Cultural Demerits: When Education Policy Reforms Co-opt Afrocentric Educational Practices

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 11. Race/Ethnicity, Schools, and Youth

Abstract

Through an ethnographic case study within one Afrocentric public charter school in the Mid-Atlantic from 2009-2011, I show how broader neoliberal reforms redefined blackness as poverty, danger, and failure through the co-optation of school-based practices. Using a Critical Race theoretical framework I argue that culturally focused programs, which explicitly aim to serve students of color, are vulnerable to failing their students because of the interests of the reform movements they are accountable to. These findings suggest that liberatory approaches to education are particularly vulnerable to marginalize the students they aim to serve.

Author

• Sarah Faude, Northeastern University