Epistemic Salience of Anti-Racist Education
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This chapter explores the epistemic salience of anti-racist education. Epistemic saliency is about the oppressed voice becoming salient. McLeod examines the flaws of Western conceptions of knowledge constructs on the Native/Indigenous through an anti-racist lens. These constructions are historically contingent, politically and socially constitutive, and produce forms of social organization. The discussion identifies the problematic implications of Eurocentric construction and production of knowledge on race and difference. It argues that contemporary pedagogues should take into account how knowledge construction and production are implicated in schooling. Current educational practices based on essentializing knowledge about the “other”, have contributed to racism and the unequal treatment of non-White students. The chapter examines ways in which racist ideas and actions are consciously entrenched by schooling structures and processes. It recognizes and examines issues of exploitation, oppression, domination and subordination embedded in dominant epistemological frameworks in schools with a view to rupture and subvert hegemonic paradigms of race and difference. Western epistemological constructions of race and difference must be reframed through anti-racist praxis. This chapter gives suggestions as to how pedagogues might use reframed knowledge constructs of race and difference, to rupture and resist the status quo.