Conversation Of The Week XVIII: Reality Reconfigured: Revisiting The Elusive Quest For Cultural Homogeneity

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"…I suppose the real truth is that I have always looked upon the Enterprise and its crew as my own private view of Earth and humanity in microcosm. If this is not the way we really are, it seems to me most certainly a way we ought to be. During its voyages, the starship Enterprise always carried much more than mere respect and tolerance for other life forms and ideas — it carried the more positive force of love for the almost limitless variety within our universe. It is this capacity for love for all things, which has always seemed to me the first indication that an individual or a race is approaching adulthood… While we humans may still be a considerable distance from understanding truth, or even of being able to cope with it, I believe that love is somehow integral to truth. Perhaps it demarks the path leading there."

Some eighteen plus years have passed now since I gave an invited presentation as part of a lecture/workshop during a conference at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, 20 November 1992 entitled, "Colorizing the 'Canon': New Directions for African American Scholarship and Research." I had gone looking for the notes for that presentation in the course of reflecting on the multiyear struggle by the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder to secure a fully operationalized graduate program in comparative ethnic studies that was first discussed and for which I wrote the first proposal in 1994, two years before CSERA (The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in America) would receive departmental status itself. I sensed that I might find there some words, images, descriptors, guide posts, whatever, I might employ to help me make sense of what I had been through. Having stepped away from the process before its completion I wanted to assess the value of what I had contributed.

Let me clarify here so as not to create too much confusion. Reviewing that presentation, I learned, in concert with many of the readings cited in the endnotes, the importance of not failing to remember the impermanence of all constructs of the consciousness; and our unwillingness at times of, to appreciate how our conceptualizations impede seeing differences between "Appearance” and “Reality.”

Take dreams for an example, constructs that Jiminy Cricket tells us are, "wishes your heart makes when you are fast asleep." Cultural hegemony is just such a dream. It cannot be realized unless and until we acknowledge and accept, as I will discuss later in this essay, the reality that the only thing we all have in common, as a species, is our differences. Not surprisingly, it is often the case that within group differences are greater and more varied than between group differences. Moreover, those differences must be addressed through the construction of more sophisticated more realistically complex and dynamical technologies of the intellect than we have utilized up to now.

The basic problem I see more readily now than then are the numerous ways in which these extant technologies are hopelessly inadequate and inappropriate because their universes of definition are too narrowly scoped and thus they are flawed in their conceptualization and implementation.

Accordingly, whatever lies outside what is essentially a socially constructed space, cannot be perceived, substantiated, believed in, or given standing in the society without compromising the customs, traditions, interests, et al that are utilized to preserve, protect, and defend the position and privileges of those strategic elites who run the social order. Most assuredly, for people of color and/either other stigmatized (the character and content of the label changes as the stress sources and levels thereof change over time mandating an historical conscious as a fundamental necessity for self-directed citizenship) groups, running the obstacle course and scavenger hunt to realize the "American Dream" is doubly onerous whenever that dream is not updated and upgraded to form new paradigmatic gestalts. These new gestalts must also flow out of the experiences and folk wisdom of those whose orienting truths are very different from those encapsulated in the dominant paradigm.

The Talk
I began my presentation that morning by saying, "the essence of my talk today is to offer for your consideration, an alternative to what I have elsewhere called the Ted Turner approach to schooling and curriculum construction—adding a little color here and a little gender there—in short, tinting the classics to effect an illusion of inclusion, so as not to completely lose control of the instruments of schooling in society. This approach put forward by all too many knowledge workers and curriculum planners out and about the countryside, makes clear the chimerical character of the quest for cultural homogeneity in a synthetic society of many different races and cultures.” What I did not talk about then because I did not understand it the way I do now is the extent to which these minute additions diverted our attention from a real examination of the frameworks that were being used to describe and categorize the experiences of others not necessarily for their own benefit and development.

It was not that I had anything against Ted Turner per se; he was simply operating in accord with good capitalist practice to increase the size of his audience. Rather, it was the realization as described above supplemented by continued reading and reflection that what was previously excluded from the universe of definition could not be brought in at a later date without a fundamental recasting of the dominant paradigm through which a previously essentialist reality was made known to the schooled masses. In short, what you got was what I have called for a number of years now, "A 3-D theory of history: best practices in deletion, denial, and distortion." Briefly, what the extant universes of definition do is eject as non-readable, whatever does not accord with the instructions for identification and processing that articulated the acceptance criteria of the centralizing filters at the time of their design. In other words, as we will see shortly, black (and all the variants thereof) insights were without validity because black people, et al "were not true life forms" and so whatever experiences they had, or the accounts thereof, could be discarded as interesting but useless. In short, what I spoke about with them that day fell more under the heading of curriculum reconstruction than curriculum infusion. And it was very much in my mind that I might use that talk to reassess and reinterpret an experience in the academy and the meaning I have made of a subset of the larger set education and social justice: viz, the quest to develop a Ph.D. program in comparative ethnic studies in the University of Colorado at Boulder.

End Notes: 

1. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Gene Roddenberry has also written a novelization published by New York: Pocket Books, 1979, pp. 10-11. Further quoted material is taken either from the film or this novelization.


2. CSERA had been created in 1987 by bringing together the Black Studies Program that had been formed in 1968, the Chicano/a Studies Program that was formed shortly thereafter, and interest groups in American Indian and Asian American Studies. Black Studies had secured degree-granting status in 1976. This degree would be changed from a B.A. in Black Studies to a B.A. in Ethnic Studies in 1996 when the department was created. The faculty of the department, approximately a dozen people, are spread over four culturally specific content areas. I joined the Black Studies Program as one of its first permanent faculty in 1972 and have been there since. I have served two tours as Associate Chair of the department and spent several years on one committee or another within the department focused on developing a graduate program.


3. As a case in point, take a look at, Steve Hagen, How the world can be the way it is: an inquiry for the new millennium into science, philosophy and perception. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1995.


4. Consider, for example, Fritjof Capra's observations in, "Complexity and Life," Theory, Culture & Society, 22, 5 (2005), pp. 33-44.


5. This whole business, what I call the problem of problem definition, is at the heart of social epistemology. That is the idea that epistemology is a construct like any other construct and is a function of what we consider important. Much of this "new" understanding has come about as we have sought to comprehend and appreciate the social consequences of science and technology, and in particular, the impact of developments like relativity, quantum mechanics, uncertainty, and chaos theory on problems that transcend traditional academic disciplines. If these disciplines, collectively, have one single weakness, it is their conceptualization of the universe as a static and linear entity in keeping with the Newtonian/ Cartesian paradigm. While it is the case that the Clark/Wawrytko volume is full of suggestions on what the participants believe is wrong with the current curriculum and how it might be fixed, the two most prominent weaknesses I found were, the abstractness of approaches without regard to the politics of inertia that energize many of our institutions of higher learning; and the inadequate treatment of issues raised by peoples of color and women who desire to subvert the dominant paradigm for entirely different reasons, principally the extent to which the myths that have been created by those in positions of authority in the academy have worked to sustain an asymmetrical balance of power in the social order and stay the development and self-determination of the oppressed classes. Some of you might want to examine what I have said here in the light of Benjamin Fraser’s “Toward a Philosophy of the Urban: Henri Lefebvre Uncomfortable Application of Bergsonism,” Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, 26 (2008), pp. 338-358. What is particularly nice about this piece is the contextualizing (especially historical) it performs for many of the ideas contained in this paper.


6. I invite my readers to "chew" on what I have said here in the light of a piece by Peter A. Corning—"The Re-emergence of 'Emergence': A venerable Concept in Search of a Theory," Complexity, 7, 6 (2002), pp. 18-30.


7. Mack Jones and Alex Willingham look at some of the problems that can arise here in, "The White Custodians of the Black Experience: A Reply to Rudwick and Meier," Social Science Quarterly, 51 (June 1970), pp. 31-36. For an earlier treatment of some of what is discussed in this paper, see, William M King, "Challenges Across the Curriculum: Broadening the Bases of How Knowledge is Produced," American Behavioral Scientist, 34, 2 (November/December 1990), pp. 165-180.

Biography: William M. King, whose doctorate in interdisciplinary social science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, is currently Professor of Afroamerican Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, the University of Colorado at Boulder where he has taught since 1972. He is the author of two books, Going to Meet a Man: Denver's Last legal Public Execution, 27 July 1886 and How to Write Research Papers: A Guide for the Insecure, and numerous book chapters, articles, essays, reviews, reports and other materials that have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and popular media. He is currently working on a history of Denver's black community while offering historically oriented topical courses on the Aframerican experience in the urban setting, schooling and education, science, technology and society, issues of citizenship, war, and peace. He is also working on a history of Ethnic Studies of which he has been a member since his arrival on campus. A member of the graduate faculty of The University of Colorado since 1974, he has supervised or served as a committee member for persons pursuing masters' theses and doctoral dissertations in history, the social sciences and education.