Three important notes about this file

Critical Pedagogy Link

Critical pedagogy perpetuates capitalism- doomed to be ineffective unless it adopts a capital-centric approach

McLaren 2k- prof at UCLA (Peter, “Knowledge and power in the global economy,” edited by David Gabbard, Chapter 39. Critical Pedagogy//MGD)

Critical pedagogy has become closely allied with multicultural education (McLaren, 1995; Sleeter & McLaren, 1995). However, just as we have witnessed in the project of critical pedagogy an avoidance of issues related to class and the social relations of production, so too have we witnessed in multicultural education an absence of discussions linking the practice of racism to capitalist social relations. Consequently, both critical pedagogy and multicultural education need to address themselves to the adaptive persistence of capitalism and to issues of capitalist imperialism and its specific manifestation of accumulative capacities through conquest (which we know as colonialism). In other words, critical pedagogy needs to establish a project of emancipation centered around the transformation of property relations and the creation of a just system of appropriation and distribution of social wealth. The domestication of critical pedagogy has not infirmed its revolutionary potential.

Hip Hop Link

Hip hop is dead.  The aff’s use of hip-hop is anything but revolutionary – the appeal to authentic local practices of experiential knowledge reintrenches the fable of identity and makes a coherent critique of capitalism impossible.  Their conception that hip-hop is necessarily transformative is just another means to covertly essentialize identity and obscure the tools of class analysis. 

Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race:  Racism after multiculturalism, p. 101-4 //liam]

 

The process of signification is at work in the emphasis that critical race theory places on “experiential knowledge” (Delgado 1995; Ladson BilIhSgs 1999). Robin Barnes (1990) notes that “Critical race theorists... iisirgrate their experiential knowledge, drawn from a shared history as ‘OJer’ with their ongoing struggles to transform a world deteriorating under the albatross of racial hegemony” (1864—65). In concert with this privileging of experience, critical race theory employs narratives and storytelling as a central method of inquiry to “analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render blacks and other minorities one-down” (Delgado 1995, xiv). The results of this storytelling method are theorized and then utilized to draw conclusions meant to impact public policy and institutional practices. The narrative and storytelling method employed by critical race theo rists sought to critique essentialist narratives in law, education, and the social sciences. In place of a systematic analysis of class and capitalist relations, critical race theory constructs “race”-centered responses to Eu rocentrism and white privilege. Delgado Bernal (2002) affirms the valid. icy of this position, arguing that Western modernism is a network or grid of broad assumptions and be liefs that are deeply embedded in the way dominant Western culture constructs the nature of the world and one’s experiences in it. In the United States, the center of this grid is a Eurocentric epistemological per spective based on White privilege. (111) The narrative method based on this perspective “has become especially successful among groups committed to making the voice of the voiceless heard in the public arena” (Viotti da Costa 2001, 21). However, despite an eagerness to include the participation of historically excluded populations, scholars who embrace the poetics of the narrative approach often “fail to challenge the underlying socioeconomic, political and cultural structures that have excluded these groups to begin with and have sus tained the illusion of choice” (Watts 1991, 652). Thus, the narrative and storytelling approach can render the scholarship antidialectical by creat ing a false dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, “forgetting that one is implied in the other, [while ignoring] a basic dialectical prm ciple: that men and women make history, but not under the conditions of their own choosing” (Viotti da Costa 2001, 20). We agree that “cultural resources and funds of knowledge such as myths, folk tales, dichos, consejos, kitchen talk, [and] autobiographical stories” (Delgado Bernal 2002, 120) employed by critical race theory canilluminate particular concrete manifestations of racism. However, we contend that they can also prove problematic in positing a broader un derstanding of the fundamental macrosocial dynamics which shape the conditions that give rise to the “micro-aggressions” (Solórzano 1998) of racism in the first place. In an incisive critique of the narrative approach, Emilia Viottj da Costa (2001) argues, The new paths it opened for an investigation of the process of construc tion and articulation of multiple and often contradictory identities (eth nic, class, gender, nationality and so on), often led to the total neglect of the concept of class as an interpretive category. . . . What started as . . . a critique of Marxism, has frequently led to a complete subjectivism, to the denial of the possibility of knowledge and sometimes even to the questioning of the boundaries between history and fiction, fact and fancy.” (19) Robin Kelley, in his book Yo’ Mama’s DisFUNKtional (1997), offers the following illuminating and sobering commentary regarding the limits of personal experience and storytelling: I am not claiming absolute authority or authenticity for having lived there. On the contrary, it is because I did not know what happened to our world, to my neighbors, my elders, my peers, our streets, buildings, parks, our health, that I chose not to write a memoir. Indeed, if I relied on memory alone I would invariably have more to say about devouring Good and Pleneys or melting crayons on the radiator than about eco nomic restructuring, the disappearance of jobs, and the dismantling of the welfare state. (4—5) Hence, we believe the use of critical race theory in education and the social sciences in general, despite authors’ intentions, can unwittingly serve purposes that are fundamentally conservative or mainstream at best. Three additional but related concerns with the storytelling narrative method are also at issue here. One is the tendency to romanticize the ex perience of marginalized groups, privileging the narratives and discourses of “people of coloi” solely based on their experience of oppression, as if a people’s entire politics can be determined solely by their in dividual location in history. The second is the tendency to dichotomize and “overhomogenize” both “white” people and “people of color” with respect to questions of voice and political representation (Viotti da Costa 2iO1). And the third, anticipated by C. L. R. James in 1943, is the in inevitable “exaggerations excesses and ideological trends for which the only possible name is chauvinism” (McLemee 1996, 86). Unfortunately, these tendencies, whether academic or political, can result in unintended essentialism and superficiality in our theorizing of broader social in equalities, as well as the solutions derived from such theories. Yet, truth be told, prescribed views of humanity are seldom the reality, whatever be their source. Human beings who share phenotypical traits seldom respond to the world within the Constraints of essentialszed ex pectations and perceptions. Hence, any notion of “racial” solidarity “must run up against the hard facts of political economy ... and enormous class disparities” within racialized Communities (Gates 1997, 36). This is why Gilroy (2000) warns against “short-cut solidarity” attitudes that assume that a person’s political allegiance can be determined by his or her “race” or that a “shared history” will guarantee an emancipatory woridview. For this reason, we argue that such declarations, though they may sound reasonable, commonsensical, or even promising as literary contributions, have little utility in explaining “how and why power is constituted, reproduced and transformed” (Viotti da Costa 2001, 22).