Repressing Radical Potentiality: How the Work of W. E .B. Du Bois Can Help Us Understand Urban Schooling in the 21st Century

• In Event: 60.042 - W. E. B. Du Bois and Caste Education: Racial Capitalist Schooling and Caste Formation From Jim Crow to Neoliberal Reconstruction

Abstract

This paper seeks to highlight the usefulness of Du Bois’ work to the existing literature of educational theory by approaching his theoretical insights as necessary backdrops to conversations on US urban schooling in the 21st century—particularly in terms of exploring how the schooling system deliberately works to repress radical potential and subjugate liberation efforts within historically marginalized communities. Employing Black Marxism as a theoretical framework and mode of inquiry will facilitate a sounder analysis of the ways in which policing and surveillance techniques target urban spaces/communities with the specific economic and sociopolitical task of perpetuating racial domination. Moreover, it allows for the positioning of radical modes of resistance as constant threats to the hegemonic order. Black Marxism is a dialectical analysis developed by Cedric Robinson (2000) to 1.) trace the European roots of capitalism and accordingly frame it as a system that is intimately tied to a US racial regime, and to 2.) illuminate the historical, political, and philosophical contributions made by Black radical politics.

Du Bois’s writings produced a “complex hybrid of different philosophical views that included Afro-centric, Marxist, black nationalist, pragmatist, and progressive views” (Alridge, 1999). His body of work describes a clear understanding of capitalism as a system of exploitation that thrives on the accumulation of capital worldwide via US imperialism. However, he understood capitalism as a racialized process that manifests itself throughout the globe while automatically positioning white bodies as its beneficiaries. For instance, in Dusk of Dawn Du Bois (2009b) explored the relationship between the ideological/material realities of white superiority and the relations between working-class whites and the black labor force within and outside the US. Du Bois maintained that the US relied on a racial caste system that relegated Blacks to the margins of society by privileging and centering the economic, political, and social needs of whites. This caste system advanced racial stratification to maintain unequal power relations and manifested itself through various institutions, such as the public school system. To better examine the ways in which schools intentionally contain and politically discipline, this paper will point to policies, statistics, and public debates unfolding within the present neoliberal era.

Regarding the current state of public education within the US, scholars have developed assessments that explicitly identify and contest the ways in which neoliberal schooling continually agitates preexisting inequalities along race, class, and gender differences (Brown, 2007; Buras, 2007; Giroux, 2007; Lipman, 2002; Saltman, 2005). Rarely are neoliberal policies and reforms situated within a historical framework of white supremacist domination. In light of recent neoliberal developments and the regularity of narratives that disseminate the idea of a romanticized pre-neoliberal past, my paper suggests that Du Bois’ writings—especially his conceptualization of a racial caste education—reveal the white supremacist roots of schooling in the US. This paper thus argues that we must move towards dismantling the normalcy of confining the ‘crisis of education’ to a struggle against neoliberal privatization and instead expose the complex dynamics between schooling and racial political domination.

Author

• Anita Juarez, University of Utah