Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon Walk into an Incubator: The Masters Forge New Tools

• In Event: The Master’s Tools: Innovation, Interruption, and Regeneration as Technologies of Whiteness

Abstract

Despite the appearance of incrementalism, liberal techno-politics can be found to have revolutionary ambitions. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the state of Louisiana took control of nearly all of New Orleans public schools with the intention of converting them to privately managed charter schools – an unprecedented and radical experiment that has been posed as an international model. Soon after, more than 7,000 teachers and school employees of the Orleans Parish schools were terminated, the largest subset of them black women, often referred to by New Orleanians as “the backbone of the Black middle class”. Working under the belief that an injection of fresh “talent and human capital” was necessary, charter school networks partnered with non-profits, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and politicians to recruit thousands of college seniors and young professionals from all over the United States to become teachers. Over the next decade, a district teaching force which was over 80% African American and local became almost fifty percent white and largely without historical ties to New Orleans. This paper examines how, recently, liberal Silicon Valley oriented education entrepreneurs in New Orleans have engaged with and appropriated the works of leftist and revolutionary political traditions as they seek to reinvigorate a flagging reform project. When a supporter of charter schools can cite both Walter Rodney and John Walton in a speech, without any self-conscious dissonance, it forces us to reckon with the ways that radical traditions can be domesticated and forged into new sets of master’s tools by “innovators”.

Author

• Christien Tompkins, Rutgers University New Brunswick