Urban Students' Critical Race-Class Narratives of School Policing

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

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the critical race-class narratives of students as they speak about their experiences of schooling, the labor market, and policing in and out of school. I borrow the term raceclass from Leonardo (2013) in order to highlight the ways students’ narratives help to elucidate the lived experience of racism, the political economy, and the relationship between the two. This analysis, thus, contributes to an integrated theory of race and political economy in educational practice and research.

My analysis draws from a larger ethnographic study of school policing and data from student interviews. I contend that the students’ narratives serve as counter-stories (Solorzano and Yasso, 2002) to dominant discourses and mainstream education research that often frame the gross inequality of resources and opportunities as an “achievement gap” and schooling as a vehicle for social mobility without fully accounting for the economic devastation of ghettoized spaces caused by neoliberal capitalism and the urban school’s role in the penal management of youth of color.

I illustrate how students provided an integrated critical race-class analysis through the use of a collective frame and spatial terms. Common phrases, such as, “Where we live… you know, the ghetto…” worked simultaneously as race and class markers as they narrated their experiences seeking employment, struggling to find meaning in their classes, navigating excessive policing in and out of schools, and making connections between these experiences. I analyze the students’ narratives by setting them in conversation with studies in the Black radical tradition that explore the historical links between racialized ghettoization and the ghetto as both an economic institution and one of racial suppression (Hirsch, 2009; Muhammad, 2010; Robinson, 1983).

The critical research on school policing is often informed by Marxist theory. In particular, much of it falls in the tradition of Jean Anyon’s Ghetto Schooling (1997), which was seminal in highlighting the importance of the political economic context of urban schooling. However, I argue that the study of school policing requires us to go beyond Marxist political economy in order to conceptualize race as a mutually determinative “master category” that profoundly shapes the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States (Omi and Winant, 2014). As such, I contend that a critical study of school policing can provide an important starting point for extending Marxist educational theory because, along with the clear political economic underpinnings of discipline, it is impossible to ignore the significance of school policing in the current racial project.

Additionally, this analysis contributes to the recent critical literature on school discipline (for example: Sojoyner, 2013), which offers rich theoretical analyses primarily informed by race theory while also accounting for the impact of neoliberal political economy. Unlike other recent analyses, however, this paper considers race and political economy as mutually determinative by focusing on the lived realities of the local political economy of ghettoized communities.

Author

• Kathleen M. Nolan, Princeton University