Mainstream education contributes to systemic violence and Black Radical Tradition can provide a starting point for analysis of the effects of racial capitalism

Policy, power, and the dialectics of domination The inequitable effects of mainstream education policy and practice are wellknown: inadequate provision of resources and opportunities to low-income students and students of color, disparate access to higher education by race and SES, disproportional effects on students of color of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, accelerating resegregation of public schools (including new forms of within-school segregation), and impoverishment of curriculum and assessment in schools serving working-class communities as a result of managerialist accountability initiatives and instrumentalist literacy regimes. In addition, research increasingly shows the collaboration of dominant educational policy with regressive public policy more generally, including in housing and urban planning (where the state-aided process of gentrification has been helped along by school reorganization) (Lipman 2004), regressive tax structures (Anyon 2005), and the neoliberal dismantling or privatization of public services generally, evident in the movements toward choice and corporatization of schools (Saltman 2005). Starting from an historical context in which white students and students of color already have access to very different networks of economic and social capital, these initiatives exacerbate existing inequalities and press the educational system into persistent crisis. The social-reproductive effect of these disparities, with regard to SES, is welldocumented and widely recognized. In addition, the argument that hegemonic policy frameworks and reforms have been systematically racist in their effects on students should now hardly be controversial. Progressive sociology of education (e.g. Noguera 2003), liberal policy research (e.g. Orfield 2000), and critical analyses of schooling (e.g. Apple 1999) have shown that no coherent account of education can be offered that does not centrally consider the importance of race and racism (within an understanding of the constructedness of racial categories); not to mention that by now extensive scholarship in education starting from critical race theory recognizes racism as a preeminent, persistent, and formative reality in school and society (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Solórzano and Delgado Bernal 2001; Yosso 2005). Furthermore, quite sensitive analyses have emerged of the systematic interactions between race and class experiences as they are influenced by school organization and administration – both in the construction of student identity (Bettie 2003; Valenzuela 1999) as well as in the larger framing of the meaning of school and popular culture (McCarthy 1998). Nevertheless, even such progressive and critical analyses have failed to adequately theorize the force and sense of power as it works through education policy and practice. On the one hand, educational research has often been captured by the reifications themselves of race and class as transparent and distinct social categories, and has then organized its analyses on the basis of an allegiance to one or the other (as can be seen for instance in the argument between CRT and Marxist perspectives). On the other hand, critical analysis from all of these perspectives has been held hostage to a conceptual model that understands education policy as the transparent effect of a process of accumulation (of wealth or privilege) by elites. Two important aspects of power are overlooked as a result. First, this model misses the way that race and class oppression do not so much overlap or intersect, but are rather identified within a more basic logic that produces each of them, as we have argued above. Second, power in this context cannot be understood merely as a monopoly on resources or control, but has to be recognized as a more fundamental process of domination – a drive that precedes and organizes familiar identities and social categories. In this way, in contrast to the arguments of familiar critical analyses, the active violence and ‘unspeakable terror’ (Harris 1999) that runs through the history of racism is not merely an instrument for shoring up hegemony, but represents as well the actual purpose and goal of power. This more fundamental logic and drive remain elusive for analyses that take given social classes and categories for granted, and which understand education policy solely as a sphere of contention between them. In this connection, Zeus Leonardo’s work makes an important contribution in undertaking a reexamination of race and racism in education that draws from Marxist and other class theories (Leonardo 2007, 2009). Leonardo’s work has helped to advance important insights about the complex dialectics of race and class within educational discourse. His work has specifically called for an examination of race questions that explores how ‘race is a structural formation [that] maintains an interdependent, codetermined and heterogeneous relationship to the economy and other social relations’ (Leonardo 2004, 404). His work on the theorizing of race, while drawing from a number of thinkers and ideas, suggests at its core that the theorization of race and educational policy must account for ideological, material and personal experiences related to race (Leonardo 2004, 2007, 2009). So in advancing a social theory of race, schooling and educational policy, Leonardo posits that race questions be understood through their structural and material meanings and in this project makes use of Marxist and capital theories. Leonardo’s work has been instrumental in helping to set in motion a needed critical discussion about the manner in which race and class analysis can help make sense of long standing educational problems. There are however, some key distinctions between Leonardo’s work and our own project. The first has to do with how we approach the dialectical relationship between race and class. Leonardo’s work tends to focus more on specific theories and theorists, and consistently refers to the ‘marriage’ or ‘synthesis’ of race critique with non-reductionist Marxist work. Our project, by contrast, is less concerned with the marriage or synthesis of race and class theories and more with how theoretically we are to understand the complex dialectic of race and class within the logic of capital as a whole. In other words, what does it mean theoretically to engage the dialectical unity of race and class, and what does this look like when offering critical analysis of educational policy? Another key distinction from Leonardo’s work is that we situate the intellectual history of theorizing the dialectic of race and class within the tradition of Black radical thinkers who understood the dialectical unity of race and class within the logic of capital. While critical theory, critical social thought, and critical pedagogy all help to provide useful nuances to the analysis of the relationship between race and class, we have found that the foundational theoretical insights, thoughts, questions and ideas from the Black radical tradition have provided particularly relevant and cogent theoretical arguments concerning the link between race and class. It is from this history that we have been able to theorize the notion of ‘economies of racism’, which we have developed in this paper.