"Despite the Odds": Unpacking Black Tax Neoliberalism and Making Space for Black Vulnerability

• In Event: 68.053 - Neoliberalism in Black Education: Research, Reform, Reproduction, and Resistance

Abstract

The idea that blacks are especially fit to endure trauma has encroached on the politics of urban education. This paper investigates the relationship between what I have termed, black tax neoliberalism (BTN), in contemporary research and policy discourse, and how youth themselves are impacted by this pervasive discourse. Despite the well documented and unaddressed “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006), black students are expected to overcome structurally inequitable odds to succeed in urban schooling contexts. Overcoming or enduring inequality in education has been normalized for black children in particular, and attached to a capitalist sense of morality. This “black tax” of academic achievement valorizes the archetype of black students climbing structural hurdles to achieve academic success. Research on black youth from the late 1960’s into the present reveals a pattern of attempts to respond to more dehumanizing scholarly characterizations from the past with more humanizing and contextualized narratives (Moynihan, 1965; Ogbu, 1987). The most current iteration of research on and about black students coincides with a larger neoliberal shift in public discourse and politics centering the black tax. This shift champions the resolve of black students to withstand inequality to achieve academically, oftentimes without challenging the naturalness of structural inequality or acknowledging the impact that it has on black students (McGee & Stovall, 2015). Working with young people in youth participatory action research, I notice a similar reliance on black tax neoliberalism in reference to the state of black Americans in the U.S. or blacks in their community.
This paper asks: What impact does the black tax have on academically successful black students? To what extent do urban black students themselves rely on black tax neoliberal discourses in their evaluation of black Americans and their own black community? To answer these questions, I put forward the theory of black tax neoliberalism and highlight its prominence in contemporary politics of education. Next, I trace the advent of BTN in education research, identifying trends over the past 60 years in the language used to talk about urban black youth, and responses to those trends that led to the present discourse. I then present the results of my qualitative study of a group of academically successful black students involved in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) group that I facilitated. In the end, I offer recommendations for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to move beyond validating the black tax and begin to challenge structural inequality in the communities and schools in which black students live and learn.

Author

• Kevin Lowell Clay, Rutgers University