‘Look to the bottom’: re-writing the body curriculum through storylines

ABSTRACT

Several critical scholars recently have debunked the media’s proclamation that with Obama’s presidency, the United States has entered a post-racial era, with the media thus fabricating an image of a ‘race neutral’ American society (McCarthy, C. (2013). The problem with origins. Race and the contrapuntal nature of the education experience. In H. A. Giroux & P. Shannon (Eds.), Education and cultural studies (pp. 104–153). New York, NY; Zirkel, S., & Johnson, T. (2016). Mirror, mirror on the wall: A critical examination of the conceptualization of the study of Black racial identity in education. Educational Researcher, 45(5), 301–311). In this paper, first, I suggest that today’s pedagogical conditions within schools built upon ‘deficit thinking’ (Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91) need to be critically considered as a source of inequity. Second, I contend that the historical legacy of the academic gap and the current health gap work implicitly as a new form of neocolonialism embedded in the current neoliberal colorblind era that continues to mark ethnic-minoritized young people as ‘deficient’. Black and ethnic-minoritized young people’s attempts to reconcile discrepancies between their own culturally relevant sense of self and the normative ‘white’ identity become a problematic and difficult process. Third, against the backdrop of intersecting forms of oppression, I discuss how the pedagogical infrastructure of the Body Curriculum allows young people to re-write the body ‘from below’ (Spivak, G. C. (1993). Outside in the teaching machine. New York, NY: Routledge) from the perspectives of the ‘other’ – ethnic-minoritized young people, to destabilize the ‘center’ position and at the same time, create powerful counter-stories for social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race theory
• social justice
• curriculum
• physical culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.