Toward New Radical Possibilities: Confronting Urban Education as Racialized State Violence

• In Event: 34.036 - Ghetto Schooling 20 Years Later: New Directions in the Study of the Political Economy of Urban Education

Abstract

This paper draws inspiration from Jean Anyon’s (1997) insistence that reforming schools without transforming the political economy and social policies in which they are embedded is “like cleaning the air on one side of a screen door” and Jean’s determination to link education and urban social movements (2014). Jean explored the relationship of education to neoliberal economic and social policies that have redefined cities and intensified social and economic inequalities. This paper extends that analysis and builds on the author’s previous work, situating U.S. neoliberal urban education policy in the imbrication of neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy and the coercive neoliberal state.

Racialization is a key structural aspect of neoliberal capitalism (Camp, 2016), saturating education policies, discourses, and practices—just as Black communities’ struggle for racial justice is the leading edge of an emergent education movement (Journey for Justice, 2014).
Drawing on critical geography, urban studies, political economy, and critical theories of race, I argue that U.S. neoliberal education policies constitute racialized state violence, a specific strategy of the coercive neoliberal state to preserve racial capitalism (Camp, 2016). The “toxic mix of privatization, free market ideology, and a ‘punitive state’ come together in our schools” (Kelley, 2016) to reinforce the disposability of Black life and Black public space in service of capital accumulation.


My point of departure is Chicago where historical roots of these policies lie in the collusion of the state and capital for real estate profiteering through racial segregation and disinvestment in Black communities (Coates, 2014), policing the Black Belt (Shabazz, 2015), and the unfinished business of Chicago’s Black freedom movement (Danns, 2014). This history set the conditions to remake the city for capital accumulation, elite consumption and racial containment and exclusion (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) with education playing a constitutive role (Lipman, 2011). This takes us to the present conjectural moment, a nexus of capitalist crisis and racialized state violence and emergent racial justice struggles. This nexus illuminates the racially targeted austerity, privatization, and penality that define urban education policy and the organized collective resistance emerging now. I develop the argument through analysis of three critical “moments”: the historic closing of 50 Chicago public schools in 2013, a 34 day hunger strike to save and transform Dyett High School in the historic African American Bronzeville area in August 2015, and the April 1, 2016 “Day of Action for Economic and Racial Justice” by the Chicago Teachers Union and a coalition of community organizations, unions, student organizations, and organizations in the Black Lives Matter movement. These “moments” foreground the centrality of anti-Black state violence in neoliberal education policy as well as possibilities and complexities of new freedom dreams grounded in a materialist, anti-capitalist anti-racist politics (Camp; BYP100, nd).


My analysis is based on 15 years of ethnographic study and participation in education policy debates and grassroots movements in Chicago, including interviews with parents, teachers, and community members; observation of and participation in dozens of public meetings, organizing events, forums, and protests; and analysis of policy documents and public records.

Author

• Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago