Interesting concepts but poor execution in On Critically Conscious Research

Overall, I liked the general tenor of today’s reading from On Critically Conscious Research, because I found myself agreeing with quite a lot of the main concepts within the chapters. For example, I appreciated the contention in the book that the West only “envisages itself” as somehow transcending race (33). Though this is a story we’re often told, I appreciated that the authors fought this contention, as it is clearly not based in reality. Even if we somehow were made to believe that our society was so (which it clearly is not), denying race as a critical issue would still be problematic, because it would be a denial of our history. That being said, I was not enthralled with the way this book went about making these broader points. The structure of the first three chapters was rather choppy; as Graham pointed out in his post, the book is quotation overkill to some degree. While I found some of the quotations and references meaningful, in particular the look at Du Bois (24) and Indigenous Theory (37-38), some of the other sections simply fell flat to me. The authors seem to want to cram a lot of quotations, references, and theories within the early portion of this book. However, I do not see how these concepts are being put within a larger framework. It just doesn’t work for me. If I wanted to study Freire, I think it would be better to read Freire; a brief one page history of Freire might be appropriate if it were contextualized within a larger framework of ideas. Here, however, this Freire section seems to serve no purpose other than simply to give a sort of cliff notes version of Freire’s history and ideas. My personal preference when it comes to this type of reading would be to look at a few authors in detail, so that I can get a better feel for how they fit within the history of a movement. However, in their quest to make the book as expansive as possible and include every different figure they find relevant, I believe the authors of this volume have done a disservice to readers. Instead of learning in depth about a few key points, I feel as if I learned a very small, discrete amount of information on far, far too many topics and ideas. Reading through this volume, I can’t help but feel that we are skating on the surface of many issues, but we’re not seeing any concept handled with a degree of depth or detail. For example, one area I really found interesting was the book’s concept of “whiteness,” especially how critical and race theories must stand “in relation to whiteness” (35). I probably would have enjoyed reading fifty pages about that concept, because I probably don’t entirely appreciate how oppressive the undercurrent of “whiteness” is within our culture, and I would rather like to see such an issue uncovered in detail. Unfortunately, the book only gave me a few brief thoughts on that issue before returning to its larger literature review structure. As we continue with this book, I sincerely hope that it can start focusing in on a few specific historical thinkers or general ideas in more depth.