U.S. Empire and an Immigrant’s Counternarrative: Conceptualizing Imperial Privilege

Abstract

U.S. teacher education has largely overlooked a sociopolitical-historical context that affects both immigrants and nonimmigrants: American empire. To address the pressing need for teacher education to acknowledge U.S. imperialism, the author stages an argument in three parts. First, she argues that the field should account for empire and its impact on immigrants, and suggests conceptualizing immigrants within a nuanced framework of white supremacy. Next, she relates her own immigrant counternarrative to expose masternarratives that operate against immigrants. By sharing her journey toward understanding imperialism and her own positionality, she also contributes an immigrant perspective to the field. Third, the author introduces the concept of imperial privilege, inviting the field to recognize and challenge masternarratives. The author concludes by inviting readers to historicize U.S. imperialism in their research and practice, and thus embrace more humanizing narratives. While the argument focuses on the United States, it also applies broadly to other high-income imperialist countries.

“Why Do We Need to Know About This?”: U.S. Imperialism, Persepolis, and Knowledge Production on Iran in the Classroom

“…How did that event set the stage for the U.S.-Iran relations that came thereafter? Such questions align with Chávez-Moreno’s (2021) arguments for U.S. educators and teacher educators to confront imperial privilege and to dismantle masternarratives that “construct us/U.S. in a sanctimonious light, and blame Others for their own destitution” (p. 214).…”

“…Although analyses of the United States as an empire are not new, the aftermaths of 9/11 have prompted new interest in theorizing the United States as empire (Coloma, 2013; Maira, 2009). Yet terms like “imperialism” and “empire” are neither common in the lexicon of U.S. K-12 teacher education, nor have they appeared as central themes of U.S. historiography (Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013). 5 As a growing number of scholars have argued, U.S. empire is regularly denied in educational spaces, thus marking it as a difficult space of knowledge, reflection, and teaching (Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013; Maira, 2009).…”

“…Yet terms like “imperialism” and “empire” are neither common in the lexicon of U.S. K-12 teacher education, nor have they appeared as central themes of U.S. historiography (Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013). 5 As a growing number of scholars have argued, U.S. empire is regularly denied in educational spaces, thus marking it as a difficult space of knowledge, reflection, and teaching (Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013; Maira, 2009). This disavowal represents an overlooked conceptual stumbling block with respect to teaching about Iran (and the greater Middle East), given its prominent position within the history of U.S. imperialist interventions.…”

“…Second, working through difficult knowledge entails a reordering of the learner’s understanding of themselves and the world, exemplified in this study by various attempts at SJEP to teach the recent political history of Iran, a history that occasions contending with the mythologies of inherent goodness and progress that underlie commitments to U.S. exceptionalism and imperialism. By embarking on such an exploration, this article takes up the invitation by Chávez-Moreno (2021) to imagine different possibilities for exploring these questions in the classroom and for further contextualizing U.S. empire in teacher education.…”

Racist and Raciolinguistic Teacher Ideologies: When Bilingual Education is “Inherently Culturally Relevant” for Latinxs

“…Racist ideologies are societal ideas that claim, incorrectly, people have evolved into distinct biological groups and that associate these distinctions to people's superiority and inferiority. These ideologies mark bodies in order to dehumanize and subjugate people, and thus intertwine with sociohistorical processes such as chattel slavery, colonialism, occupation, theft of Indigenous land, and imperialism (Chávez-Moreno, 2021b, 2021c. Under the umbrella of racist ideologies, raciolinguistic ideologies are oppressive societal ideas that relate to language and racialization.…”