ABSTRACT
I begin this chapter with a declaration of my political and academic project. I maintain that education is the satisfaction of social, material, economic, and spiritual needs of the self and a collective. Effective education depends on effective and efficient instructional, pedagogic, and communicative means that positively affect the well being and social existence of a people. In harnessing the human potential, education must not only be relevant to the learner but also equip the learner with critical thinking skills to understand their social world and work to transform current situations. In the struggle for educational change I have always disavowed a politics of the moment or situational politics, one which is constantly shifting, not grounded and only pursued where one finds herself or himself. I believe that we must affirm the cultural and political relevance of a critical collective anti-racist resistant politics so that the minoritized are empowered in their pursuit of the multiple and complex identities’ around what I prefer to call “a politics of identity.” Such politics must be grounded in some identities that are shared, not because these are the only relevant identities for us to speak about, but, rather, because it is important to pursue a political stance that does not absolve the dominance of responsibility by denying collective histories of colonial oppression. I also share the belief that essentialism pursued politically in the service of the devaluation, negation, and domination of others’ experiences ought to be
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challenge. It is in combining this understanding of “strategic essentialism” with an anti-racist politics of identity that I employ the notion of “saliency” and the argument for a recognition of the “severity of issues for certain bodies.”
