Week 5 Thoughts

Giroux has a great rebuttal for Todd Gitlin’s critique of social movements organized around gender, race, sexual orientation, multiculturalism that, according to Gatlin, overlook the more ‘real politics’ of economic inequality and class. Giroux uses Hall’s insight that class is lived through the modalities of race and gender to show how social movements organized around racial and gendered issues expose how these issues are connected to class-based politics (example: the social movement ACT UP, which tried to make AIDS visible, exposed how AIDS was taking its greatest toll on poor black women). My question is, can we think of social movements that are seemingly organized around class issues, but which also expose how race and gender are tied up in class politics. As I am writing this, I am thinking of Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a study of how eight families in Milwaukee struggled with poverty and home insecurity. Although the families are all struggling, Desmond points out how their experiences are lived through the modalities of race and gender. For example, he points out that poor black women are more likely to get evicted. He also points out how white landlords are more willing to overlook crime records of white people than of black people.

How do Peter N. Kiang’s practices as an instructor and fellow coworker in the College of Education reflect Giroux’s theory of critical public pedagogy? How might Gitlin and others’ critique of cultural politics be compared to the arguments made by the core of students opposing Kiang’s teaching methods?

-Daisy