Civil Rights Deconstructed

We’ve come a long way from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in which he exhorted listeners to judge others, if they must, on content of character rather than color of skin. “Colorblind discourse asserts that any consideration of race is itself racist,” Priya Kandaswamy writes in the latest issue of Radical Teacher. “It protects racism by making it invisible, and has been instrumental in the preservation of white privilege within universities through the dismantling of affirmative action in admissions and hiring, the delegitimization of scholarship that interrogates racism, and the marginalization of those of us who need to name the racism that we experience in our everyday lives.”

Kandaswamy is an assistant professor of women’s studies at Portland State University. Radical Teacher is “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.