¶ … identity, and how that is related to place. The articles are, well, they are interesting in that they all seem to start from a specific straw man narrative about the big evil dominant culture. Yosso (2005) begins with the assumption that everybody only thinks the dominant culture has capital, in order to argue her point that other cultures have capital, too. The underlying assumption that there is a research lens that has a deficit view of "communities of color" as places of cultural poverty is one I, as a person who comes from a very multicultural place, have not heard in a long time. So she is right that all cultures have capital, and that it would benefit everybody to respect and tap into that capital, she falls into a couple of intellectual traps. First, she assumes a monolithic dominant culture that defines everything for everybody -- not in the world I've ever experienced in my life has this been the case. The dichotomy she envisions in the world is precisely the type of backwards thinking we need to dispense with -- otherization is cheap, lazy straw man nonsense. There is great irony in her noting that there was once a black/white binary while perpetrating the same. The black/white binary? Is this 1954? Is the U.S. The only country in the world now? We have moved far beyond that, so long ago. I cannot believe people still write in those terms in 2005 -- and she is arguing against a single article from 1977. In other news, cherry-picking is a logical fallacy. So, sadly, this work ends up telling us what we already know about the value of different cultures, and the need to capture this value in education specifically, while perpetuating the same archaic vision of a world where people can be broken down easily into groups -- there is no one culture, no two cultures -- has this person ever considered that not everyone within a culture is the same? Or that there are people of mixed cultures? CRT is a nice idea, but seems outdated, and out of step for anyone who grew up in a multicultural society.

I...

There's some nuggets in there, especially about the meaning of home in a world where one's home is an uncertain thing. I find the clinging to the idea of home as interesting, mind you, in that people move around all the time. The idea that someone maybe lived somewhere once and that is meaningful today is laughable -- more than half the world's population has moved since the Arabs lost their multiple attempts at genocide, and they still pine for a different patch of dirt? At some point, the idea of home is one you create for yourself. His perspective as Muslims all as victims of persecution is laughable, as anyone who ever tried to be gay or a woman in a Muslim country can attest -- I have no time for hypocrites. As if New Yorkers were wrong to mourn for their losses. As if "America" is a singular entity, as per his corn rant. There is no one "America" -- again with the straw man otherization. If he wants to have an intelligent dialogue about what home is, and how we identify, he needs to scale back his racist screeds. His anger and bias do not make for positive dialogue.
Heynen's article, despite its academic gobbledegook (please, do tell me more about "revolutionary praxis" and "spatial metaphor"), makes a pretty good point about the subtle effects of the Free Breakfast for Children program. The BPP was not known for its subtlety, but this was a pretty profound change in the way people think about poverty, equality, and opportunity. To many, it surely came as a surprise that there were children who could go hungry. We still today have the ridiculous welfare queen narrative. Cutting through his self-satisfied quote-dropping and explanations about how forks are "bodily spaces," we get to the meat of the article -- no discussion of equality of opportunity can occur until it genuinely exists. Those with more power and privilege assume that if the rules are the same for all, then that is equality; this is false. The BPP recognized that inherently, because they…