"It Was Never Ours": Neoliberal Paternalism, Black Youth, and Reclaiming Community-Based Educational Spaces

• In Event: 68.053 - Neoliberalism in Black Education: Research, Reform, Reproduction, and Resistance

Abstract

Despite the huge range and capacity of community-based educational spaces, the current political climate of education, neoliberal restructuring and the overall marketization of education has left community-based youth organizations vulnerable in many of the same ways as public schools (Baldridge, 2014; Lipman, 2011). Neoliberalism and its ties to racism, capitalism, individualism, and patriarchy continues to position community-based afterschool programs as spaces of containment, control, and paternalism for Black youth (Kwon, 2013). Community-based educational spaces are usually peripheral to broader educational discourse, yet these programs are also informed by broader neoliberal education reforms and ideologies about race, gender, class, and power (Baldridge; 2014; Gilmore, 2007; Kwon, 2013). Drawing on ethnographic research with 20 youth workers at a college completion and youth development community-based program serving Black youth in the urban Northeast, this paper carefully examines the deep challenges youth workers encounter as they work under broader neoliberal economic and educational reforms informing the experiences of Black youth within a community-based education program.
This paper explores the transformation of an afterschool-community-based organization situated in the current neoliberal education policy context. Findings show how youth workers assist Black youth in navigating inflexible educational and social policies, negotiating conflicting academic expectations, and traversing through arduous school and neighborhood obstacles while undergoing intense organizational transformation that drastically shifted the racial makeup of program leadership and organizational culture. Findings also demonstrate how youth workers fiercely protected the asset-rich framing of Black youth as a critical dimension of their work with young people, and how this was severely jeopardized amid rapid turnover of key positions in the organization. Findings show that a once vibrant Black-led organization rooted in critical pedagogical practices shifted to a more corporatized model of education thus mirroring the market-based approaches to public education. Fueled by neoliberal restructuring and neoliberal paternalism, a hyper focus on expansion, building “character,” and capitalizing on tropes of poverty rooted in notions of deficiency became the new focus of the organization. This paper will illuminate the narratives of youth workers who attempted to reject these changes to ensure broad educational experiences for Black youth participants, while also trying to maintain the integrity of their counter-hegemonic pedagogical practices. The perspectives and experiences of youth workers shared in this paper will shed light on problematic narratives rooted in neoliberal ideologies that seems to not only reframe how we construct Black youth, but the tangible ways they can and do destroy Black-led organizations engaging Black youth.

Author

• Bianca Jontae Baldridge, University of Wisconsin - Madison