Chapter 4: The Silences we Speak: Deliberative Pedagogies and the Whiteness of Civic Education

Best practices in civic education emphasize deliberative pedagogies as one of the most powerful ways to educate enlightened democratic citizens. Yet deliberative pedagogies are rooted in a white normative ideal of discursive democracy that, in the service of “civility” and “reasoned discourse,” fails to account for the social and political inequalities—the logic of white supremacy—that structures our civic context. In this chapter, I contrast the normative framework of deliberative civics with pedagogies of counternarration, which open up space for a more pragmatic, liberating, and racially conscious civic education. In doing so, I argue that dominant approaches to civic education, even those hailed as exemplars, can reinforce white supremacy if they perpetuate silence about the core inequalities that structure Western democracy.