The Classificatory Technology of Liberal Schooling: Socializing Racialized Youth Into the Relations of Coloniality

• In Event: 29.023 - (De)Colonial Research: Space, Place, Memory, and Bodies in Un"settling" Narratives of Educational Opportunity

Abstract

In this paper I question the legitimacy of liberal approaches to addressing both local and national educational problems despite their popularity as the “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971) responses to conservative and neoliberal educational policies and practices. Rather, I point to the inherently violent outcomes of educational policy and practice that stem from liberal thought by drawing upon political theory, decolonial theory, and linguistic anthropology in order to describe the social processes through which its exploitative hierarchies are maintained. Through incorporating personal testimonios (Anzaldúa, 1987; Latina Feminist Group, 2001), I connect broad, historical social processes and relationships to local, specific spaces and bodies in order to illustrate the ways that I have witnessed and experienced liberal modernity’s creation of useful subjects. Building upon the work of Macpherson (1964) I examine the necessarily exploitative relationships that lay the foundation between modernity and modern subjects and coloniality and those subjected by it. In doing so, I point to the ways that social hierarchies are perpetually reified by American schooling, even when influenced and shaped by liberal thought aimed at addressing “educational inequalities” and “lack of educational opportunity.” Additionally, I discuss the ideological component of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson, 1964) in schooling as it is manifested in its systematic scarcity and competition. In the second section, I present the concept of social disciplining in order to describe how particular bodies, locales, and knowledges are made useful within liberal modernity’s systems of exploitation. Social disciplining is comprised of a system of social processes that classify and compel subjects into specific locations within global and local social hierarchies based on local and global conceptions of rationality that are (re)created with changes in modernity’s narrative of itself. I draw upon Smith’s (1999) discussion of Foucault’s (1977) spatial disciplining as both literal and metaphorical means of locating particular bodies for particular uses whether classified as a modern subject, an object of coloniality, or tenuously in between. To address the more complex classifications of subjectivity that have evolved due to the outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement, I engage the work of Bauman and Briggs (2003), and in particular, how the reading and performativity of verbal and corporeal indexical signs serve classificatory functions while social actors appear to retain impartiality. Additionally, I discuss how meta-discursive processes function to obfuscate the origins of social success and failure and how their interrelationships with spatial disciplining and the reading of indexical signs together serve to discipline youth into and out of modern subjectivity for the use and continuity of liberal modernity. Both theoretical and practical efforts to address educational inequities in the United States must turn away from liberal solutions, as they can never achieve social equality, let alone equity, because their logics inherently (re)create social hierarchies rather than deconstruct them. Attempts to ameliorate these processes will therefore necessarily fall short, as American schooling’s liberal foundations require a complete uprooting in order for educational spaces to realize social, racial, and economic justice rather than justification for existing hierarchies.

Author

• Theresa Burruel Stone, University of California - Berkeley