Abstract
As James Baldwin so succinctly points out, many white Americans prefer not to be reminded of the “appallingly oppressive and bloody history” of racism that has characterized the very fabric of U. S. society. In fact many, if not most, white Americans from various ethnic backgrounds would feel extremely uncomfortable if the curriculum in schools incorporated an antiracist pedagogy that asked, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, is everyone welcome in the hall?”
I concluded long ago that they found the color of my skin inhibitory. This color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see.
This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since in the main they seem to lack the energy to change this condition they would not be reminding of it.
—James Baldwin1
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Notes
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s/MAREK), p. 409.
bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 22.
Cited in Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 20.
John Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (London: Verso Press, 1994), p. 13.
Steven Randall, Jim Naureckus, and Jeff Cohen, The Way Things Ought to Be: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error (New York: New Press, 1995), pp. 47–54.
Donaldo Macedo, Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 10.
C. P. Otero, ed., Language and Politics (New York: Black Rose Books, 1988), p. 681.
Donaldo P. Macedo, “Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies,” Harvard Educational Review, 63 (1993), 183–206.
Derrick D. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. xiii.
David T. Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1993), p. 6.
Russell B. Nye, ed. Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 112–113.
Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 75.
Oliver Reboul, Lenguage e Ideologia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1986), p. 116.
Donald I. Bartlett and James B. Steele, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 93.
Paulo Freire and Frei Betto, Essa Escola Chamada Vida (Sao Paulo: Editora Scipione, 1989), p. 32.
Vitor J. Rodrigues, A Nova Ordern Estupidoldgica (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1995), p. 18.
Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, p. 3).
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© 1999 Donaldo Macedo and Lilia I. Bartolomé
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Macedo, D., Bartolomé, L.I. (1999). Dancing with Bigotry. In: Macedo, D., Bartolomé, L.I. (eds) Dancing with Bigotry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10952-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10952-1_1
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