Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United States

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, This article argues that recent instances of cultural conflict in the United States are part of a single, historically distinctive trend likely to intensify in the future. Recent cultural conflict springs in part from growing competition for cultural capital between dominant and subordinate racial groups in the United States. This article analyzes this conflict, treating its chief symbolic expression-"multiculturalism"-as a form of subordinate resistance to dominant group power. This article concludes that the uncertain outcome of cultural conflict in the United States reveals the absence currently of white ideological hegemony in American society.I would like to thank Michael Olneck, Crawford Young, Donald Culverson, and Clarence Stone for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Ethnic Museum Websites, Cultural Projection, and Self-Categorization Concepts

“…Merelman described two other components of cultural capital: marketable talent (such as in music) and creative manipulation of symbols (such as in advertising). Although both Bourdieu (1984) and Merelman (1995) defined cultural capital as a resource in group struggle, Bourdieu's concern was class struggle and Merelman's was race. To Bourdieu, struggles over the appropriation of cultural goods were struggles for the monopoly over the emblems of class (1984, p. 249).…”

Social Justice is Not Spoken Here: Considering the Nexus of Knowledge, Power and the Education of Future Teachers in the United States

“…This racial epistemology of Whiteness as knowledge is grounded in a history of practiced violence and has been used to maintain White racial dominance and superiority (Jordan, 1974;Goldberg, 1993;Mills, 1997;Bonilla-Silva, 2003). Drawing on this historical foundation of privileging Whiteness, Whites use their understandings of the world as a lens to make sense of what is happening in the contexts around them (Marable, 1993(Marable, , 1994Merelman, 1995;Jensen, 2005).…”

Re-naming, re-imagining America: multicultural curriculum as classification struggle

“…Despite shifts toward multicultural curriculum content, Galin (1996) argues, 'systems of discursive practices and their underlying claims to truth have remained fundamentally the same' (Galin, 1996, p. 12). [20] The uneven transformation of curriculum, in which new perspectives are introduced, but traditional storylines are preserved, in which new definitions and interpretations are sometimes advanced, but in which old definitions and interpretations predominate, in which conceptual inconsistencies appear, and in which established cultural gatekeepers blunt challenges for parity of narrative construction rights (Lakoff, 2000) may represent a transitional state toward cultural syncretism (Merelman, 1995) in which cultural representations and classifications from heretofore dominant groups, and previously subordinated groups are synthesised into a new, relatively stable, and consistent system of cultural representation and classification. It may, however, be indicative of a persistently unstable and inconsistent state produced by the clashes of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural representations and classifications.…”

“…The 'same' curriculum may be used in very different ways. Richard Merelman (1993Merelman ( , 1995 observed African American teachers in elementary and middle schools in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC using black history materials to promote a sense of solidarity and identification with a shared past among African American students, while white teachers used black history to exemplify universalistic and individualistic themes. Christine Sleeter has argued that numerous teachers of colour use multicultural education as a rubric under which to pursue critical, anti-racist teaching (Sleeter, 1989).…”