6.

The curriculum should be structured to give greater emphasis to the cultures and views of non-dominant groups. One of the consequences of the fact that the dominant culture tends to naturalize social relations is that cultural critics who wish to arrive at a more objective understanding of society will need to give members of marginalized groups a disproportionate share of “air time.” This will be for epistemic, more than ethical, reasons. The point here is not to “compensate” those who have been previously denied a place in the conversation, but rather to facilitate the emergence of alternative perspectives and accounts. We need to remember that in order to maintain its hegemony, the culture of power must make its dominance appear natural—must convince everyone that what is, is what should be. This is why the alternative perspectives of members of subordinated cultures within a larger society will have the potential to teach all of us more about the relations of power in a society than the perspectives of the members of the dominant culture in that same society.

[28] I should emphasize that I am affirming the value of alternative perspectives, not simply the views of members of racial minority groups whose perspectives reflect that of the dominant culture.

Just as John Wills argues that white students, as well as students of color, need a truly multiperspectival, multicultural historical education in order to be able to construct a “usable past,” I am arguing that culturally dominant, as well as culturally non-dominant, people need to pay close attention to the views and perspectives of those persons who are marginalized within society. Because the marginalized person's condition of subordination will be at odds with her human need and capacity for self-determination,

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she will be the one most likely to encounter the contradictions inherent in a social formation that claims to extend to all its members the promise of equality even as it keeps some persons in subordination to others. How well she understands those contradictions will depend on the theoretical framework she employs. But, as I have argued thus far, experiences of oppression create the necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for the achievement of an epistemically privileged position. Therefore, to the extent that we are interested in working for a better world, we will pay particular attention to the experiences of people from subordinated cultures. We will understand the value their alternative perspectives and accounts can have for revealing the deep economic, social, and political structures of the society within which they are subordinated.

Moreover, inasmuch as we understand cultures to be fields of moral inquiry, we will see subordinated cultures as containing a potential resource of alternative ways of living in and relating to the world. But because those cultures are by definition subordinated, we will not “naturally” learn about them through the normal channels of cultural transmission. Therefore, we will have to work harder if we want to understand their ways of knowing and being. We will, in other words, have to pay more attention and spend more time learning about them than we will have to spend on the dominant culture, precisely because we are not constantly exposed to subordinated cultures through the everyday ideological state and social apparatuses.