Literacies of Power

What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know With New Commentary by Shirley Steinberg, Joe Kincheloe, and Peter McLaren

Donaldo Macedo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429978807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Literacies of Power illustrates the many ways American schools, media, and other social institutions perpetuate ignorance. In this new, expanded edition, Donaldo Macedo shows why so-called common culture literacy is a form of dominant cultural reproduction that undermines independent thought and goes against the best interests of our students. Offering a wide-ranging counterargument, Macedo shows why cultural literacy cannot be restricted to the acquisition of Western heritage values, which sustain an ideology that systematically negates the cultural experiences of many members of society—not only minorities but also anyone who is poor or disenfranchised. Macedo calls on his own experience as a Cape Verdean immigrant from West Africa who had to surmount the barriers imposed by the world's most entrenched monolingual system of higher education. His eloquence in this book is testimony to the very idea that critical thinking and good education are not and must not be culturally or linguistically bounded. A new concluding chapter by the author critically challenges the crucial role of schools in "the manufacture of consent" for the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act, and the "charitable racism" that is too often evident in the field of ESL. In essays new to this edition, well-known and respected educators Joe Kincheloe, Peter McLaren, and Shirley Steinberg share their insights on Macedo's message, complementing Paulo Freire's foreword to the original edition.

1
Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies

The great masses of people… will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.

—Adolf Hitler

MOST AMERICANS WOULD CRINGE at the thought that they have repeatedly fallen victim to big lies told by their government. In fact, they would probably instinctively point out that the manipulation of people through big lies only occurs in totalitarian, fascist governments such as Hitler’s. In the same breath, they might remind us that their ancestors gave their lives in the great wars so that we could enjoy the freedom and democracy we now have. They might also hasten to recite slogans such as “live free or die,” “freedom of speech,” and “freedom of information.” While busily calling out slogans from their patriotic vocabulary memory warehouse, these same Americans dutifully vote, for example, for Ronald Reagan, giving him a landslide victory when he ran on a platform that promised to balance the budget, cut taxes, and increase military spending. This “unreason of reason” led George Bush to characterize Reagan’s economic plan as voodoo economics—even though he himself later became entranced by the big lie of this same voodooism.

What U.S. voters failed to do was to demand that Reagan tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In other words, they failed to require that Reagan acknowledge that, in order for his proposition to be true (and not a lie), the voters would have to give him and Bush a blank credit card with $4.3 trillion in deficit credit to create the false sense of economic prosperity enjoyed under their leadership. I say a false sense not only because of the present economic malaise but also because the Reagan economic boom was a bust. According to Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and E. Thomas Weisskopf: “Output growth did not revive during the 1980’s cycle. Far from stimulating investment through massive tax cuts and concessions to the wealthy, Reagan-Bush economic policy has dealt investment a blow; compared with the previous business cycle, the pace of real net productive investment declined by a quarter during the most recent business cycle.”¹

Despite concrete evidence indicating that the Reagan-Bush economic plan was a failure, U.S. voters swept Bush into office in 1988 with the same voodoo trickle-down economics, now ornamented with a thou-* sand points of short-circuited lights. These same voters ascended to Bush’s morally high-minded call to apply international laws against Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and his invasion of Kuwait. The great mass of voters who rallied behind Bush, pushing his popular approval rating beyond 90 percent during the Gulf War, failed to realize that these same international laws had been broken by Bush a year or so before in Panama and by his predecessor in Grenada, Libya, and Nicaragua. This leads to the question why we supposedly highly literate and principled citizens of a great democracy frequently demonstrate the inability to separate myth from reality. This inability pushes us to perpetual flirtation with historical hypocrisy. However, not all Americans suffer from the inability to separate myths from reality, to read the world critically. For example, David Spritzler, a twelve-year-old student at Boston Latin School, faced disciplinary action for his refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which he considered “a hypocritical exhortation to patriotism” in that there is not “liberty and justice for all.” According to Spritzler, the pledge is an attempt to unite the “oppressed and the oppressors. You have people who drive nice cars, live in nice houses and don’t have to worry about money. Then you have the poor people, living in bad neighborhoods and going to bad schools. Somehow the Pledge makes it seem that everybody’s equal when that’s not happening. There’s no justice for everybody.”²

Spritzler was spared disciplinary action only after the American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter on his behalf, citing a 1943 case, West Virginia State Board of Education versus Barnett, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a student’s right not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and to remain seated.

What remains incomprehensible is why a twelve-year-old boy could readily see through the obvious hypocrisy contained in the Pledge of Allegiance, while his teachers and administrators, who have received much higher levels of education, cannot. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in reference to a similar situation, these teachers’ and administrators’ inability to see through the obvious represents “a real sign of deep indoctrination [in] that you can’t understand elementary thoughts that any 10-year-old can understand. That’s real indoctrination. So for him [the indoctrinated individual] it’s kind of like a theological truth, a truth of received religion.”³ These teachers and administrators should know that history shows us convincingly and factually that the United States has systematically violated the Pledge of Allegiance, from the legalization of slavery, the denial of women’s rights, and the near-genocide of Native Americans to the contemporary discriminatory practices against people who, by virtue of their race, ethnicity, class, or gender, are not treated with the dignity and respect called for in the pledge.

If we did not suffer from historical amnesia, we would easily recall that, once upon a time, the Massachusetts legislature promulgated a law that provided monetary rewards for dead Indians: “For every scalp of a male Indian brought in … forty pounds. For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of twelve years that shall be killed … twenty pounds.”⁴ Even the abolitionist President Abraham Lincoln did not truly uphold the U.S. Declaration of Independence propositions of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when he declared: “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…. I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”⁵

One could argue that the above-cited incidents belong to the dusty archives of our early history, but I do not believe that we have learned a great deal from historically dangerous memories, considering that our leaders continue to incite racial tensions, as evidenced in the issue of Willie Horton in the presidential campaign or in Bush’s opposition to job quotas on the pretext that they were a renewed invitation to racial divisiveness. This racial divisiveness actually has served the Republican Party’s interest of splitting voters along class, racial, and ethnic lines. Our perpetual flirtation (if not marriage) with historical hypocrisy becomes abundantly clear if we imagine the juxtaposition of students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in Charlestown High School in 1976, in classrooms ornamented with copies of the Declaration of Independence hanging alongside racial epithets scrawled on the walls: “Welcome Niggers,” “Niggers Suck,” “White Power,” “KKK,” “Bus is for Zulu,” and “Be illiterate, fight busing.”⁶

Our inability to see the obvious was never more evident than when a predominantly White jury found the four White policemen who brutally beat Rodney King “not guilty.” Even though the world was shocked beyond belief by the raw brutality and barbarism of the Los Angeles law enforcers, the jurors who saw the actual video shots of King struggling on his hands and knees while being hit repeatedly by the policemen’s batons concluded that “Mr. King was controlling the whole show with his action.”⁷ The racist ideology of Simi Valley, California, blinded these jurors to such an extent that they could readily accept the savage beatings they had seen on the video to have been, as the defense attorneys claimed, nothing more than a “controlled application of fifty-six batons” in order to contain King, who had been portrayed as a dangerous “animal,” like “gorillas in the mist.”⁸ However, one of the jurors did not fully accept the view of reality suggested by the defense attorneys: “I fought so hard to hang on, and hang on to what I saw on the video…. There was no way I could change the others. They couldn’t see what I saw…. [But] they could not take away from what my eyes saw.”⁹

The real educational question and challenge for us is to understand why most of the jurors either could not see, or refused to see, what their eyes and the eyes of the entire world saw on television. Unfortunately, in the present setup of our educational system, particularly in our schools of education, it is very difficult to acquire the necessary critical tools that would unveil the ideology responsible for these jurors’ blinders. A critical understanding of the savage beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal of the four White police officers necessitates the deconstruction of the intricate interplay of race, ethics, and ideology—issues that schools of education, by and large, neglect to take on rigorously. Courses that deal with issues such as race relations, ethics, and ideology are almost absent from the teacher-preparation curricula. This serious omission is, by its very nature, ideological and constitutes the foundation for what I call the pedagogy of big lies.

At this juncture, I can easily frame my argument to demonstrate that many, if not all, of David Spritzler’s teachers and administrators are either naïve victims of a big lie or are cognizant of the deceptive ideological mechanisms inherent in the pledge and consciously reproduce them, even if it means violating the very rights the oath proclaims. I argue that the latter is true. Even if we want to give such educators the benefit of the doubt, their naïveté is never innocent, but ideological. It is ideological to the degree that they have invested in a system that rewards them for reproducing and not questioning dominant mechanisms designed to produce power asymmetries along the lines of race, gender, class, culture, and ethnicity.

Those teachers who refuse such investments in the dominant ideological system usually think more critically, thus recognizing the falsehoods embedded in the various myths created by the dominant class. Critical teachers of this sort, instead of sending David to the principal’s office, would seize the pedagogical moment to engage the entire class in a consciousness-raising exercise that would be in line with both the democratic ideals of the Pledge of Allegiance and the development of critical thinking skills. For instance, the teacher could have given David the opportunity to have his voice heard as he discussed the enormous contradictions inherent in the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher could also have engaged the other students by asking them if they agreed or disagreed with David’s position. The teacher could have asked the following: “Do you agree that the pledge is a ‘hypocritical exhortation to patriotism’? Explain why.” This question would enable other students to voice their opinions regarding their perception of the Pledge of Allegiance. Students could also be asked whether David was right in asserting that the Pledge of Allegiance is a mere attempt to unite the “oppressed and the oppressors,’’ since “you have people who drive nice cars, live in nice houses and don’t have to worry about money. Then you have the poor people, living in bad neighborhoods and going to bad schools.” The teacher could continue to encourage an open dialogue by asking students if they knew people who were poor, “living in bad neighborhoods and going to bad schools.” If many students were to confirm David’s position, then the teacher could raise the following questions: “Why do you think that we have so many poor people living in bad neighborhoods? Do you think that poor people choose to live in bad neighborhoods? Who is responsible for the present inequality? Would you like to live in a bad neighborhood and go to a bad school? What would you do if you were forced to live in poverty and to go to a bad school?”

I am sure that a multiplicity of responses would have been given by the students, according to their own social class and race position as well as their different levels of political awareness. This exercise could have provided great insights into the students’ personal narratives. It would also help the students to understand that the Pledge of Allegiance cannot fulfill its ideals in light of the social disparities and inequalities in our society. This exercise would also have provided the students the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the proposition “liberty and justice for all.” This reflection could also have prepared these students to understand their civic responsibility and their role in a society that, although it promises “equality, liberty and justice for all,” is replete with inequality and injustice for those groups of people who are from different racial, class, and ethnic backgrounds.

The above exercise is one of the many constructive and creative ways that a critical teacher could begin to problem-pose with the class, as together they engage in a pedagogical process to deconstruct the myth sustained by the Pledge of Allegiance. However, in order to do so, the teacher has to be not only critical but also willing to take great risks, including losing his or her job, since the doctrinal system does not reward dissent. This risk became obvious when Jonathan Kozol was fired from the Boston Public Schools in 1964 for having his all-Black segregated fourth-grade class read Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. The reason for his dismissal was that he did not follow the curriculum. Kozol wrote that according to school officials, “Robert Frost and Langston Hughes were ‘too advanced’ for children of this age. Hughes, moreover, was regarded as ‘inflammatory.’”¹⁰ It did not matter that “one of the most embittered children in the class began to cry when she first heard the words of Langston Hughes.”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun? ¹¹

It did not matter to the Boston school officials that this fourth-grade girl was touched by the poem and went “home and memorized the lines.” What mattered to them in 1964 when they fired Jonathan Kozol and in 1992 when they attempted to expel David Spritzler for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance was to deny the fourth grade the opportunity to answer and understand “what happens to a dream deferred” and to prevent David Spritzler from exposing the hypocrisy embedded in the Pledge of Allegiance. Boston school officials and educators of this sort have chosen to “live within a lie” to protect their privileged positions and the rewards the doctrinal system provides them.

What I have described so far points to an intricate and complex web of lies that functions to reproduce the dominant ideology through cultural literacy. This will become clearer in my analysis of the role of literacy in cultural reproduction, an analysis in which I will show how collective experiences function in the interest of the dominant ruling elites rather than in the interest of the oppressed groups that are the object of the policies of cultural reproduction.

Literacy for cultural reproduction uses institutional mechanisms to undermine independent thought, a prerequisite for the Orwellian “manufacture of consent” or “engineering of consent.” In this light, schools are seen as ideological institutions designed to prevent the so-called crisis of democracy, another Orwellian concept, meaning the beginnings of democracy.¹²

In fact, this very perspective on schools was proposed by the Trilateral Commission, whose members—among them Jimmy Carter—belonged to the international and essentially liberal elite. This commission was created in response to the general democratic participation of masses of people in the Western world in questioning their governments’ ethical behavior. Its major purpose, as many understand it, was to seek ways to maint...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Foreword to the Expanded Edition
• Induction: The Power of “the Personal”
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies
• 2 Our Common Culture: A Poisonous Pedagogy
• 3 Our Uncommon Culture: The Politics of Race, Class, Gender, and Language
• 4 English Only: The Tongue-Tying of America
• 5 Educational Reform: Literacy and Poverty Pimps
• 6 Charitable Racism: Imposing Democracy Undemocratically
• Afterword: That Which Was True Yesterday Is Even More True Today
• Notes
• Index