Abstract
Anti-racist socio-educational intervention is not proving effective at combating contemporary racism. Traditional awareness models suffer from serious limitations that prevent them from achieving their stated objectives. In this chapter, these limits are described and explained, based on an analysis of the dominant models implicit in current anti-racist intervention. Second, two new conceptual tools are proposed that are essential to reframe anti-racist action, so that socio-educational intervention is truly able to transform and eliminate moral boundaries. Finally, several operational proposals are presented and described to renew anti-racist socio-educational action from a critical-transformative perspective: critical reflexivity, the decolonization of one's own culture, understanding to transform, the enabling of racialized and discriminated groups, participatory communication, and communicational empowerment.
TopLimits Of Anti-Racist Socio-Educational Interventions
The anti-racism strategies of institutions and non-profit organizations have focused mainly on communication and awareness. Traditional awareness models suffer from serious limitations that, far too often, prevent them from achieving their stated objectives.
Over the last decade, from the critical perspectives of anti-racism, so-called ‘moral’ or ‘functional’ anti-racism has been criticized. This consists of a set of anti-discriminatory policy and intervention strategies that deny the structural nature of racism, focusing only on its attitudinal aspect. These approaches exclude individuals and groups who are victims of racism, reproducing paternalistic and salvationist models, and deprive anti-racism of its transformative and political power.
In order to revitalize anti-racism efforts, we must expose the implicit intervention practices and models that, without realizing it, reproduce the logic of inequality. We must become aware of the unconscious or implicit underpinnings of actions that are not always consistent with their explicit intentions (Aguilar-Idáñez, 2010). All people, including those who declare themselves anti-racists and engage in anti-racist socio-educational action projects, may harbor prejudices, stereotypes or a certain ethnocentrism in their ways of being, thinking and acting, without even being aware of this (Aguilar-Idáñez, 2011). It is necessary, then, to identify and understand those frames of reference that, unconsciously and impulsively, guide actions, in order to be in a position to carry out actions that ensure success. The way we design our anti-racist social intervention actions, our strategies and work methodology are based on implicit models formed by frames of reference that reflect a simplified and schematic construction of reality that serves to explain it, providing a general referential outline that unreflectively guides our actions. It may be uncomfortable, but we must realize that our ways of working with and for victims of discrimination, against racism and towards a more just society, are often based on values, assumptions and stereotypes that can legitimize and reproduce new forms of racism that, while more subtle, are equally harmful (Aguilar-Idáñez, 2011).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Moral Boundaries: The symbolic lines of separation that place certain groups outside the margins to which we feel compelled to apply moral and justice standards; that is, outside our ‘moral community.’
Participatory Communication: A methodological tool to achieve the social change that implies working toward awareness and communication through horizontal logic focused on collective processes and dynamics. Participatory communication is a process of dialogue based on respecting and recognizing others, on equity, social justice and the participation of all people. Its objective is to boost transformative processes through actions that are capable of building new frames of reference and new imaginaries to interpret reality, and to do so with “cultural efficacy.”
Racism: System that structures interpersonal, institutional, and cultural dimensions for the purpose of letting one group dominate and inferiorize another based on the racialization of differences. It is expressed through a set of ideas, discourses and practices intended to ignore, stigmatize, discriminate, exclude, exploit, attack and dispossess.
Implicit Models: The frames of reference that reflect a simplified and schematic construction of reality that serves to explain it, providing a general referential outline that unreflectively guides our actions. The implicit models that underlie any anti-racist action primarily depend on and are determined by the interrelation of three elements: how racism is defined and, in particular, what its main causes are; what strategies are deemed most legitimate for dealing with the problem; and how the people involved are defined, and, specifically, what roles and statuses are assigned to them.
Functional Interculturality: Pro-coexistence actions based on dialogue, without taking into account the structural discrimination, poverty, and social and moral exclusion suffered by certain groups, these being the main obstacles to laying the foundations for dialogue under equal conditions. It is functional because it does not question the existing system. On the contrary, it generates discourse and practices that legitimize structural inequalities.
Communicational Empowerment: The process by which people, groups or communities become communicative agents for social change.
Racialization: The process through which phenotypic, social, cultural, religious and other differences are thought of as natural and essential, as if they were markers of a supposed race. It implies an essential and radical differentiation between human groups, reducing the complexity of people to a few characteristics related to a group (cultural identity, phenotype, ethnicity, religion, language) and a deterministic relationship between these characteristics and an individual’s way of being.