"I Thought Pocahontas Was a Movie" : Perspectives on Race/Culture in Education and Service Professions

The editors and authors would like to thank the organizers and sponsors of that conference, which proved to be a fertile seedbed for the growth and development of this collection of essays. [...] We appreciate the sponsorship of the conference and subsequent financial support provided by the Centre for Social Justice and A nti- Oppressive Education located in the Faculty of Education at the University of. [...] One of the purposes of “cultural sensitivity training” is to familiarize one group of people about the “other” by disseminating information that the dominant group is assumed not to know about the cultural traits of “minorities.” Depending on the profession, educational training has consisted of particular sets of “cultural competencies” that attend to client diversity in curricula, communication [...] In the national narrative, where hegemonic inequalities are part of the social fabric, raising the topic of funda- mental social inequality is taken as a sign of overreacting, and is further evidence of not understanding how “things are done.” The persistence of a cultural cure is grounded, therefore, in the assumption that professionals don’t need to change because difference (the problem) reside [...] Outlining the history of the relationship of each of these institutions with the University of Regina, Dupré, following Bourdieu (2001), sees examples of the commodification of di- versity that has led to the reproduction of social discrimination.