Saving "Uneducated Delinquents," Pacifying Radical Urban Youth: The Settler Colonial and Racial Capitalist Underpinnings of Civic and Character Education

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Race and Human Rights in Contemporary Education

Abstract

This paper builds on the work of Damien Sojoyner (2016) who critiques common school-to-prison pipeline narratives by arguing that public education protects and advances the U.S. prison regime by historically operating as a “mechanism of ideological enclosure”. This paper therefore examines common discourses surrounding the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—the first federal education reform that passed as part of Johnson’s War on Poverty efforts—and key anti-crime initiatives passed throughout Johnson’s administration, to argue that the ESEA functioned as a political instrument that discursively buttressed two key features of white settler state formation and racial capitalist arrangements: the expansion of both the prison and military industrial complexes.

Author

• Anita Juarez, University of Utah