Blended Analysis: Akili Academy, Sylvia Wynter, and Critical Race Theory

• In Event: 41.061 - "There Can Never Really Be Justice on Stolen Land": A Discussion for Emerging Scholars

Abstract

Akili Academy is one of three charter schools operated by Crescent City Charter schools in New Orleans. According to 2014-2015 statewide discipline rates, Akili Academy suspended more than 110 of its 412 students amounting to a 23% suspension rate (Louisiana Department of Education, 2015). In comparison, Jefferson Parish School system, Louisiana’s largest school district, suspended only 12.1% of its 48,835 students (Jefferson, 2016). As of October 2013, Akili Academy’s student body consisted of 95.9% African American students while the leadership of the school consists of a nearly all white staff (LA School Finder, 2013). Demographics and suspension rates alone do not tell the entire story. When situated in the racialized neoliberal market based context specific to New Orleans, these factors warrant an investigation of the school's’ policies and how they perpetuate - even generate - life altering colonial structures in the lives of the black parents and students that attend that school. With the purpose of interrupting neoliberal colorblind and post racial discourse, this paper discusses Akili Academy’s suspension policy and how it serves as contemporary iteration of racialized communication and thought processes that enabled Europeans constructed to colonize and then ideologically order the races in the 15th century. More specifically, this paper utilizes a blended Wynterian and Critical Race Theory framework to analyze the suspension policy listed in the 2015-2016 Family Handbook produced by Akili Academy of New Orleans.
In so doing, the author uses Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, 1988) to discuss how Akili Academy’s suspension policy serves as an evolved, contemporary, U.S. specific example of old European racialized colonial ideologies (Wynter, 1995). More specifically, this paper attempts to theoretically capture how race works as an ideology behind Akili Academy’s suspension policy– how it organizes black parents lives in ways that are antithetical to the well being of their families. Blended analysis allows us to further Wynter’s (1995) work and theorize about how race as an ideological hegemonic force leads people to codify schools’ institutional actions in ways that reify historically varying modes of truth that are simultaneously are harmful for people of color. In this way, this paper seeks to discover the mechanisms behind how people grasp, codify and enact these colonial and racist narratives in curriculum, school policy, and practice with such automaticity.

Author

• Sarah Ishmael, The University of Texas - Austin