Questions abound in the literature and in practice about how best to advance social justice among groups who are content to ignore the chorus of marginalized voices pressing for social change. This qualitative study of 20 community-based practitioners explored how to assist the transformation of privileged learners on issues of race, class, and gender when they are in the training rooms. Pedagogy for the privileged presents an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of adult educators who work with privileged learners on a daily basis in antiracism and diversity training, human rights development, leadership training, sensitivity training, and organizational development workshops. This article describes how grassroots educators understand the transformation process, including its ethical dimensions, and presents a new model for this pedagogy based on confidence shaking and confidence building.
The implementation of a robust community based participatory research (CBPR) study in Multnomah County, Oregon, has detailed broad and deep racial disparities across 27 institutions and systems. The process of this research has led to the identification of numerous practices that misrepresent and negate the experiences and very identity of communities of color. The research draws from engagement with numerous databases from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and various administrative databases. The core issues at hand are population undercounts, understudy of the unique characteristics of these communities, inaccuracies in how data are codified and analyzed, and data collection efforts that are infused with white centrism and a colorblindness that renders issues minimized and the experiences of communities of color obscured. Collectively, we analyze this experience to suggest that much conventional policy research while wrapped in a cloak of objectivity is in fact a reproduction of whiteness that renders communities of color invisible, marginalized and misunderstood. The impact of these practices is to extend whiteness into the arena of policy research, and correspondingly extend dynamics of oppression and white centrism. The paper profiles each area of the policy research process that reflects and reinscribes whiteness and concludes with an articulation the reach of such conventional practice and outlines an avenue to reduce the influence of whiteness
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