ften, the word activism conjures up the image of what the media and others call “radicals,” such as inflamed Mexican American college students, for example, who are passion- ate and emotional, demanding an imme- diate end to racism on their college campus. Another image may be the twenty-second news sound bite of angry women in white T-shirts who travel from all over the country to the U.S. Capitol to express their frustration with the current policies on drunk driving. Another image is of protesters at World Trade Organization meetings express- ing their disapproval of further expan- sion of global markets. Some castigate activist participants as immature and unsophisticated, whereas others des- cribe their actions as repugnant and counterproductive to democracy and the “American way of life.” My point is that activism has been stereotyped, and par- ticipants can be portrayed as “ignorant” by way of various code words. James S. Leming (2003), in “Ignorant Activists: Social Change, ‘Higher Order Thinking,’ and the Failure of Social Studies” in Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? (WDSSGW), implies that activism and activists of the “radical” type are ignorant. In this article, I argue that physical activism is stereotyped precisely as radical and passionate, rather than logical, progressive, and rational, because people who are less privileged by the system have tradition- ally engaged in such practices (Urrieta 2004a). Often, more physical forms of expression are some of the few resources that the activists have avail- able for making their voices heard. In this essay, I question what activism means as a practice for social change or, in the case of conservatives, as an agent to maintain or strengthen the current cultural hegemony of the United States. I argue that those whom more pro- gressive people in our society call “con- servative” or “right wing” are very much activists fighting to support their own agendas within a system that allows them to appear neutral, logical, progressive, and rational. WDSSGW is an activist project based on irrational and shortsighted, but deeply ingrained, ideologies of cultural domination that attempt to maintain and reinvigorate a system of cultural hegemony, in this case by means of the social studies cur- riculum. In a rapidly changing multicul- tural society such as ours, such activist incursions must be critiqued and ques- tioned for their legitimacy, because, although they appear to be neutral and, to some, rational, they may lead to fur- ther division and inequality and serve to reinforce cultural domination. Activism What is activism? Broadly defined, activism is the active participation, in various ways, of people advocating a particular set of issues. The image that activism conjures up is not that of men and women in business attire working out of a think tank in Austin, Texas, or Chicago, Illinois—most often, the image is of young people shouting at police officers in full riot gear. What has our media culture done to mediate this image of activists? The media are not neutral. For the last twenty-five years, there has been a strong movement among conservative activists to redress the gains of the civil rights movements and other more pro- gressive accomplishments. That the media portray what some people refer to as “leftover hippies” in a negative way is not a coincidence. What is often overlooked when dis- cussing issues of activism is that mem- The Social Studies of Domination: Cultural Hegemony and Ignorant Activism LUIS URRIETA JR. LUIS URRIETA JR. is an assistant profes- sor in Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of California at Davis. THE SOCIAL STUDIES SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 189 O