School Closings: Racial Capitalism, State Violence, and Resistance

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: What's Race Got to Do With It: How Market-Based School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality

Abstract

Theoretical framework:
This paper sheds light on one of the most devastating neoliberal education reforms: school closings. The author’s analysis situates neoliberal education policy in the political economy and ideologies of racial capitalism (Brewer, 2012) and, in particular, the current logics of austerity and Black disposability (Pulido. 2016). Drawing on Melamed’s (2015) framing of the "state-finance-racial violence nexus," the paper argues that closing schools to facilitate privatization and gentrification exemplifies the inter-relationship of neoliberal governance and racist violence. Illuminating a key moment in the education struggle in Chicago--a hunger strike by 12 Balck parents and their supporters for a neighborhood high school shaped by the community--the paper situates resistance to these reforms in Black self-determination.

Methods and data:
The paper is based on the author’s 20 years of qualitative ethnographic research and activism in Chicago, and in particular her participation in the support committee for the Dyett Hunger strike. Deeply engaged in schools and the social movements she writes about, the author’s epistemology is rooted in Haraway’s (1988) concept of “situated knowledges”: a feminist research paradigm that argues researchers’ embodied experiences and “partial perspective promises objective vision” (p. 582) and knowledge that is rooted in and serves movements for social justice (Hale, 2008).

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions
The author argues school closings are a form of racist state violence that enables capital accumulation and intensifies state abandonment of communities of color (Gilmore, 2008), particularly working class Black communities. The paper draws attention to not only the pain and suffering experienced by caregivers and young people when their schools are closed, but also their hopes and desires for something different. She extends this point with the example of the Dyett hunger strike in Chicago in 2015, led by Black parents, to reopen and transform their closed public high school. Their visionary proposal for a community-rooted high school focused on "environmental sustainability and leadership for peace and justice" was rooted in Black self-determination and the accumulated wisdom of parents and youth and community organizing. The author presents the conflict over Dyett High School as a window on the social and political dynamics and possibilities of struggles over school closings in the U.S. today.

Chicago has been a laboratory for neoliberal education policy and for resistance to it. Chicago is also an exemplary of neoliberaul urban restructuring in which the workings of racial capitalism are experienced spatially and corporally, particularly on Black community spaces and Black bodies. But the dialectics of this moment when resistance takes the form of struggles for self-determination and revisioning the racial capitalist social order are much less explored. The example of Chicago and the Dyett hunger strike illustrates this dialectic suggesting a framework for examining this process in other contexts.

Author

• Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago