An Apartheid of Knowledge in Academia: The Struggle Over the "Legitimate" Knowledge of Faculty of Color

Abstract

The University as an institution is a key arena where "legitimate" knowledge is established. While discourses of power may have qualities of constraint and repression, they are not, nor have they ever been, uncontested. Indeed, the process of determining what is "legitimate knowledge" and for what purpose that knowledge should be produced is a political debate that rages in the University. Our presence, as working-class people of color (especially women of color), in an institution which values itself on its elitist criteria for admission, forces the debates and challenges previously sacred canons of objective truth.…It is probably for this reason that our presence here is so complex--and so important (Córdova, 1998, p. 18).