Toward a Race Radical Mode of Study in This Era of Racial Capitalism

• In Event: Marxism, Race, and Capital in the 21st Century

Abstract

In this paper, I think through Anyon’s (1997, 2005, 2014) “mode of study” (Meyerhoff, 2019) as an instance of Marxist educational research, and draw on examples from previous research on education policy and urban development in cities in the U.S. northeast, to take up long standing critiques of how race and structural racism are situated within Marxist modes of study. Specifically, I argue that Anyon contended with race in a way that overemphasized racial outcomes and ignored racial production. In order to more fully understand and combat urban educational injustice I propose a race radical mode of study that attends to the ways the twined forces of capitalism and structural racism, or racial capitalism, shape urban educational ecosystems.

Author

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College