Blogbook -- The Affordances of Racist Discourse in Literacy Classrooms
Entry 18 Let me summarize what I’ve been discussing in the last four entries of this blogbook (entries 14 , 15 , 16 , and 17 ). I’ve been asking us to think of racism in our classrooms, texts, language practices, and world as a discourse. But the idea of what “racist discourse” means is bigger than just words. Racist discourse is both material and linguistic. It’s actions and decisions, and it’s language and stories that we use to explain and talk about those actions and decisions. Marxian dialectic and hegemony, as well as verum-factum and verum-certum that explain Vicovian common sense, help describe how we often consent to our own oppressions, that is, consent to racist discourse as the dominant set of conditions we all live and participate in, regardless of our better intentions or ethical stances on things. Our consent to hegemony usually comes as “preferable systemically-constructed consciousness” -- that is, consciousness that is created in the system as preferable -- defined a