Closing the Opportunity Gap, or Creating a New Opportunity? Navigational Capital, Racialization, and Resistance in the Context of Neoliberal Multicultural Education
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2018
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
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en
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Abstract
Historically, public schooling in America has disenfranchised students of color,
evaluating these youth by their confonnity to or defiance of the nonns for curriculum and
conduct dictated by the dominant white middle class. Synthesizing Bourdieu's (1986) realization
of academic qualifications as cultural capital with Robinson's (1983) emphasis on the racial
dynamics of this schematic, students of color can either pursue upward mobility within the
existing political and economic structure by practicing identities of racelessness (Tatum 1997) or
manifest their resistance through oppositional identities (Ogbu 1998; Ferguson 2000), with the
discrepant material and social outcomes of each choice serving to legitimize the racial hierarchy
of larger society. Presently, public schooling has adapted a paradigm of neoliberal
multiculturalism that acknowledges racial difference as benign variation, without regard for the
institutional and economic inequities that result from and reinforce racial discourse, and that
looks to dehistoricize race by conceptualizing conflict as a matter of individual psychology
(Mohanty 2003). Moreover, though neoliberal multiculturalism ostensibly offers a pedagogy
with culturally responsive content and methods, it nonetheless adheres to hegemonic nonns for
knowledge and behavior, espousing navigational capital (Yosso 2005) for the agency of
individual students of color within the existing structure rather than proposing social change.
Thus, or education to work towards racial justice, a critical pedagogy geared towards
deconstructing race and devising activist praxis is in order. Yet, in order to subvert the status
quo, campaigns for critical pedagogy must work within the state - which inevitably influences
social movements (Weldon 2011) - to create spaces that redefine cultural citizenship and
challenge racial inequities inside and outside of schools. For this purpose, the politically
Prior 3
palatable, class-centered rhetoric of opportunity gap represents a proverbial foot in the door, but
educators interested in societal transfonnation must be vigilant with regards to the potential for
reifying, instead of refonning, the political and economic structure. Therefore, this thesis,
through curricular analysis, participant observation, and ethnographic interviews at
state-sponsored Growth Mindset Academy - all names are pseudonyms - looks to explore how
educators might foster resistant capital (Yosso 2005). Specifically, this work inquires as to what
constitutes cultural capital and, by extension, academic qualifications within a framework of
neoliberal multiculturalism, how pedagogy and discipline infonn the racialization or racelessness
of students of color, and what steps teachers and students can take to transition from Freire's
(1970) hierarchical banking model of education to a more collaborative problem-posing
pedagogy, in turn revealing to classroom participants the possibilities for different racial
understandings and economic systems.