Learn So You Can Earn: Job Corps and the Racialization of 1960s Human Capital Discourses

• In Event: Co-Opting Justice: How Neoliberalism Profits From Race in Educational Reform Projects

Abstract

Current educational debates overwhelmingly highlight the value of schooling based on its economic benefit for students, and particularly low-income youth of color. However, why this assumption has become common sense and how it closely aligns with the racialization of urban poverty is often left unexamined. Researching 1960s origins of the Job Corps can clarify these intersections, as the program marked the rise in national public anxiety over poor Black urban youth alongside the signature education-based War on Poverty programs to address the issue. The paper demonstrates that while policymakers and Black activists alike promoted employment and economic uplift, this consensus masked disagreements as to what would benefit urban Black communities that were fundamentally shaped by the interplay of broader postwar economic and political constraints.

Scholars traditionally draw on two narratives to explain the Job Corps rise. The first presents it as a liberal victory to technocratically solve social problems despite administrative rollout issues (Week, 1967; Levitan & Johnson, 1976) or institutional misalignment (Mangum, 1969; Sealander, 2003). While highlighting operational concerns, this narrative does not dispute that social problems could be addressed through well-structured social engineering. The second narrative partially critiques this assumption by examining the program’s relation to broader socioeconomic structures including changing job markets (Berg, 1971; Piven & Cloward, 1971) or social orders (Quadagno & Fobes, 1995). However, neither narrative adequately clarifies the interplay between the broader shifting political economy and the specific contestations over the Job Corps’ formation and purpose. In connecting the two, this paper situates the program’s early legacy within broader economic changes and social struggles that gave rise to new antipoverty reforms premised on novel “culture of poverty” discourses and neoliberal organizational arrangements that the Job Corps emblematized.

Utilizing an iterative method of writing alongside critical textual analysis of primary and secondary sources (U.S. Congressional Records; Office of Economic Opportunity program documents on Job Corps; Black periodical collections; and oral histories), this paper demonstrates two points. First, early Job Corp support from policymakers and Black activists was primarily framed as responding to the broader restructuring of the American political economy that disproportionately affected urban Black neighborhoods. Second, beyond the benefits of additional education and training offered to Black youth, policymakers successfully co-opted activist concerns. In doing so, the Job Corps operated within a culture of poverty framework that racially essentialized and exceptionalized poor Black communities through promotion of neoliberal ideological and organizational arrangements including privatizing of antipoverty programs and goals as well as legitimating human capital deficit discourses (lack of discipline, charm, etc.) as the primary issue facing unemployed Black men.

These findings are significant as they illuminate how the Job Corps heralded the current neoliberal policy environment that emphasizes education-based antipoverty reforms and discourses. The paper concludes by offering a potential alternative to economically and culturally integrate marginalized youth that does not reproduce and reaffirm the very ideological and structural inequities the original Job Corps claimed to target.

Author

• Kenzo K. Sung, Rowan University