How are race and gender embedded in the patterns identified above
Patterns to Practice Seeing
1. Consider your friends, family, and most trusted business associates. What classes are they from? Do you notice a pattern in the class positions of those in your closer social circles?
2. How do you and the people in your social circles talk about people of other classes? What class assumptions about people are evident in this talk?
3. How are race and gender embedded in the patterns identified above?
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CHAPTER 11
“Yeah, But …”: Common Rebuttals
“So, I have to watch everything I say?”
Based on our experiences teaching critical social justice in a variety of forums, we predict that readers will raise some common questions, objections, and critiques. This chapter addresses the most commonly raised issues and objections. Drawing on all that has been discussed in previous chapters, we briefly but explicitly speak again to these concerns.
The primary goal of this book is to explain key concepts in critical social justice education in ways that deepen our readers’ understanding. Deepening understanding is not dependent on agreement; the back-and- forth arguing inherent to winning or losing debates is not useful to this goal. We expect that some ideas will be new and difficult to understand. But struggling to understand and struggling to rebut are very different choices. Raising questions because you are working through an idea is important, and we encourage you to seek out critical social justice education well beyond this book. However, rebuttals that function to block out, cut off, and negate explanations are counter to the goals of education, be it critical social justice or any other kind. We ask our readers to reflect on whether the goals of their questions are greater clarity or greater protection of their existing worldview. Once a level of fluency has been gained, one is of course free to reject the arguments, but will be able to do so from a much more informed and nuanced position.
As we have explained, our socialization is the foundation of our identity. Thus to consider that we have been socialized to participate in systems of oppression that we don’t condone is to challenge our very sense of who we are. But this socialization is not something we could choose or avoid, and doesn’t make us bad people. It does, however, make us responsible for reeducating ourselves and working to change oppressive systems. This is unquestionably very challenging but can also be
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personally rewarding as we gain insight, expand our perspectives, deepen our cross-group relationships, align what we believe and say with what we do, and increase our personal and political integrity.
Based on our experience teaching critical social justice to a wide range of people in a variety of forums, we can predict that certain rebuttals will be made. While we have discussed many of these issues in detail elsewhere, given their tenacity, we want to revisit the most common ones. In the examples below, when we refer to “students” we are referring primarily to our students in university and college classrooms. However, the objections, as well as our responses to them, should be familiar to people outside of these contexts and easily transferable.