Rick Lybeck - Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy: The US-Dakota War Re-Examined

Rick Lybeck

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy

The US-Dakota War Re-Examined

1st ed. 2020

Logo of the publisher

This book takes up the recent call to clearly explicate the ways in which public pedagogies actually work. Lybeck provides a clear analysis of how White public pedagogies operate by presenting excellent data, including observations in classrooms, interviews with students, letters to the editor, public speeches, and more, to show how particular White points of view come to be seen as natural and normal, and how they continue to perpetuate systems of White privilege.

Jennifer A. Sandlin, Professor, Department of Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Transformation, Arizona State University, USA

Rick Lybecks book about the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862 and the ways the event has been effaced by a rhetoric of fairness to both sides vividly reminds us that justice is an action that rights a wrong and thus requires a moral judgment. The lesson is as timely today as it has ever been.

James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Literacy Studies and Regents Professor, Arizona State University, USA

How does one develop an appropriate and effective pedagogy of the privileged, one that would educate white American students into recognizing their countrys white-supremacist history and motivating them to help bring about a racially just nation in the future? Lybecks detailed and compelling account of his efforts to challenge conventional Minnesota white-settler framings of the 1862 US-Dakota War provides both a sobering realization of the multiple obstacles to such an undertaking and a valuable and inspirational guidebook, nonetheless, from which educators across the country can learn and continue striving for that laudable goal.

Charles Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), USA

This is a painful, brilliant account of yet another ugly chapter in the history of the American genocidal treatment of Native Americans. Lybecks critical pedagogy calls for a critique of the practices that keep the violent past alive. A must read.

Norman K. Denzin, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Research Professor Emeritus of Media and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois, USA

Lybecks grain of sand is a short, month-long college course on the US-Dakota War of 1862. And he helps us see the world in itincluding how, in classroom and white-settler public pedagogies, the war against Indigenous peoples continues under the banners of neutrality, objectivity, fairness, and balance. Lybecks book is startling for its intellectual and moral clarity. Please read it.

Timothy J. Lensmire, Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Minnesota, USA, and author of White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America (2017)

In a moment when the defense of white supremacy and the attack on teaching truths about injustices and anti-oppressive struggle are blatant and vicious, it might be easy to overlook the subtle, everyday, normalized ways that those happen, both in and out of educational institutions. Lybeck brilliantly and lucidly connects the dots between history, rhetoric, and curriculum as he traces the entrenchment of American nationalism in the genocide of indigenous peoples and the legacy of such contingent identify politics in contemporary debates. It is difficult to imagine a more timely and important intervention than this book as it illuminates the insidious ways that appropriating the commonsensical lexicon of democracy and justice gives force to the public pedagogy of whiteness.

Kevin Kumashiro, author of Surrendered: Why Progressives are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education (2020)