Why Multicultural Literacy? Multicultural Education Inside and Outside Schools

Abstract

It is widely known that Barack Obama is the first President of African heritage in the United States, that Mahatma Ghandi encouraged non-violent resistance to colonial rule, that the Chinese have practiced medicine for thousands of years, that the Middle East and the Arab world is the “cradle of civilization”, that indigenous peoples around the world have sophisticated knowledge of natural ecosystems, and that the Afro-American musical tradition of blues begot rock and roll. This awareness of the poly-cultural origins of a global intellectual heritage, combined with the tools to locate these origins within broader narratives and patterns of world history and knowledge production, is what we are terming multicultural literacy, an appreciation and understanding that bespeaks a multipolar worldview even if it manifests in an apparently fragmented form. As we describe below, multicultural literacy is something to strive for, a challenge for educators and educational policy makers that can support antiracist values and an anticolonial politics. By identifying the knowledge of the cultural and intellectual contributions of racialized and often minoritized peoples and cultures as a component of what it means to be literate, we set the conditions for a de-hierarchization of knowledge. The awareness of such legacies speaks to a particular stance vis-à-vis what counts as knowledge; it’s one that recognizes our profoundly rhizomatic and dialogic global history of proliferating ways of understanding our world and systematizing these understandings into diverse knowledge traditions and forms of shared consciousness.