Retheorizing Black Educational Life: Confronting the Hidden Curriculum of Racial Capitalism in the Neoliberal University (U.S.)

• In Event: Echoes Across Place and Space: Blackness, Diasporic Violence, and the University: Exploring the Black Experience in the University From an African Diasporic View and Connection

Abstract

Much of educational research about and for Black people in university settings focuses on the disposability and dispossession of Black students and faculty. This characterization reinforces responses that too often pathologize and individualize their experience rather than address the institutional structures and practices in which the inequalities are rooted. Drawing from critical educational scholarship and Black studies, this critical narrative study proposes that universities conceal epistemic, structural, and actual violence entrenched within and enacted by the neoliberal state’s curriculum of racial capitalism. Using narrative inquiry, the author examines how together the preference for positivist research practices that essentialize and naturalize human behavior, the competitive nature of foundation grant funding, and the marketization of identity-based oppression–all strategies for containing radical anti-racist organizing and activism– are covers for the ways in which universities participate in the exploitation and expropriation of Black land and life in the U.S. and globally. For instance, universities make significant financial gains by engaging in nonprofit, military and prison industrial complexes. Theorizing the totality of Black educational life, the struggle and resistance within the complexities and contradictions of the neoliberal University reveal important implications for creating structures and practices that are liberatory and that reclaim Black educational futurity.

Author

• Ezekiel Joubert, California State University - Los Angeles