Justifying School Inequality: Anti-Black Imaginaries and the Cultural Political Economy of Urban Education

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

Abstract

While some previous periods were relatively more conducive to advancing the interest of racial equity, what we witness now is a neoliberal project fully capable of absorbing multicultural ideals (Melamed, 2009), a hegemonic postracial or “colorblind” discourse (Bonilla-Silva, 2014) and an arguably more exasperated and emboldened antipathy to blackness (Norton & Sommers, 2011). In this cultural-political context, there is a fierce defense of white racial advantage, even with the acknowledgement that white advantage results in greater economic inequality and even further entrenched racial advantage. Almost inevitably, part of this discourse is a move to implicate Black children and families in their own poor educational opportunities and outcomes, culpable in contributing not only to their own academic failures, but also in somehow reducing the prestige and value of schools and classrooms in which they are present.


In my analysis here, I am moved by Bob Jessop’s (2010) notion of “economic imaginaries,” which he defines as “semiotic system[s] which gives meaning and shape to the economic field.” Put another way, such imaginaries “frame individual subjects’ lived experience of an inordinately complex world, and/or inform collective calculation about that world” (p. 344). In cultural political economy, analysis of economic imaginaries “calls for a shift from a mainly semiotic analysis of individual text or discursive genres to a concern with the semiotic and extra-semiotic mechanisms that together shape the variation, selection, and retention of particular imaginaries in a continuing dialectic of path-dependent path-shaping” (p. 340, italics added).

Drawing on theorization of antiblackness (Hartman, 1997; King, 2014; Sexton, 2009; Wilderson, 2010), I contend that, in the US, the justification of educational (and more broadly, economic) inequality is about defending white entitlement to material advantage, an entitlement to always win. And, as I shall argue, this entitlement can only be imagined within a social reality in which Black people have lost, and continue to lose. Finally, I explore some implications of operationalizing antiblackness, and more specifically, an understanding of antiblackness as economic imaginary, in further scholarship in the cultural political economy of urban education.

My argument is that the cultural political economy of urban education in the United States—but certainly, other places as well—is heavily informed by the cultural politics of race. We certainly understand that race shapes so much of the social imagination, and it is no surprise then, that racial cultural-ideological formations impact the distribution of education resources. Thus, it is no longer enough to merely catalogue these inequities or call for greater equity; we must recognize that some racial inequities are perceived as natural, inevitable, even desirable. Rich explanation of educational inequality requires a simultaneous, precise and synthesized analysis of the relationship between cultural and political-economic forces, and then, within that analysis, a close reading of how the public imagination of race—the story constructed largely by and through white supremacy—determines, in a very material sense, who receives education resources and who does not.

Author

• Michael J. Dumas, University of California - Berkeley