ABSTRACT
This chapter presents curriculum as students' relationship with school knowledge and how the curriculum implicates race relations. Curriculum creation is arguably the most appropriate way to begin a discussion around education and racism. On the most obvious level, the content that students study relates to the intellectual grappling with the history of race and racism. Earlier developments in "intercultural education" influenced this process, but multiculturalism and curricular change raged in the 1990s as a response to the entrenchment of a Eurocentric curriculum. Like the cultural wars, the urban wars took on a distinctly racial flavor. Knowledge is not an inert thing, but a dynamic relation into which educators enter. A new curriculum may not change schools and society, but no social change happens without it, either before or after major upheavals. Edward Said's study of "Orientalism" confirmed the racial implications of knowledge relations when one group occupies the status of knower over another.
