This article, based on an ethnographic study in a predominantly White working-class middle school in the South, critically examines why a literature-based multicultural curriculum failed to get "students to talk about racism." According to the author; attempts to implement a multicultural curriculum fail not because of unprepared, insincere, or insensitive teachers; rather; these efforts fail primarily because of dominant mainstream beliefs embedded in the institution of schooling and in the discourse of multiculturalism itself:
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