https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2053-1269
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Abstract
In 1933 Carter G. Woodson wrote the Miseducation of the Negro, an essential—yet often overlooked—text in educational studies. In the text, Woodson documents the pervasive and subtle inequities that saturate schooling for Black people. Over 80 years later the enumerated issues Woodson discussed remain and are reflective of and contributory to what Gloria Ladson-Billings has termed the “education debt.” This conceptual article aims to trace why efforts to address racial and social inequality in education remain on the hydraulics of elusiveness. In doing so, I argue that a central issue debilitating transformative educational justice initiatives for Black people is what I term “educational parasitism.” Educational parasitism is a form of racial capitalism that “funds” and supports the larger body of white supremacy by dispossessing and “eating away” at Blackness. As such, educational parasitism is a mechanism of profit accumulation, power solidification, and ontological sustenance for whites; overall, it is a necropolicy that looms in the shadow of stated reform aims. While the phenomenon of educational parasitism is longstanding, I center neoliberal reform efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans to illustrate this phenomenon. Most specifically, I focus on the dispossession of Black educators to illuminate educational parasitism. Analytically, I draw from Black Studies and Critical Race Theory to frame and situate the analysis. Lastly, I end with meditations and implications for practice, theory, and research.
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Notes
1 The notion of the body politic has a long history within Western political philosophy. For deeper interrogation and explanation of the concept see the work of Thomas Hobbes, Kenneth Olwig, and Patricia L. MacKinnon. The idea, at base, uses the imagery of the human body to conceive of the state, kingdom, or society writ large with for instance the head of state represented by the “head” of the body. More generally and in more recent time, one can think of the notion of the body politic as the collective individuals under a nation/polity/authority. When I write of the “larger body [politic] of white supremacy,” I am thinking about a collective in concert with the white supremacy of a state. I am also gesturing to the notion of a body in the fullest sense of the word, both as in the collective work, as in a body of work (i.e., what are the collective works of white supremacy?), as well as body as in the physical/ corporeal sense (i.e., bodies who are raced as white). This aligns with Mills (Citation1997) conceptualization of the racial contract, which serves are a rejoinder to western social contract theory that works from an ideal of racelessness, but in fact is grounded in very real, material raced realities. If the social contract is key to the body politic and state craft, then an approach that understands the centrality of race and racism must be present. The racial body politic acknowledges the role of race, power, and differing collectives within a state. It also understands the state as having white racial interests and most explicitly understands those interests as parasitic towards Blackness. As such, one is better able to make sense of the anti-Blackness of the state or as Samudzi and Anderson (Citation2018) succinctly note, “Blackness is the anti-state just as the state is anti-Black” (p. 112).
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Kevin Lawrence Henry
Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on the politics of education, with a particular emphasis on anti-Blackness in market-based educational policy and practice.