Learn, Baby, Learn: (Neo)Liberal War on Poverty, Racialization of Blackness, and the 1960s Rise of the Job Corps

• In Event: Confronting Neoliberal Education: Policy Reform, Institutional Negotiations, and Possibilities for Structural Change

Abstract

Objective

While educational and employment disparities continue to energize national debates over the past half-century, the formative linkage to the postwar shifts in the gendered racialization of poverty and political economy have not been clearly articulated. The 1960s Job Corps illuminates this intersection, as the program marked the rising concern over disillusioned poor black men. While policymakers and black activists alike promoted employment and economic uplift as the primary solution, this consensus masked deeper disagreements as to what would increase gainful employment in urban ghettos. This paper demonstrates how the Job Corp’s potential and limitations as an “education-based” antipoverty effort were fundamentally shaped by the interplay of broader economic and political shifts.

Background Framework

Scholars traditionally draw from two narratives to explain why the Job Corps gained currency in the 1960s. The first presents the program as a liberal state victory to technocratically solve social problems despite rollout problems (Week 1967; Levitan and Johnson 1976) or institutional misalignment (Mangum 1969, Sealander 2003). While highlighting operational concerns, this narrative does not dispute that social problems could ultimately be addressed through well-structured social engineering. The second narrative partially questions this assumption by examining the program’s relation to broader socio-economic structures including changing job markets (Berg 1971, Piven and Cloward 1971) or particular social orders (Quadagno and Fobes 1995).

However, neither narrative adequately outlines the interplay between broader socio-economic systems and the specific political contestations over the Job Corps’ formation. In connecting the two, this paper situates the program’s early legacy within broader economic changes and social struggles that gave rise to a new federal economic and educational reforms premised on novel “culture of poverty” ideologies and “neoliberal” organizational arrangements that the Job Corps emblematized.

Methodology and Data Sources

Paper sources include U.S. Congressional Record, National Archives Office of Economic Opportunity files, black periodical collections, and oral histories. Data analysis utilized an iterative process of writing alongside reviewing and coding of primary sources and secondary references.

Substantiated Conclusions and Significance

This paper demonstrates two points. First, policymakers and black activists’ early Job Corp support was primarily framed as a response to the broader economic restructuring of American farms and cities. Second, policymakers successfully co-opted activist concerns and ultimately promoted the program as a new apparatus to both appease and racially discipline black communities. In doing so, this history heralded ideological and organizational arrangements now characterized as “neoliberal” during the height of liberalism including business tax-breaks, privatizing of antipoverty programs, and institutionalizing “wedge” issues against labor unions.

These findings are significant because they highlight how the Job Corps operated within a “culture of poverty” framework that racially essentialized and exceptionalized black poverty through “neoliberal” arrangements. Furthermore, these findings are relevant today because they herald the current neoliberal policy environment in which education-based antipoverty reforms meant to culturally and economically integrate marginalized youth often do more to reproduce and reaffirm the very inequities they claim to target.

Author

• Kenzo K. Sung, Rowan University