Color-Blindness vs. Race Matters: Pre-School Education and the Need for a Communal Vision

Multicultural Education, Summer 2004 by Hein, Christina Judith

It needs be the ultimate goal of these painful processes of reassessment, debate, and compromise to come to a communal vision for the United States. Oppression has never been embraced communally, neither have assimilation or segregation. What, then, are the alternatives? What should be the guise of the United States?

At present, all that teachers can do in this society is to work towards the alleviation of past wrongs and the effects that they still induce into human interaction today. They can engage into opening up spaces and minds for unprejudiced communication and exchange.10

Their hands are bound, however, when it comes to preparing future citizens for a state that would hold equality as dearly as the contentment of its different groups. The national intercultural future of the United States is hidden in a mist of injustices, harsh feelings, and misunderstandings, and without a constructive communal vision, the ultimate goal of culturally responsive education needs remain vague and blurred.

Notes

1 Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. called for the equal treatment of all people regardless of their distinctive characteristics. Rhetorically and within the framework of a struggle for agency, this dream is powerful and valuable. Interpersonal contact, however, always requires reacting to a person's individual needs, desires, hurts, etc.

2 According to Cornel Pewewardy (1998), culturally responsive pedagogy "involves providing the best possible education for children that preserves their own cultural heritage and prepares them for meaningful relationships with other people, and for living productive lives in the present society without sacrificing their own cultural perspective" (pp.69-70).

3 Pulido-Tobiassen & Gonzalez-Mena (1999) emphasize the importance of culturally responsive education for preschoolers: "Because young children form ideas about themselves and other people long before they start kindergarten, it is important to begin teaching anti-bias lessons early. If we reinforce these lessons, children will learn to appreciate, rather than fear, differences and to recognize bias and stereotypes when they see them" (p.3).

4 Williams does take care to include members of other racial and ethnic backgrounds into her discussion. Her main focus, however, remains with the old binary of black versus white. Clearly, education and communication need to improve drastically until those who live in the United States become able to appropriately see and appreciate the cultural diversities and complexities of their nation and the opportunities inherent in them.

5 Not just any book, doll, game or song will do! Teachers need to take special care at choosing appropriate materials. Playing cowboys and Indians or a little African doll in a straw skirt are clearly not the options that I am talking about.

6 Financial restrictions might of course impede the acquisition of new articles. Resorting to appropriate games and songs and having the children paint their own pictures of culturally and racially diverse, positive identification figures are inexpensive and available options.