Toward a Pedagogy of Coalition

Abstract

In the very recent history of the academic institution where I have taught for the greater part of the last decade, a group of students of color and their white allies took over the president’s office to protest institutional racism. The official response from the president, delivered at a Campus Community Committee meeting, was a written document, which addressed the students’ demands primarily by reframing them within the college’s “history” of successes in the area of diversity. Both before and after the occupation of the president’s office, student protestors organized informal forums, open to the entire community, to discuss institutional racism. These meetings were packed with students, whose competing identities, interests, needs, and desires came roiling to the surface in the form of often heated and contentious debate. The fact that no administrator, let alone the president, attended any of these discussions constitutes a disavowal of both the pervasive presence of racism on campus, and the experiences and knowledges that informed the students’ actions and efforts toward social change. At the same time, it raises serious questions, many of which have been raised by the editors of this anthology, about the place, or lack thereof, for critical and dissenting voices within the educational institution.

Academic thinkers mediate the cultural politics of difference and have it end up recodified as “multiculturalism.”

—Norma Alarcón

[I]t may be through contradiction that we begin to address the systematic inequalities built into cultural institutions, economies, and geographies, and through conflict that we call attention to the process through which these inequalities are obscured by pluralist multiculturalism.

—Lisa Lowe