Represent or Resist?: Uncovering the Complexity of Black Education Politics in the Urban South

• In Event: Racial Capitalism Perspectives on Educational Inequality

Abstract

Overview
This paper examines Black intra-racial politics in relation to the 21st century education reforms in Memphis, Tennessee, a southern city replicating the New Orleans post-Katrina education model of state takeover of local public schools and charter school expansion. This qualitative case study traces reforms from the enactment of the state charter law in 2002 to the 2020-2024 dismantling of the state takeover agency in the global pandemic and its aftermath. Drawing from interviews, observations, and document analysis, this paper attends to the ideological diversity of Black actors within the case, contributing to our understanding of how post-civil rights political economic restructuring shifts the axis of Black intra-racial politics more broadly.

Theoretical Framework
This study integrates conceptual insights from racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000) to examine how race, space, and capital shape present-day Black politics in education policy. Racial capitalism foregrounds racism as a structuring logic of capitalism (Robinson, 2000); racial difference and hierarchies are deployed to advance the accumulation of surplus of profit and power (Pulido, 2017). I frame charters in relation to neoliberal political economic restructuring, and trace how they unfold through a racialization of local space over time. I trace the tensions within Black participant responses to an educational policy agenda shaped by capital’s imperatives. While scholars traced radical critique and politics flowing from Black people’s collective struggle against capitalism (Kelley, 2002; Robinson, 2000), the complexity of Black politics requires attention to the limits of assumed racial unity (Cohen, 1999; Collins, 2004; Manning, 1983; Shabazz, 2015; Spence, 2015). Present-day Black politics must be situated in a historical trajectory of divergences in Black political responses to racial domination (Dawson & Francis, 2016). I attend to critical cleavages of Black politics shaped “as and with” an educational agenda underwritten by racial capitalism.

Methods and Data
This paper presents findings from a case study tracing the trajectory of education reforms from 2002 to 2024 in Memphis, Tennessee, that include three years of observations, 40 semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. This in-depth analysis, drawing from multiple data sources within the boundaries of a case allows the researcher to explore processes and mechanisms that generate conceptual insights beyond the specific case (Small, 2009).

Findings and Significance
Findings reveal the dynamics and strategies of increased Black representation within market governance alongside policy alternatives flowing from Black education leaders and community members. I unpack the critical tensions around the meaning of Black education by illuminating how its aims are inextricably linked to different responses to structures of racial capitalism, including how Black liberation is imagined and how it might be secured by participants. Even as Black participation within market-based reforms was qualified and with an analysis of inequality grounded in history, place, and economic justice, findings show the limitations of representation and surface alternative starting places to consider possibilities of education policy that address the inequalities in Black communities that racial capitalism requires and sustains. This study contributes to scholarship that attends to various strategies and contradictions of Black education politics (Arena, 2023; Todd-Breland, 2018).

Author

• Rachel E. Williams, University of Wisconsin - Madison