After the Crash: Moving from a Discourse of Deficit to a Discourse of Potential‪.‬

We enter movie theaters or push play on our movie viewing equipment, with an anticipation of fulfillment, pleasure, sadness, laughter, or any combination of expectations that we perceive will be gained from glaring at a screen of colors and depictions for approximately two hours. Many movies guide us through scripts that represent our realities and/or encompass our promised futures. C.L.R. James noted that "American popular cultural texts--popular film, popular music, soap operas, comic strips, and detective novels--offered sharper intellectual lines of insight into the contradictions and tensions of modern life in postindustrial society than the entire corpus of academic work in the social sciences" (as cited in McCarthy et al., 2004, p.164). One movie recently released not only captures our social reality and brings to the surface those ideas, conceptions, and acts we often dismiss, but it also parallels our discourse of deficit and the ongoing human crashes occurring between differing races, differing expectations, and differing ideals. These crashes create ongoing struggles and inevitable conflict. It is now our responsibility as critical thinkers and democratic citizens to recognize the social and educational crashes that occur every day. We must then step forward to analyze the discourse of deficit under which our society operates and discover ways to model a discourse of possibility and potential. Finally, all unique human beings should work together to build a community of virtue that echoes through educational systems and society alike.