Hegel's Master/Slave Relationship...

For some reason, Hegel's Master/Slave relationship example stuck in my mind while I was reading. Immediately, my mind went to chattel slavery and colonialism. It amazes me that Hegel could make this association with consciousness, but still believe that black people "had not historically or  intellectually evolved to consciousness and, at best, could only seek to imitate White males" (Willis et al. 9). How can Hegel acknowledge that consciousness comes from this type of relationship, and the desire for freedom, but not acknowledge the consciousness of black people who were slaves, or victims of colonial oppression? I particularly appreciated Fanon's response that basically argues black people have their own consciousness that is unique (not universal) to their experience of oppression, and not merely an imitation of white people: "I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal...My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower." (qtd. in Willis et al. 21).

His misunderstandings of Black consciousness (while understandable), do seem to reflect his own racism--if only in his concept of Universality. However, the book does point out that there is a "universalistic position" in the Master/Slave relationship where "slaves become conscious of their masters' dependency on the slaves' labor and obedience" (Willis et al. 10). Of course, when you add chattel slavery and good ole Willie Lynch to the equation, it seems rather difficult to make this position universalistic. In fact, it makes Hegel's idea of imitation a tad bit more palatable in the sense that American slaves didn't fully "develop a personal sense of reality based on new understandings" (Willis et al. 10). In other words, the Master used language as a tool of oppression in order to "inculcate dominant ideologies through speech and literature in the lives of the less powerful" (Willis et al. 22), and it is this dominant ideology that would be the foundation of the American slaves' understanding. The American slave, in particular, would have his/her reality shaped by, based on, the understanding of white people from the moment they were brought to this country and stripped of their own culture, language, etc., and given the language/literature of their oppressors. This is another reason I love Fanon :-).

So, seeing as how I'm a visual person, I'm really tired, and I haven't had the opportunity to throw a video in on these posts as of yet.  I found a video on Fanon. It talks about some of this stuff in there. Hope you like it.

The first three chapters of Critically Conscious Research constitute my presentation material source for tonite's class. The book is a bit of a departure in our class in that it is in no way instructional so far in its approach. Indeed there is a sense that the authors do not wish to offer any instruction but rather to encourage some critical thinking on Critical Thinking about teaching Criticality. In support of their desire to set the stage for helping the reader to choose their paths regarding Critical Consciousness these first chapters focus upon the roots of such thought in their semi-extricable antiquity, their transition into the post-modernist era and entrance into the American body of thought, and their progress and change as they enter into the Pedagogical Universe.
     My strategy for dealing with the three chapters will be one of excision, explication, and exercise, respectively. Meaning I intend to justify dumping the first chapter after a cursory glance. Then I will draw out the salient dichotomy of ideas that characterize the time and space and state of thought which defines the beginnings of the post-modernist movement in CT. Lastly I will give a reductive overview of what seems to me to be the common theme in all the offerings in chapter three as a precursor to encompassing that theme in a game, an exercise, a moral effort and experiment to see if our tiny microcosm will, in fact, re-enact the greater gestalt faced by all pedagogical adaptations of Critical work.
      So, somebody fetch me a dull ax, let's go behind the shed and liberate chapter one of Critically Conscious Research with extreme prejudice now. There is nothing in particular wrong with it and it fulfills its role within the framework of the book adequately, namely to generally place the origins of Critical Theory in the the creation/recognition of a burgeoning Critical Consciousness in concerned intellectuals and academics in a formative period of history. It does that just fine so what's my beef? My beef is this, there is a limit the futility of abstraction that I can tolerate in the creation of a premise. I mean you pluck out enough history to support an unfinished definition of a term you wish to educate me about and simultaneously speak of how incomplete this definition must be so as not to overly parameter the development of the flowing present in which the subject of your definition must be allowed to romp free to properly embrace its destiny. The actual history is not done justice and the historicity is done violence.
    This is a stepping stone to the present where the material of the book dwells and I got a different book right here(thump) that's twenty times the size and opens with a meek apology for being too small to accomplish this same task. Getting your history straight as a starting place is good stuff but it is better performed elsewhere and is done so in a fairly admittedly perfunctorily way here. Apart from that the chapter somewhat suddenly wholeheartedly throws in with Collins 2000 Matrix of Domination theory as the team it wants to on for kickball. So its on to chapter two unless any one has any aspect of this first chapter they would like to discuss.
      The chapter overview, apart from mislabeling in which chapter they place their emphasis on Gramsci and Fannon(the former is mentioned once in chapter one, the latter not at all), describes chapter two as extending "to a focus on the the contributions of African American scholars and social activists and like minded whites in their quest to address oppression in the United States" but less than half the chapter involves U.S. thinkers and then it seems not so much to show a transition as a runaway rebirth that styled itself in a fairly revolutionary way in its critical focus. Dubois seems the last one attempting to process the values of Marx and then those concepts lose market share or get repackaged.( Marx is so unpopular on these shores that even his most benevolent wisdoms need a fresh nom de' plume every generation.). What the chapter more clearly seems to show is the actual, tangible birth of, lets face it, American Critical Consciousness. Its really different than its predecessors. It was similar to other nascent  ideals coming across the pond and drew heavily upon them to get started but the sheer freedom from history and open intellectual territory waiting to be claimed made it qualitatively different than the various evolutions and reactions following Marx. Praxis never had it so good. Praxis is the living opposite of universality and universal applicability was not a concern to the new critical consciousness. No, relevance and fearlessness are the hallmarks of the new American CT described in Chapter two.  
      Yes, by the time it was blowing up here we had made it uniquely American and inverted the whole process of accessing ones own CC. This inversion and transition can well be made to act as the crucial dividing line between modern and postmodern critical thought. The inversion was the mental act of personalizing oppression and its cures. We are so steeped in this individualistic view now that elucidating what came before it seems odd. Nontheless, an impersonal, generalizable concept of the methods of oppression as simple economic human nature was quite new and sexy in Marx's time. This because it could blend so well with Science and and that meant change was not a matter of goods and evils or even hateful haves and humble have-nots but a forgivable progression into the future. It was the first non-villan based ideology for economic justice and people really liked that. We could hate the game and not the players and in terms of change that was a new technology. This, in terms of Critical thought, is Modernism. The using of science and reason to predict peaceful change.
     Post-modernism in critical thought starts with an examination of how this body of Modernistic thought is incomplete and culminates its birth process by rejecting it outright. The thinkers whose ideas bookend this birth of the PoMo/U.S. flavored CT or CC are Gramsci and Fannon and I went outside this book to obtain extra data to flesh out the underpinnings of my theory as it is presented here. What is at issue for both thinkers here is how they responded intellectually to the inadequacy of Modernism to address the needs of the Peoples each of them loved. Inadequacy or unwillingness. To be clear, in the understanding which frames this speech, Marxism is the essence of Modernism, and PostMarxism is not PostModernism. Postmodernism begins by problematizing out from the individual instead of inward from the larger societal construct. Gramsci and Fannon prepared these lenses to be taken up by the U.S. thinkers.
       Central to each of these people are the mid-sized social constructs to whom they feel allegiance and whose fate they cannot bear to view in a statistical or generalized fashion. And whose being left behind or marginalized constitutes a kind of proof that the Modern ideologies are failing. If I see my people being left out of the better things in a larger society, that pretty well proves that the methods for detecting and correcting unfairness are not working. In Gramsci's story he hewed to the founding ideals and identity of several dominant political groups and strove to adapt them to better serve people more like the ones he loved. His disinterest in Socialism was simply that it did not help Sardinians that much. In his hunger to do right by his class he walked and worked a path much like our Ben Franklin in becoming a Publisher/Journalist and getting as close to the flow of information as possible. In noticing and framing the culture war, he may have been its first true 4-Star General.
     Marxism, in its nearly non-moral account of distributive inequity utterly failed to account for how such systems resist change and redirection. What allows an inequity to persist in an at least partially ethical and moral society must be some means of slapping a glamour on those inequities. They must be made palatable to persist in a situation which characterizes itself as having moral and ethical rules. Two main additions to the economic patterns elucidated by Marx were needed. The creation or codification of the concept of a Cultural Hegemony, which serves a normative function over conditions of inequity and recasts them as helpful, inevitable, or under construction. It accomplishes this via the creation of consent which is a form of coercion in that it creates a manufactured and false consensus as a frame or context to fix its principles upon.
     The other is the complexification of our understanding of the locus of ruling power into a stratified oligarchy of economic players who intermingle with the distributors and producers of culture. In this way the actual power can regulate how it is perceived by the populace by carrying its messages across the dual sides of power regulation. Political Society is the embodiment of force and Civil society is the embodiment of consent. He borrowed the term "blocs" for these collaborative units too monstrous and varied to be isolated but still obvious enough to be studied and examined.
     Gramsci sought and fought for reforms that would give distributive and productive control to the working class by tuning Marxism to address the Nations view of itself. The workers councils would stand and speak for themselves in an organized manner. This was the clearest and truest path to equity in his eyes and when it was completely defeated by political and propagandistic forces in 1920 Gramsci did two things. One was to be done with Socialism and help found Italian Communism and the other was to conceive of a new class of intellectual to balance forces of consent and transform Academia from within to support a more egalitarian National view. If you look around you you will see examples of the bourgeois/prole scholars envisioned by Gramsci. We are well and truly his children in that sense. Transforming the institutions which resist transformation by enhancing the balance of thought within them is the praxis of critical consciousness and one end of the spectrum in the Postmodernist view. Gramsci's progression from Idealism to pragmatism shows his increasing dissatisfaction with systems of thought too incomplete to address the needs of the people he cared about.
     The other end of that spectrum starts with Fannon. Frantz Fannon is a recognizable influence on the tremendous internal power of American Critical Thought. He gave the necessarily individualistic voice to Racial Injustice studies that lent the urgency that was missing from CT at the time. He poetically and articulately stood for his own significance. Basing his critical view on the realities that impacted upon him and stressing how his view of his world was superior to that of any person of any stripe. I will not repeat any of his words here because each of us should be free to feel them privately and taste how much we crave them as our own. This emphasis is understandable in light of Fannon's life path.
       While his education is tolerably parallel to Gramsci's and his predicament extremely similar in that his adoptive Algerian people were being continuously denied progress and economic justice, his lived story is one of battle and healing. He made his living as a psychiatrist and through his work there honed his understanding of the role of coercive consent in oppressed peoples. All Fannon's work was with individuals and the day to day good he strove to produce was done one person at a time. It is easy to see how he came to see the individual as the fundamental unit of change in a society. We take this for granted now but it was crazy talk until Fannon hit out of the park a concept that had been tee'd up by Gramsci's acknowledgment of the wider forces of culture. Fannon criticized society's failures and taught us to criticize our culture from our place within it, regardless of how we, or others, see that place.
  As with all things quintessentially American, the U.S. PoMo thread of CT was a radical reinterpretation of something that was just happening a little too slow for our tastes and once these thinkers crack the door we barged right in.
     This concludes my analysis of chapter two and to introduce my plans for chapter three I will state the lens that occurred to me as I read it and then we will proceed to the exercise. What I got from the chapter dedicated to the transition of CC and CT into the pedagogical world was that no body of thought could resist the pull toward universality. You can't teach that one of us is more deserving of focus than another even if that makes a super profound story or essay, even if its the new American way, it just ain't the academic way and all self based philosophies seem to drift toward a more egalitarian view as they are prepared to be taught.
Lets take a breath and see if there is time for a group exercise to study this idea.

Understanding Critical Consciousness

 In beginning of this chapter I read, “a multiperspective positioning is not synonymous with CT or critical theories (lowercase to reflect expanded notions of criticality that directly and expressly address race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and their intersectionality)” (3). This statement made me wonder what the authors meant by multiperspective and how so many researchers could not incorporate these different diversities. With further reading and explanation Willis et al. describes “critical consciousness” as “multiple and shifting definitions of critical theory and expanding applications” (3). With this response I was hopeful that the writers were not above diversity. Through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, the authors looked at their ideas in response to their CT of critical consciousness. 

In the different views of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, we as researchers, should recognize that historical context and the philosophical understanding of identity within ones social group. However, the identities with in the social groups the philosophers speak of generally involve this aristocracy and higher class of white people. Now, I am aware that Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Marx’s ideas are in relation to society and western culture during the time they wrote about consciousness, but I question their philosophical ideas in relation to incorporating a multiperspective to CT. With further reading, Willis et al. explained the association in simple terms as “a connection among consciousness, race/ethnicity, and gender that perpetuated the idea of an inferior status of people of Color and women, and thereby supported colonialism and imperialism” (12). The authors go on to say that, “current critical theorizing seeks to more openly address race/ethnicity and gender, moving oppression and its intersection with class from the margins to the center or criticality” (12).  I found that the authors’ responses to the three philosophers were insightful; in that, I could recognize why the ‘individual’ responses of Kant, Hegel, and Marx are reflections of society and incorporate gender, race, and ethnicity.

This understanding continued as I read chapter three. I could relate back to the three philosophers in comparison to the different sections. Especially with the Critical Race Theory, which “sought to ‘reexamine the terms by which race and racism have been negotiated in American consciousness, and to recover and revitalize the radical tradition of race-consciousness among African Americans and other peoples of Color’” (34). With this theory, I was extremely moved when I read the Critical Indigenous Theory. Being part Cherokee and an active researcher on Native American culture, this section further intrigued my interest because it incorporated value and understanding of a people and their culture. With this section and first chapter in mind, I understand the difficulty of being critically conscious within critical theory. As much as I disagree with what the three philosophers ideas were, there were more people who ignored the fact that Native Americans were even citizens. With that, I am curious about what the rest of this book entails.

I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances. - Fanon

On Critically Conscious Research makes it clear to the reader from the introduction that they are detaching from ongoing, meaty conversations focused on critical theory.  It serves as an introductory text for researchers to understand the history of Critical Theory and critical theories, as well as how these theories are applied to language and literacy education and pedagogy.

Chapter 1 focuses on the framework for understanding Critical Theory, and focuses on the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and generations of the Frankfurt School.  The chapter focuses also on the ideas that "understanding critical consciousness is foundational to understanding critical theorizing" and "at the heart of critical theorizing is critical consciousness" (3).  The authors also recognize that these theorists recognized critical consciousness as residing in the lives of White males and does not recognize people of Color or women as oppressed people.  By informing the researcher of the history of Critical Theory, the authors seem to believe they can make the researcher more aware of the larger context of the theory and is application through history.

Chapter 2 provides a connection between how Critical Theory began and how it has changed over time.  The authors cite Hall when he says, "We need to...make sense of the connections with where we think we are then as compared to where we are now" (15).  The chapter discusses how other theorists have challenged or built upon previous theorists such as Marx.  Gramsci, a Marxist, further develops ideas about oppression outside of class boundaries.  Hegemony "has come to mean any form of domination that implies power, although more modern ideas also propose that the oppressed an effect change.  Hegemony is never complete; it is always shifting, changing, and adjusting to ideological an cultural struggles" (20). The chapter further discusses ways that new theorists have discussed critical theory, often because previous theories were not universal, and often left out the voices of other oppressed groups.

One sentence in Chapter 3, really I think sums up the point of this chapter:  "While the West envisages itself as transcending race/ethnicity and gender oppression, silences about past and current colonization, genocide, imperialism, and mass murders are constant reminders of human rights abuses and human suffering" (33).  This chapter calls into question why the West believes this and the system of education that has led to this belief, which fosters racism and sexism.  It recognizes that part of the problem is that everything is compared to Whiteness, Whiteness being acultural in some way, as a "norm" in which everything else exists in relation to it. This is not discussed in education and white privilege is often ignored although it perpetuates itself in education and literacy pedagogy.

This part really resonated with me as I recalled my education K-12.  Everything was always, thinking back, whiteness.  We never talked about that.  All other peoples discussed in history class were "others", always compared and contrasted to white people, as though the other people were somehow deficient.  We never heard their voices-- only the voices of white people talking about them.  In the same way, we never discussed things at a global level.  If we talked about World War II, it was only from the perspective of the United States.  As though our way, our ideology was the norm, and anyone not in agreement was deficient in some way.  We didn't value the thoughts, beliefs, values, or practices of anyone different from us.  It is scary to me now, thinking back, that it seemed NATURAL, even though it wasn't.  That racism and sexism are perpetuated in education, which is something that we usually view as opening our minds, might actually be closing them off.  

"Being conscious . . . is a Radical form of being"

To support intellectual development, Freire suggested that people should be taught how to help themselves or educate themselves about their reality” ( 42)

I dug the overview feel the book has so far, as I noticed others did not. The book does have a 17 page reference section that will help out with the further examination of critical theory. A whole school could be developed around CRT, CT, CWT, and critical theory with all of its complexities and contributors, so I greatly appreciate this book finding its way into my life.  

I took the quote above because I been trying to find alternative ways to educate myself besides public / private institutions. I have been unsatisfied this whole semester with a number of things concerning my education and have been re-examining how I ended up at Texas State going for a technical communication degree.  Some of the ideas and theories mentioned in this book helped in my re-examination. When the book mentions how Stovall offers a counterstory to “mainstream notions of urban education that perpetuate stereotypes of academic disinterest among children of color” it reminded me of  myself and my disinterest in school. I remember being disinterested in elementary school, disinterested in middle school, in high school and in bits and pieces of my schooling in higher education. Often times when I realize how disinterested in school I was I felt guilty and stupid. And lazy.  As I recognize now,  I was disinterested in most of my education because it was eradicating my culture, as it had already done, for the most part, to my parents. Ironically my disinterest from whitestream education perpetuated the stereotype Stovall mentioned. Education was installing certain ideologies and practices that remained invisible to me until recently.

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it . . . His education makes it necessary” (25)

This realization has caused me a lot of chaos and confusion. I used to tell myself that I didn’t care how poor I ended up, that I was going to be something I loved, regardless of the financial sacrifices it might call for. And yet, I went to school, in the end, for a job, for money. I find it hard to work within the confines of a system you are trying to change but in a weird way, now that I have a better hold on where I am, how I got here, and where I stand in the system, I am a little more excited than scared.  

Critically Conscious Research- blog 1

11.5.12

Critically Conscious Research is an interesting book that attempts to bring attention to social justice and how our biases can compromise us. The book brings philosophers in and explores their opinions in different ways. The philosopher Kant maintains that self-awareness is key to developing knowledge. How we are aware of ourselves in situations, especially involving research, affects the outcomes of experiments. I agree with Kant’s theories, which are related to self-awareness. It is true that science cannot explain the human condition in its entirety.

One of the most moving examples of the book is on page 5: “What makes a person critically conscious is challenging the underlying assumptions that work in the internal and external worlds to privilege some while disprivileging others” (CCR). This quote puts me on the defensive side and has invoked an emotional response. The way to become critically conscious is not accomplished by observing other people/situations (etc.) buy by adjusting yourself to life’s challenges. For example, we can observe the relationship between the community and the police. There are groups present that fear discrimination due to the color of their skin. Police may stereotype certain individuals, but the community sometimes shields their “friends” who may be criminals. Situations, not people, is where we can “adapt” our roles. Police departments around the globe need the help of community, but if the perception that discrimination may occur, this makes the situation more difficult, even dangerous. Both sides of the situation require independent thought, which restores balance.

I do not challenge oppression that exists in our world. I study it and protect my values while surviving the situation, because it will pass. A major drawback of this book is that it highlights how different we all are from one another, which can effectively divide us. The use of specific “cards” greatly weakens our resolve because we are acknowledging this division. The military focuses on the outcome of the mission, not the status of the individual. It is important to recognize biases to become more self-aware of your situation, but it is easy for the oppressed people to become oppressors. A good solution for us as human beings is not to focus on what makes us different. We all bleed the same blood.

“OH NO! Communism”

“OH NO! Communism” The Rhetoric of Change

In the first three chapters of, Critically Conscious Research, the authors provide an overview of the history of Critical Consciousness.  They not only give their readers a framework of the different theories, but they also briefly discuss the contributions of many different scholars (Kantz, Freire, Fannon, Marx, and many more!).  For the purpose of this post, I will be concentrating on Karl Marx.

What’s more negative in this country then mentioning the works of Marx?  Probably mentioning the works of mass murders (Bundy, Hitler, etc.) would be exceedingly worse.  However, to mention the political ideologies of Father Communism is appertaining to punching Uncle Sam in the face.  The world of capitalism does not readily call for the social considerations of Karl Marx; instead, it constantly fights against his works and ideas and labels him as “EVIL”. 

To clarify, I am not agreeing with Marx (completely); instead, I want to identify how the idea of Critically Conscious research and pedagogies are in danger of this same label.   The world we live in has norms and cultural mores that are present from birth.  Marx believed this to be a social phenomenon, “Marx believed that consciousness, as an idea, was formed in response to social and economic contexts” (7).  In other words, a person’s level in society (economically and socially) informs his or her critical mind.  And while Marx believes in this ideal, he moves further to explain how it is a true social occurrence, “He observed that ‘the world’ was in the stage of capitalism, where the work of the lower classes is used by the wealthy upper classes to obtain and maintain wealth” (7).  In the world he explains, the knowledge and norms of the dominant class is superior.

Douglas, Dubois and other African American activists utilized and refined Marxist theory to battle the seemingly normative thoughts of racism (25).  His ideas are represented through Frederick Douglas’ many public speeches.  Douglas, being an African American, was not part of the domineering ideologies of his time. Although his critical views are now considered to be the foundations of equality, his concepts during the time they were presented were not considered to be at the forefront of social change.  For example, Because of the eloquence of his speeches, which fought against slavery, Douglas’ works were often assumed to be ghost-written by a white man.  Frederick Douglas moved to alter the Status Quo; the dominating class moved to oppress his ideas and labeled him as unequal.

The idea of critical consciousness is very important to me; in fact my research focuses on social change.  Although I label my approach to a particular social problem as “social action,” the ideas of CC are still present.  Like Freire’s explanation of critical pedagogy in chapter 3, my research promotes the idea that “…people should be taught how to help themselves or educate themselves about their reality” (42).  The point I start to worry is how the representation of my ideas will be seen as fighting against the dominating theories of PTSD. Because I am not a psychologist, will my concepts be viewed as unintelligible or unequal?  What will my label be?