Giroux, "Postmodernism as Border Pedagogy: Redefining the Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity"
Giroux draws a distinction between modern and postmodern views of racism, with modernism seeing it as individual prejudice and postmodernism seeing it as “part of the wider discourse of power and powerlessness” (459). Modernism’s answer to racism is multiculturalism, which celebrates Otherness without problematizing whiteness. Giroux calls for a postmodern anti-racist pedagogy which decenters whiteness—and “the liberal, humanist notion of the unified, rational subject as the bearer of history” (467)—and recognizes whiteness as a political, social, and economic construction. He believes that through postmodernism, we can begin to see past stereotypes “that smother difference within and between diverse subordinate groups” and present Others unified, essentialized objects, and see Others as multivocal subjects.
The pedagogy Giroux envisions reconceptualizes teacher authority as “grounded in a respect for a radically decentered notion of democratic public life. This is a view of authority that rejects the notion that all forms of authority are expressions of unwarranted power and oppression. Instead, it argues for forms of authority that are rooted in democratic interests and emancipatory social relations. . . this is not a form of authority based on an appeal to universal truths, it is a form of authority that recognizes its own partiality while simultaneously asserting a standpoint from which to engage the discourses and practices of democracy, freedom, and domination” (484).
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