Caste Education and Population Racism: A Du Boisean Analysis of Neoliberal Data Economies

• In Event: 42.027 - Neoliberal Racism as Educational Policy

Abstract

As W.E.B. Du Bois and now more recently Michelle Alexander (2012) has shown in her study of the criminal justice system in the U.S., the caste system of control in the U.S. is extremely adept at recalibrating itself in ways that maintain and preserve the goals of racial capitalist society. With this in mind, my paper asks this question: if Du Bois theorized the caste education system during the Jim Crow era, how do we apply a caste schooling analysis in our current neoliberal moment (Pierce, 2016)? This is an especially important question given that national reform policies such as Race to the Top and now the ESSA Act frame the problem of racial and economic equity as ones best managed through strategic investment plans lead by private enterprises and state partnerships interested in implementing new market driven approaches for disciplining students, teachers, and communities through high stakes accountability measurement systems and the expansion of the charter school system (Au & Ferrare, 2015). To begin to sketch out what caste education looks like today within the horizon of neoliberal educational restructuring in the U.S. I focus on illuminating new caste technologies such as value added metrics (VAM’s) and school rating systems which I argue reveal some of the most damaging “virtual bars and virtual walls” of caste education within neoliberal society (Alexander 2012).

One of the most important features of caste education Du Bois’s work elucidates is the racial state’s power to regulate populations through caste technologies that produce value differences of social life between white and nonwhite groups and individuals (Du Bois, 1935; Pierce, 2016). Given this core feature of caste education I focus in this paper on one of the most important caste technologies currently constructing value forms of social life associated with neoliberal governing strategies of education. Assigning value to life in the educational population of the U.S. now, however, looks different than it did in the Reconstruction-Jim Crow era. Just as the caste system of control had to adapt to the new conditions of racial capitalism after the end of legal slavery by developing a segregated school system, in the neoliberal era of schooling race, gender, sexuality and class differences are erased in the pure state of equality created in the illusory pretext of the free market; we need to identify and examine the new caste technologies schools utilize to produce and assign value to population segments. In doing so I suggest that we need to understand these new caste technologies within the framework of what Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse have called “population racism” (2011). In particular I use the example of value-added metrics (VAM) to illustrate how caste education in the neoliberal period represents most clearly how population racism works and racial capitalist schooling is maintained.

Author

• Clayton Todd Pierce, University of Utah