Education by Movement: School Restructuring, Racial Capitalism, and the Black Radical Tradition in Rural Detroit

• In Event: Toward an Anti-Imperial Thought in Education: Pedagogy, Methodology, and Struggle for a World Anew

Abstract

Public education has undergone a complete makeover, with working-class communities across urban and rural spaces having to continuously bear the brunt of change. While contemporary research has rightfully focused on and identified how neoliberal era reforms have deepened structural inequality in these spaces, what has been mostly overlooked is how the historical formation of restructuring public education is deeply connected to the global economic crisis of racial capitalism. The purpose of this paper is to examine this history of public school restructuring to broaden our understanding of the impetus of and lasting impacts on racially marginalized spaces. Theoretically rooted in WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983), the author asks how can Black critique of political economy transform how we understand and respond to the structural, symbolic, and actual violence associated with the educational displacement and dispossession of Black children and youth that occurs due to public school restructuring?

Using Black archival practice (Sutherland & Collier, 2022), the author recovers from local newspapers and community archives rural Black working-class consciousness. From the critical discourses of a Black rural community’s organizing located in the archive, the author traces thematically Black radical thought and practice of Black auto-union workers, farmers, elders, and mothers that disrupted and responded to oppressive educational reforms in post-war Metropolitan Detroit. Drawing from this evidence, the author contends that state-sectioned school reorganization—in the forms of school closures and consolidation—reproduce race and class inequality through the logics of colonial racial capitalism. Connecting these logics to school reform reveal how the political economic ideologies of the northern industrial regional bloc has helped to engender the conditions of displacement and dispossession, spatially and bodily, here in the states and around the globe. Yet, this Black rural community worked to develop cooperative and critical pedagogies to respond to what one community member called “the annexation of their school district.” Their efforts support the educational experience of rural Black children and youth who have had to engage in forced and agentic geographic moves to attend school.

The radical critiques of empire, capitalism, race, class, and education that emerge from this study make a significant contribution to the field of critical education. One, it focuses on the lived experiences and perspectives of Black people from rural spaces rather than the urban spaces.
This rewrites how researchers and educational organizations view place-based impacts of educational reform. Two, this study centers migration and movement rather than segregation and integration. Studies about racial oppression at the intersection of education tend to analyze inequality through a lens of inclusivity and division. This framework ignores how much quality of life and social status is determined by our capacity to move freely across social and geographic borders. Given this, the author aims to take seriously how the logics of our global systems shape local educational lives and the freedom of movement.

Author

• Ezekiel Joubert, California State University - Los Angeles