The Violence of Compassion: Education Reform, Race, and Neoliberalism's Elite Rationale

• In Event: 42.027 - Neoliberal Racism as Educational Policy

Abstract

This paper explores the racial-ideological roots of neoliberal “compassion” as expressed in contemporary educational philanthropy and reform. I argue that the rationale that backs elite reform is grounded in an implicit belief in the virtue of privilege, a belief that is explicit in the writings of F.A. Hayek (1944/2007, 1960/2011), whose work has served as an important theoretical foundation for neoliberalism. For Hayek, privilege and inequality are necessary to enable material and cultural progress; I argue that this assumption covertly grounds contemporary top-down educational reforms. At the same time, neoliberal educational philanthropy and reform also take place in a specific racial frame, as White elite reformers remake conditions on the ground for students, parents, and communities of color. Drawing on contemporary Afro-pessimist scholarship (Mbembe, 2003; Wilderson, 2010) and especially the work of Saidiya Hartman (1997), the paper shows that the racist underpinnings of neoliberal “compassion” repeat long-standing patterns of paternalism and erasure. From this perspective, the material and symbolic imposition that occurs through processes of choice, chartering, and accountability has to be understood within the long history of White efforts to narrate, organize and appropriate the experiences of people of color. The center of the paper is a consideration of key moments in the neoliberal reorganization of schooling in Newark, New Orleans, and Chicago, in which the structure of elite authority and “neoliberal care” is exposed.

Across these cases, I consider the process of undemocratic planning by elites outside of any consultation with local communities, the subversion or rewriting by reformers of rules for school governance, and the framing of the assault on community schools as a process of redevelopment benefitting all constituents. Others have documented this history in detail (Buras, 2011; Dixson, Buras, & Jeffers, 2015; Lipman, 2011; Russakoff, 2015); however, my focus is on an ideological and epistemological analysis of the structure of White elite authority that these moments expose. Through an examination of these cases, I show that the contradiction between the putative focus on improving educational conditions and the process of antidemocratic appropriation that reforms in fact enact can be made sense of with reference to Hayek’s defense of the value of privilege, which he argues bestows on elites the right and duty to experiment with social conditions; this argument operates as an implicit and explicit rationale within contemporary neoliberalism’s “good works.” At the same time, Hartman’s framework for analyzing the structure of racism within historical gestures of White empathy toward Black people allows us to understand the aura and excitement of contemporary reforms from the perspective of White elites. Within this symbolic “economy of racism” (Brown & De Lissovoy, 2011), the circulation of representations of Black and Brown beneficiaries serves ultimately to exalt White elites and to prove the virtue of their initiatives. The paper aims to map this terrain toward a fuller understanding of the complex structure of this elite rationale; this can allow us to imagine more informed, pointed, and powerful responses in the context of struggles against neoliberalism.

Author

• Noah De Lissovoy, The University of Texas - Austin