His concepts of “transformative” and “social action” for “integrative education” in my view are significant for interpreting and understanding how social strategies for overcoming racism among Brazilian urban Amerindians may be applied to “multicultural education practices”.
Dr. J. P. Linstroth is a Social Science teacher at Royal Palm Beach High School (RPBHS), where he teaches Advanced Placement (AP) World History, Honors World History, and Regular World History. He obtained a D.Phil. (PhD) in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford and is an Adjunct Professor at Barry University and Faculty Member at the Catholic University of New Spain (UCNE). His books include: Marching Against Gender Practice: Political Imaginings in the Basqueland (2015, Lexington Books) and: The Forgotten Shore (Poetic Matrix Press, 2017). Linstroth was a signatory of the Brussels Declaration for Peace to end ETA violence (2010). He was a co-recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Grant (2005-2007) to study immigrant populations: Cubans, Haitians, and Guatemalan-Mayan immigrants in South Florida. He was awarded a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholar Grant (2008-2009) to study urban Amerindians in Manaus, Brazil and to be a Visiting Professor at the Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM). In 2017, he was awarded a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award. Linstroth is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Peace Research Association Foundation (IPRAF). In 2019, he received a medal as a “Gentleman of Merit” and was inducted into La Noble Compañia de Bernardo de Galvez (The Noble Order of Bernardo de Galvez). In addition to many academic articles, he writes “opinion editorials” or “Op-Eds” in many newspapers and online news sources, including CounterPunch, Des Moine Register, Euroscientist, L.A. Progressive, PeaceVoice, The Houston Chronicle, and Londonderry Sentinel. His academic research interests are cognition, ethno-nationalism, gender, genocide, history, immigrant advocacy, indigeneity, indigenous politics, indigenous rights, love, memory, minority rights, peace, peace-building, racism, social justice, and trauma.
How Urban Amerindian Strategies to Overcome Racism may be Useful for Transformative Education
In 2009 with a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholar Award, I conducted anthropological and ethnographic research among 8 unique “urban Amerindian” peoples (Apurinã, Kambeba, Kokama, Munduruku, Mura, Sateré-Mawé, Tikuna, and Tukano) in the city of Manaus, Brazil. Among these Native peoples, I learned about their social strategies for overcoming “racism” in a city of almost 2 million where the majority were considered to be “white” (brancos) or mixed indigenous and European descent (Caboclos). In “multicultural education” one of the prevailing theorists is James Banks (1999). His concepts of “transformative” and “social action” for “integrative education” in my view are significant for interpreting and understanding how social strategies for overcoming racism among Brazilian urban Amerindians may be applied to “multicultural education practices”. Notably, what is popularly being labeled, “celebrating differences”, among minorities. For the purposes of this paper, my interpretation of how Brazilian Native peoples cope with white majorities may be transferred to a general educational setting outside of Brazil to the United States public school setting. By examining Banks’ “transformative educational strategies”, whereby students are enabled to view concepts, issues, and events from their own socio-cultural lenses, allow for a so-called “celebration of their ethnicities”, and in doing so, transform the classroom setting into a multicultural atmosphere of diverse and tolerant knowledge. Taking “transformative education” to the next level, students who have been taught in such a “transformative educational atmosphere”, may be able to proceed on to “social actions” beyond the classroom from such knowledge skills. In this manner, we may also understand such transformative processes as Foucauldian, after Michel Foucault (1980), wherein “knowledge is power”, and social strategies may help to transform society and minorities through education about successful social strategies of overcoming racism such as those among Brazilian urban Amerindians. The point is anthropologically learning by example from other cultures and transferring such foreign examples to classrooms in the United States. As such, while minorities in the United States tend to be either African-American, Hispanic-American, or Asian-American, and less so Native Americans, nonetheless, Brazilian Native strategies for overcoming differences are instructive and useful as transformative skills and as social catalysts for further social action within educational settings and beyond.
