Reducing Hate Through Multicultural Education and Transformation

By:
Festus E. Obiakor, Sunny Educational Consulting

Published 2023

Reducing Hate through Multicultural Education and Transformation is a book that reminds us that we live in a complex world; and at micro and macro levels, the demography is changing and people are worried about the current state of affairs, their future, and the future of their children. At local, national, and global levels, there appears to be unsteadiness, crises, and struggles in our economies, politics, and societies. Disruptions, disasters, and deaths are visible at all spectra of our lives; and our leaders seem unready, unwilling, underprepared, and unprepared to bring us together to solve our problems for the common good. Even when we make efforts to respond to human differences and multicultural valuing, they seem to be half-baked cakes that are unready for consumption; and there continues to be visible hateful actions that devastate our sacred existence. While these hateful actions have filtered into our families, schools, communities, nation, and world, we pretend to solve them by engaging in phony community relations, fraudulent multiculturalism, and unreasonable “wokeness” to masquerade our inefficiency, inflexibility, prejudice, and jaundiced views.

Reducing Hate through Multicultural Education and Transformation provides cutting edge solutions for innovative educators and leaders. Yes, hate is a controversial construct that is rarely researched, studied, and discussed in education. The reason is that teachers and related professionals are supposedly very liberal people who cannot hate their culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students, parents, and colleagues. And, the lingering question is, can a teacher who is always liberal be also hateful? This question seems legitimate; and, to answer it, we must look deeper into traditional presumptions. The reality is that White educators and professionals who dominate the educational profession are human-beings who live in their respective White dominated communities. As a result, they teach or lead people who they do not know very well. If not, why should CLD individuals continue to experience hateful misidentifications, misassessments, miscategorizations, misplacements, and misinstructions in school programs? And, why should disproportionate placements of CLD learners with special education needs, gifts and talents, and emotional/behavioral problems continue to be burning issues in education? This book provides outside-the-box solutions!

CONTENTS
Foreword, Carlos R. McCray. Preface. CHAPTER 1: Understanding Hate and Its Impact on the Education of Multicultural Learners. CHAPTER 2: Multicultural Shifts in Paradigm and Power to Reduce Hate. CHAPTER 3: Beyond Multicultural “Wokeness” in Tackling Hate: The Need for Real “Goats” in Education. CHAPTER 4: Thinking Outside-the-Box to Reduce Hate and Boost Multicultural Changes. CHAPTER 5: Making Assessment Relevant and Hate-Free to Multicultural Learners. CHAPTER 6: The Church as a Tool to Reduce Hate and Maximize the Potential of Multicultural Learners. CHAPTER 7: “Life is in the Ears:” What Multicultural Learners Should Hear from Educators to Reduce Hate. CHAPTER 8: “On Our Blindness:” How What Multicultural Students See Can Reduce Hate in Education. CHAPTER 9: Making “Caring” an Educational Reality Beyond Multicultural Tolerance to Tackle Hate. CHAPTER 10: Eradicating the “Poverty of the Teaching Spirit” to Reduce Hate and Inspire Multicultural Learners. CHAPTER 11: What the Mouth Says Matters in Education: Reducing Hate by Motivating Multicultural Learners. Afterword, Floyd Beachum. References. About the Author.