Critical Multicultural Education

“Sleeter effortlessly weaves together analyses of personal narratives, anecdotes, history, case studies, and political events and social movements to argue for a reanimated critical multicultural education theory and practice; and in doing so, Sleeter shows just how deep the roots of the multicultural education tree lie.” —Teachers College Record

This volume collects Christine Sleeter’s core work focusing on critical multicultural education, situating culture and identity within an analysis of power and racism.

Multicultural education arose in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and, in its inception, shared with that movement a focus on eradicating both interpersonal and systemic racism. The problem this book takes up is that, over time, many people have come to understand and enact multicultural education in ways that evade grappling directly with racism. This dilution has happened for several reasons, including White teachers’ rearticulations of multicultural education as “getting along” or learning to be colorblind and neoliberal reforms that have reduced it to a celebration of cultural diversity while maintaining silence about racism.

Critical Multicultural Education includes ten of Sleeter’s articles that explicitly locate multicultural education within critical understandings of race, racism, and colonialism, offering both theoretical and practical discussions of what that means.

Book Features:

• Brings together, in one volume, the full arc of work by a leading scholar in multicultural education.
• Offers a unique focus on why multicultural education needs to be critical and what it means to be critical.
• Directly connects theory with practice by offering vignettes of practice following theoretical or conceptual discussions.
• Examines how the power of Whiteness and racial capitalism has forestalled progressive education and social change.
• Spans multicultural education from its inception in the 1970s through the current attacks on Critical Race Theory, showing how it has been targeted, ignored, or misused.

Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Education at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her books include Critical Race Theory and Its Critics, Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools, and Un-Standardizing Curriculum.

“Sleeter effortlessly weaves together analyses of personal narratives, anecdotes, history, case studies, and political events and social movements to argue for a reanimated critical multicultural education theory and practice; and in doing so, Sleeter shows just how deep the roots of the multicultural education tree lie.”

—Teachers College Record

“A book for practitioners, researchers, theorists, and policymakers across disciplines, time, place, space, race, and worldview, Sleeter has produced a deeply researched, contextualized, and nuanced account of multicultural education.”
—H. Richard Milner IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Education, Vanderbilt University, author of The Race Card

“Christine Sleeter has been a brilliant and courageous thought leader in critical multicultural education (CME) for over two decades, breaking with white solidarity long before it was acceptable in mainstream discourse. I consider her a foundational mentor whose work has had a profound influence on how I understand and articulate the dynamics of systemic racism and the role of white people in achieving racial justice. This beautiful and intersectional volume traces the trajectory of CME from its inception to the present time, delineating the resistance it has faced and speaking back to current forms of backlash with clarity and nuance. Critical Multicultural Education needs to be required reading in every school of education.”
—Robin DiAngelo, author of Is Everyone Really Equal?, White Fragility, and Nice Racism

“As conservatives across the country launch all-out attacks against any form of diversity in schools, Christine Sleeter’s Critical Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice is an important intervention on the side of racial justice in education.”
—Wayne Au, editor, Rethinking Schools, and professor, UW Bothell School of Educational Studies

Contents

Series Foreword James A. Banks  ix

Introduction  1
Pivot Points in My Biographical Journey  1
Why Critical?  5

Part I: Defining Critical Multicultural Education

1.  Critical Multiculturalism: An Introduction  13
With Stephen May
The Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism  15
Critical Responses to Multiculturalism  19
Critical Multiculturalism  22

2.  Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Antiracist Education: Implications for Multicultural Education  25
With Dolores Delgado Bernal
Critical Pedagogy and Multicultural Education  27
Critical Race Theory and Multicultural Education  33
AntiRacist Education  41
Discussion  46

3.  Capitalism and Caste  50
Roots of Caste and Capitalism  50
Racial Capitalism  52
Marxism as a Western European Totalizing Theory  53
School Reform, Curriculum, and Public Consciousness  55
Conclusion  57

Part II: Critical Multicultural Education and School Reform

4.  Challenging Racism and Colonialism Through Ethnic Studies  61
Minoritized Youth and Historical Amnesia  62
What Happened to Multicultural Education?  63
Curriculum: Still Through White Points of View  65
Ethnic Studies as a Decolonial Project  67
Ethnic Studies Praxis  70
Implications  73

5.  Critical Race Theory as the New Villain  75
With Francesca A. López
The Bastardization of Critical Race Theory  75
Efforts to Make Curriculum More Inclusive  77
Reactions to Equitable Education Endeavors  79
What the Critics Are Saying  81
How We Respond to the Critics  83
CRT as the Villain  85
Conclusion  89

6.  Diversity, Social Justice, and Resistance to Disempowerment  90
Diversity, Social Justice, and School Reform Under Neoliberalism  91
Curriculum That Disempowers  93
Curriculum That Empowers  95
Confronting the Education Reform Paradigm  97

7.  Equity and Race-Visible Urban School Reform  98
The Problem With Color-Blind Solutions to Urban School Challenges  99
Race-Visible Pedagogy in the Classroom  101
Race-Visible Teachers  105
Race and Class Visible Equity in Access  107
Conclusion  109

8.  Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms  111
Four Hallmarks of Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms  111
Framework for Designing Classroom Teaching  114
Conclusion  120

Part III: Personalizing Critical Multicultural Education

9.  Situating Oneself in a Critical Multicultural History  123
Family History as an Entrée into History  124
Benefiting From Colonization  125
Implications  127

10.  Multicultural Curriculum and Critical Family History  129
Approaches to Family History Research  129
Theoretical Lenses for Critical Family History  130
Tools for Researching Critical Family History  133
Teaching Multicultural Curriculum With Critical Family History  136
Conclusion  139

References  141

Index  167

About the Author  178