ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical sociological and autobiographical engagement with questions of race and language that redefines them as forms of capital. It moves to a normative model that aims to reconstruct the school as a social field for language and literacy education. The narrative structures around race, power and speaking position have historically been written from the margins of power – from diasporic positions produced by histories of displacement, migration and cultural and economic marginalization. Educational institutions are sociologically contingent, mediated and structured by their location within political economy, secular and nonsecular ideology, cultural history and place. The educational response, then, centres on the politics of recognition, with calls for a general shift in school discourse to accommodate diverse ways of knowing and cultural interactional patterns. To see racism, sexism, social class and linguistic discrimination from the vantage point of those who exercise power against others is unsettling.
