Chapter 10: “Pie π in the Sky”: Imaginative Possibilities to Foster Diverse Diversities in Primary School Mathematics

Diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmonious ensemble of benign cultural spheres is a conservative and liberal model of multiculturalism that … when we try to make culture an undisturbed space of harmony and agreement where social relations exist within cultural forms of uninterrupted accords, we subscribe to a form of social amnesia in which we forget that all knowledge is forged in histories that are played out in the field of social antagonisms.

—McLaren (in bell hooks, 1994, p. 31)

Privilege works in a peculiarly seductive way in relation to whiteness, which is seen to be rooted in a whole range of things other than ethnic difference and skin colour.