Racial Politics and Double Consciousness: Education for Liberation in an Inescapably Diverse Polity

Abstract

Political power and ethnoracial, cultural, and/or religious identities often interact such that clear patterns of political empowerment and exclusion emerge along demographic lines. One could try to eliminate the interaction itself, either by eliminating minority race identity within mainstream politics via assimilation, or by eliminating mainstream politics from the activities of minority raced individuals via separation. I propose that public schools pursue neither of these approaches. Rather, schools should teach a kind of Du Boisian “double consciousness” to all children, majority and minority alike, in order to promote the coexistence of individuals’ ethnoracial and civic identities via multiple perspective taking and power analysis. By learning to recognize the particularity of their own perspectives and access to power, including the ways in which their ethnoracial and cultural identities help shape those perspectives and powers, young people will be better equipped to recognize and fight against ethnocultural bias in the civic sphere.