Presidential Invited Session: Learning from Black Lives Matter: Racial Capitalism and Reparative Justice in Comparative and International Education

Group Submission Type: Presidential Invited Sessions

Proposal

This group panel emerges from the work undertaken for a Special Issue in Comparative Education Review on Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice (published November 2022). BLM calls us to pay deeper attention to state violence, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and abolition in our frames of analysis within educational research and practice. Here we focus specifically on the injustices of racial capitalism in education systems and what this raises for a reconstructive project of reparations in education.

Theories of racial capitalism track how the enduring dispossession and dehumanization of Black people under colonialism and slavery have been fundamental to the extraction and exploitation required by capitalist accumulation. Work in this vein sees colonialism and capitalism as entwined rather than distinct projects, with racial domination as their constitutive mode of operation (Ince 2018). Even within the field of comparative and international education which has seen a burgeoning critical literature on the marketization of education and on the pernicious effects of neoliberalism across the world, there has been insufficient attention to the specific ways in which the political economies of the global education “industry” are deeply racialized (Gerrard et al. 2022).

Panellists in this session discuss the implications of understanding racial capitalism not as a form or variant of capitalism, as is often assumed, but rather as “all of capitalism”, as critical geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore contends. In Histories of Racial Capitalism, Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy build on Cedric Robinson’s theorizations of racial capitalism to identify racial capitalism as “the process by which the key dynamics of capitalism–accumulation/dispossession, credit/debt, production/surplus, capitalist/worker, developed/underdeveloped, contract/coercion, and others–become articulated through race. In other words, capital has not historically accumulated without previously existing relations of racial inequality” (Jenkins and Leroy, 2021: 3).

How might this lens recast how we understand the foundations and workings of educational systems, within and across contexts? What models of justice does such a lens therefore demand? Taking up both these questions, the panel offers empirical insights into operations of racial capitalism in school systems as well as reflects on the possibilities for reparative models of justice in education, including models of economic justice and material reparations: the redistribution of educational resources or opportunities where these have been hoarded or withheld; the creation of educational systems that refuse political economies of educational exclusion and social closure; and the restitution of resources, including land and labour, that have been exploited in past and present systems of education. The panel argues that BLM has offered renewed coordinates for global struggles against the injustices of racial capitalism in education which CIE can no longer ignore.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Sharon Walker, University of Bristol

Individual Presentations

• Racial capitalism and reparative justice in education - Arathi Sriprakash, University of Bristol

• Reparative Visions for Black Lives: Racial Capitalism and Reparations in the Movement - Krystal Strong, Rutgers University

• Shareholder Schools: Racial Capitalism, Policy Borrowing, and Market-Based Education Reform in Cape Town, South Africa - Amelia Simone Herbert, Rutgers University - Newark

• Schooling as Plantation: Racial Capitalism and Plantation Legacies in Corporatized Education Reform in Liberia - Tyler J Hook, University of Wisconsin-Madison