Cultural Dissonance & Other People's Children

In The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's' Children by author Lisa Delpit, Delpit argues that within education circles, the voices of the marginalized and their lived experiences are often silenced when attempting to critique progressive pedagogies set forth by well-intentioned liberal whites as they fail to understand the culture of power and the necessity for preparing students to face said culture whilst encouraging students to critique it.

Key Quotes: 

"When you're talking to white people, they still want it to be their way. You can try to talk to them and give them examples, but they're so headstrong, they think they know what's best for everybody, for everybody's children" (Delpit 21).

"If you try to suggest that's not quite the way it is, they get defensive, then you get defensive, then they'll start reciting research...they only want to go on research they've read that other white people have written" (Delpit 22) 

"I believe that the actual practice of good teachers of all colors typically incorporates a range of pedagogical orientations" (Delpit 24).

"The culture of school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes - of those in power" (Delpit 25).

"Members of any culture transmit information implicitly to co-members. However, when implicit codes are attempted across cultures, communication frequently breaks down" (Delpit 25)

"When acknowledging and expressing power, one tends towards explicitness...when deemphasizing power, there is a move toward indirect communication" (Delpit 27).

"In this country, students will be judged on their product regardless of the process they utilized to achieve it. And that product, based as it is on the specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit. If such explicitness is not provided to students, what it feels like to people who are old enough to judge is that there are secrets being kept, that time is being wasted, that the teacher is abdicating his or her duty to teach" (Delpit 31).

Perhaps because white culture is the dominant hegemonic structure in our society, white people do not feel the need to explain the ins and outs and cultural nuisances of conduct as it is second nature. In thinking about liberal white educators and their discomfort with being explicit, maybe this discomfort stems from the awareness and guilt that forcing students and individuals to adhere to white cultural expectations is counterproductive to co-creating a reimagined society that uplifts diversity of culture and promotes equity. While I have often questioned why non-white people have to adapt to and play by the rules of the dominant culture, considering it's rooted in racism, I understand the necessity of doing so for the sake of personal well-being and social mobility. Failure to adequately prepare students for this reality would be a disservice to them.