The Complicated Conversation of Class and Race in Social and Curricular Analysis: An examination of Pierre Bourdieu's interpretative framework in relation to race

Abstract

As a means to challenge and diminish the hold of mainstream curriculum's claim of being a colorblind, politically neutral text, we will address two particular features that partially, though significantly, constitute the hidden curriculum in the United States—race and class—historically studied as separate social issues. Race and class have been embedded within the institutional curriculum from the beginning in the US; though rarely acknowledged as intertwined issues. We illustrate how the theoretical and interpretive structure of French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu can productively subsume the insights of critical race theory into its framework in a way that provides a more robust understanding of how race and class continue to be socially reproduced in schools. To perform this task we examine, through Bourdieu's constructs of habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence and misrecognition, the ways in which race, in general, and whiteness, specifically, influences pedagogical and curricular existence within the institutional superstructure of school.

Race and Employment Practices in Northeast Brazil’s Ecotourism Industry: An Analysis of Cultural Capital, Symbolic Capital, and Symbolic Power

“…Employers likewise may not have been conscious of the fact that their employment preferences were based in race. As a result of the entrenched ideology surrounding mestiçagem, Brazilians often misrecognize racial ideologies and discourses as social facts rather than sources of domination and oppression, thus normalizing social inequality (McKnight and Chandler 2012).…”

“…Studies of social inequality reveal that the accrual of cultural capital and its socioeconomic benefits are mediated not only by class, as Bourdieu emphasized, but by race and ethnicity as well (Lan 2011;McKnight and Chandler 2012;Purcell 2007;Yosso 2005), thus exposing the economic and social consequences of someone's inability to attain cultural capital (Carter 2003) and to embody a habitus that reflects cultural capital. In Brazil, habitus is racialized, and a habitus that includes embodied cultural capital indexes someone's whiteness.…”

Peace education and peace education research: Toward a concept of poststructural violence and second-order reflexivity

“…A third philosopher, who brings the notion of symbolic violence to the discussion, is the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His concepts of field, cultural capital and habitus are central to post-structural education theory, and have much to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which PACS education might itself symbolically reproduce violence (Bourdieu, 1977;Bourdieu & Passeron, 1986McKnight & Chandler, 2009).…”

Designing Counter-Narratives

“…The discrimination and systematic oppression of people of color persist even though some curriculum within higher education has become inclusive of race, class, and gendered perspectives. McKnight and Chandler (2012) found that "institutional versions of curriculum are predisposed toward anti-democratic education because they tend to marginalize or entirely exclude the voices of the 'other' by way of privileging and socially reproducing the patriarchal, white normative perception of the world" (p. 4475). This lack of democracy within curriculum perpetuates the silencing of diverse voices.…”