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Introduction: “Official Perspective” and the Two Senses of Justice

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Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy

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Abstract

This Introduction chronicles the development of the author’s research examining intersections between literacy and race in U.S.-Dakota War commemorative events that unfolded in southern Minnesota around the war’s 2012 sesquicentennial. Discussion includes the author’s involvement as participant-observer in a local college course that designed a traveling museum exhibit on the 1862 war. Based on his applied work, the author identifies competing senses of justice driving regional commemoration: (a) critical social justice which seeks educative redress and material reparations for ongoing injustices shaped by regional settler colonialism and (b) white justice as fairness which compels citizen-scholars to suspend moral judgment when making collective sense of the racially violent past. Theorizing the two senses of justice helps contextualize teaching-and-learning moments analyzed in the book’s chapters where instructors and students negotiated choices between critical social justice and white justice as fairness, invoking racialized dilemmas rooted in regional and personal white identity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Studies, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Mankato, MN, USA

    Rick Lybeck

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  1. Rick Lybeck
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Correspondence to Rick Lybeck .

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Lybeck, R. (2020). Introduction: “Official Perspective” and the Two Senses of Justice. In: Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62486-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62486-6_1

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