W. E. B. Du Bois and Caste Education: Racial Capitalist Schooling From Reconstruction to Jim Crow

• 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

There are two primary goals I take up in this paper. The first is to provide a historical and theoretical definition of caste education in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. In this sense the paper seeks to clarify the question of how caste research developed in Du Bois’s body of work on race and class relations in the U.S. and what it achieves as an analytic tool applied to the public school system. The second goal of the paper is to show how caste education is an evolutionary and adaptive system of social control—one related to other caste tools of control such as the prison industrial complex.

Racial capitalism offers unique strengths as a theoretical framework that guides my mode of inquiry. For instance, it differs from both classic Marxist analyses of schooling that focus on class antagonisms and the social reproduction of labor as the ultimate source of human oppression (Willis 1981; Bowles and Gintis 1977; Freire 2000; Allman 2001). A racial capitalist mode of inquiry also rejects common celebratory accounts of schools associated with the liberal tradition as equalizing and inherently democratic institutions (Cremin 1964; Darling-Hammond 2010). Instead racial capitalism emphasizes inquiry on how the production of racialized populations and competing labor groups have been one of the core goals of schooling in the U.S. throughout the institution’s history.

To articulate Du Bois’s analysis of caste education I draw upon his own body of work that extends from his early writings in the late 19th to the mid 20th century. Using Du Bois entire body of work as my source material, the paper traces (a) when the term caste education first appeared in Du Bois’s research and (b) how it evolved as an analytic tool for understanding schooling in racial capitalist society. In this sense, my paper is a genealogical study of the concept in Du Bois writings on education, race, and capitalism in the U.S.

In our current neoliberal context where schools are being restructured for the further benefit of the “1%”, the role schooling plays in maintaining wealth and racial inequalities is placed in a larger historical context (Kochhar, Fry, and Taylor 2011). My paper ultimately suggests that to understand the root causes of the neoliberal restructuring of education we need to see how the privatization of public education is just another phase in a historical process of caste education Du Bois identified almost a century ago.

Finally, this paper addresses a major gap in the critical foundations of education literature that has largely ignored Du Bois beyond his well-known Souls of Black Folk. Building on the work of Du Bois scholars in education (Alridge 2008; Rabaka 2007; 2008), this paper’s focus on developing caste education as a mode of critical analysis advances this area of scholarship by not only putting Du Bois at the center but also by offering an underutilized analytic tool developed by perhaps the greatest researcher on education, race, and class of the 20th century.

Author

• Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah