One of the most pressing challenges facing educators in the U.S. is the specter of an “ethnic and cultural war”—a code phrase that engenders our society’s licentiousness toward racism. In Dancing with Bigotry, Donaldo Macedo and Lilia I. Bartolomé use examples from the mass media, popular culture, and politics to illustrate the larger situations facing educators and how this type of argument is ignored in much of the academic research and rhetoric. They also examine why it is essential to take on the sources of “mass public education.”
By shunning the mass media, educators are missing the obvious—more public education is done by the media than by teachers, professors, or anyone else. What this book does is move past the white liberal axiomatic panacea to “racial problems” through paternalistic “tolerance”—which presupposes that those who are tolerated are ontologically morally repugnant and need to be reformed—by placing them within the proper category of colonizer/colonized antagonism.
