Whiteness within education is parasitic upon Blackness for its own survival. Absent confronting this relationship, any attempt at progressivity is doomed to fail.

It is February 2021. I am writing this article while my mother is without electricity or water. She lives in Houston, TX, one of the most technologically advanced and diverse cities in the world. Her case is not singular; she is fortunate. I am grateful. Reports have documented the numerous individuals who have died over the course of several days due to the “winter storms” and infra- structural collapse that has been underwritten by capitalist greed. No water. No heat. No electricity. Limited food. Bone-chilling temperatures. People are suffering due to deregulation, privatization of the energy sector, and what could be understood as general legislative malprac- tice or a cavern of ethical emptiness. Black low- and no-income folks will most assuredly feel the brunt of this disaster, as have they with the environmental and political disasters in the United States that preceded (and continually haunt) this moment: COVID-19, police brutality, The Flint Water Crisis, Hurricane Katrina, the “War” on Drugs, Jim and Jane Crow segregation, kitchenettes, Rosewood, Tulsa, lynching, sharecropping, capture and enslavement, the spectacular and mundane forms of anti-Blackness. These examples index the ways Black people are terrorized and extracted from for the maintenance of racial capitalism and white supremacy. To say that Black people in the United States—and globally—are structurally vulnerable and experience suffering and premature state sanctioned death would be to utter an understatement (Dumas, 2014; Jones,

2001; Warren, 2018). Although the aforementioned examples are reflective of exogenous or out-of-school contexts, U.S. schools are cocooned by, created within, and cohere to these socio-political contexts. As a central institution of United States statecraft and a critical element in racial formation, U.S. schools, too, play a significant role in the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of structured vulnerabilities, racial stratification, and anti-Blackness (Dancy & Edwards, 2021; Givens, 2016; Henry, 2021b; Woodson, 1933). As early as 1848, educator Horace Mann suggested that education is the great equalizer. This narrative has continued to prevail in political, public, and popular discourse. While not having access to quality schooling certainly ever decreases one’s odds at “upward mobility” and “quality of life”—both spurious and unstable categories under regimes of anti-Blackness—schools, in fact, continue to perpetuate inequity. This inequity is often categorized around the “achievement gap.” Yet, scholars such as Ladson-Billings (2006), Carter and Welner (2013), and Douglass Horsford and Grosland (2013), have broadened our conceptualization of the gap, moving against deficit notions by not situating the imbalance or problem within the child, their family, or their communities, but rather by focusing on the racialized and classed contexts that animate and construct the “gap.” Ladson-Billings (2006) goes on to reframe the achievement gap by suggesting what we face is an education debt. In Ladson-Billings’ articulation, the education debt is accumulative and made up of the historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debts society owes Black people and children. These large-scale debts are emblematic of disinvestment and expose the faulty utility of seeing schools as the great equalizer.

The education debt and the opportunity gap help those committed to educational justice make sense of and reframe these recalcitrant inequities. One must acknowledge that despite these persistent gaps, Black educators have long worked to eliminate educational injustice and to pay down the education debt (Anderson, 1988; Foster, 1997; McKinney de Royston et al., 2021; Ross et al., 2016; Siddle Walker,2005). Despite these efforts, structural racism and white resistance has hindered progress with respect to Black children specifically and children of color writ large. This article aims to trace why efforts to address racial and social inequality in education remain on the hydraulics of elusiveness. It builds on scholarship that focuses on the education debt and opportunity gap, by exploring the nature of whiteness. 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.

For instance, punitive disciplinary practices can be an example of educational parasitism. The debasing, removal, and criminalizing of Black youth in schools “eats away” at the educational lives of Black students, while satisfying the desires of white supremacy. As such, educational parasitism is a mechanism of profit accumulation, power solidification, and ontological sustenance for whites; overall, it is a necro-policy that looms in the shadow of stated reform aims. While the phenomenon of educational parasitism is longstanding, I center neoliberal reform efforts to illustrate this phenomenon. Specifically, I discuss the dispossession of Black educators in post-Katrina New Orleans to ground this analysis. Moreover, this article joins the chorus of Black scholarship that challenges the white gaze in qualitative research, specifically, and in epistemology and knowledge production, generally. That is to say, this paper is interested in what the Black gaze and Black experience can tell us about research, education, power, whiteness, life, etc. Educational parasitism, as a theory, is informed by Black experience and Black study. As such, educational parasitism names the parasitic nature of whiteness and challenges western epistemologies that maintain power imbalances and white supremacy. At base, research—be it qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods—is shaped by the epistemological assumptions that undergird it.

Educational parasitism holds that research, policy, and social practice steeped in whiteness relies on the dispossession of Blackness; it needs Blackness for its survival. I begin this article by providing provisional comments on whiteness as parasitism before moving into a conversation on neoliberal educational reform approaches in post-Katrina New Orleans as an example of educational parasitism. I then provide a brief meditation on Black thought as an onto-epistemology that challenges the status quo and illuminates the subjection of Black people while working towards freedom.

Toward a theory of educational parasitism

The below French caricature from 1885 is in reference to the Berlin Conference, which was held in Germany from November 1884 to February 1885 (Figure 1) [[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]]. It depicts German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with knife in hand divvying up the continent of Africa for European consumption. The European men, representative of various countries or nation states, gaze upon in amazement, fawning as Bismarck slits what looks to be a cake into slices. While a cartoon, the image illustrates the spatial, structural, and socio-cultural realities associated with fourteen white nations deciding the fate of the African continent and her people. To be clear, no African representatives were invited to a conference about them, neither present to even discuss or defend their future. The leaders of the Berlin Conference were concerned about their own survival and sustenance. This image is an entryway to think about what Martiniquan writer, politician, and one of the founders of the Négritude Movement, Aimé Césaire (1972/2000) in his magisterial 1955 text, Discourse on Colonialism, states is the “appetite and force” of colonialism or more precisely whiteness and white dominance. Put differently, the delectable cake portrayed in the cartoon represents the political and ontological body of Blackness; the knife, the brute force that lacerates the Black body [politic], inflicting pain on the Black body at the hands of whiteness; and the white people who gleefully devour the Black body for a myriad number of “appetitical” reasons: sustenance, desire, gluttony, pleasure, power over. Whatever the reasons may be, I would submit this image represents the institutionalized hunger of whiteness and the socio-political consumption of Blackness (Woodard, 2014). The caricature opens this section as it helps to locate what I term, educational parasitism. I have alluded to this concept in previous work (Henry, 2016, 2019, 2021b), yet this article will provide a more thorough, yet provisional rendering of this concept. Simply put, educational parasitism is a form of racial capitalism that “funds” and supports the larger body [politic] of white supremacy by dispossessing and eating away at Blackness.1 Samudzi and Anderson (2018) argue the sacrifice of Blackness is a benefit to the state. They further argue it is critical to understand that it is upon the suffering of Black people that the state is constructed. The concept of educational parasitism captures, although metaphorically, what Black people have long understood: white people and the broader project of white dominance and supremacy need us for the cohering of a fabricated, normative white identity and attendant accumulations and distributions of power, prestige, and profit. Educational parasitism captures the psychic and material realities associated with whiteness. It is, as James Baldwin reminds us that, “what white people have to do is try and find out, in their own hearts, why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him” (Clark et al., 1963). Baldwin’s brief articulation of the construction of “the nigger” or “the Black” highlights the parasitic need for such an object/subject to be created and sustained within white imaginaries. Embedded within Baldwin’s remarks from a 1963 interview with Kenneth B. Clark is the powerful and violent reality of Black suffering, degradation, and exploitation. The debasing of Black humanity to the status of the “abject other” allows for otherwise absurd, inhumane, and barbaric practices to become normalized, taken-for-granted, every day, quotidian (Henry, 2016, 2021b; Mills, 1997).

More to the point, the extraction of resources, or what I’m framing as parasitism, from Black people is necessary for the acquisition of psychic, economic, and/or political power and comfort (Mills, 1997). Cedric Robinson (1983) in his comparative discussion of enslavement, notes the dependence on the enslaved in the colonies for the survival of various European monarchies. He remarks, “the slave…had become…an item of social dress and self presentation as well as the source of the energy [my emphasis] that produced the real wealth of the economy” (p. 150). Those enslaved Africans were the fodder for wealth accumulation. Dispossessed and extracted from, the enslaved Black person’s energy became consumed by the state and European enslavers. They were the economic and social lifeforce for whites. Similarly, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (2019) makes clear in her discussion of the United States context the link among the enslaving of Black people and white women’s participation in enslavement when she states, [f]or them [white women], slavery was their freedom. They created freedom for themselves by actively engaging and investing in the economy of slavery and keeping African Americans in captivity…slave ownership allowed southern women to mitigate some of the harshest elements of the common law regime as it operated in their daily lives. Women’s economic investments in slavery, especially when they used legal loopholes to circumvent legal constraints, allowed them to interact with the state and their communities differently (p. xvii).

I would categorize both Robinson’s and Jones-Rogers’ articulation of white enslavism as parasitic. For the white women enslaver, the negotiation and performance of her freedom was manifested in the abduction and enslavement of Black people. Through the subjection of Black people legally constituted as property, or anything but human, white women enslavers were able to find their political, economic, and social humanity in negating Black freedom and commandeering and constricting Black life. In Robinson’s articulation, we see the survival of various European states due to colonialism and enslavement. Moreover, in Robinson’s account, even the idea of “energy” can be understood via the notion of parasitism. The capitalist economic benefits of rendering and debasing Black people as nothing more than cargo on ships and property on plantations, instruments for the production and cultivation of cotton, tobacco, sugar, wealth, etc., propped and propelled the accumulation of wealth and power for white empires and individual whites, as well. Using Black people to satiate white appetites of and hungers for power is illustrative of the consumption and feasting on Blackness that I am suggesting is a constitutive element of the symbolic and structural order. The durability of the ontological and structural relationship of oppression among Blackness and whiteness persists due to the parasitic ideologies and political

and libidinal economies of whiteness and white dominance (Wilderson, 2010). Critically, this parasitic relationship has material consequences. Lipsitz (1998) in discussing his theory of the possessive investment in whiteness argues that he uses “the adjective possessive to stress the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our society…” (p. viii). If Lipsitz is correct, which I believe he is, taken to the logical extent, the possessive investment in whiteness hinges on the disinvestment in and feasting on Blackness. Taking for instance asset accumulation, one can think of housing and predatory lending. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2019) traces the morphic nature of racial capitalism from the exclusionary redlining that shaped housing practice and policy to what Taylor terms “predatory inclusion.” While redlining and other exclusionary housing practices helped to build the wealth of the white middle class, Black people were often denied loans and access to homeownership, thereby blocking wealth accumulation and housing stability and solidifying white psychic, economic, and political power. The state’s interest in investing or “funding” whiteness in the form of housing was buoyed by its disinterest in Black people. Black people were disinvested in and locked out of the national project of home ownership and faced “civic estrangement” (Tillet, 2012). Taylor (2019) furthers the conversation by discussing how Black inclusion was later possible, “but on predatory and exploitative terms”—predatory inclusion (p.18). Taylor notes that Black people fell victim to a predatory banking market that had little oversight and was deregulated. This market relied on “originating and maintenance fees and volume sales” to make their profit. More to the point, mortgage bankers speculated that Black prospective buyers in segregated and desperate circumstances would engage in more risky market actions. The white banking industry allowed for and created riskier market realities for Black people, all the while profiting off of Black people’s housing demise. Taylor (2019) states, “…mortgage banks and other lenders were able to parlay foreclosures into profits as the homes went back onto the market and the process was repeated over. and over again” (p.19). The point here is the consumptive practices of whiteness/white capital. While Black people experienced evictions, the pain from losing a home, and continued housing insecurity and instability from a rigged, unregulated market, white people experienced excessive profits and wealth accumulation. The exploitation and sacrifice of Black people lubricated the white housing market and fed the economic and social appetites of whiteness.

The endurance of parasitism

The metaphor of whiteness as parasitic helps us consider the long-standing relationship among whiteness as a political and ideological project committed to the socio-political consumption of Blackness. As Vincent Woodard (2014) illustrates in his groundbreaking text on human consumption and homoeroticism within U.S. slave culture, the idea of whites consuming Black people— both figuratively and literally—for power and position is protracted and the relationship central to the “consensual hallucination,” as Charles Mills (1997, p. 18) describes it, of whites engaging in white dominance and supremacy. Returning to a discussion of slavery, Woodard draws on sociologist Orlando Patterson’s (1982/2018) work by suggesting, According to Patterson, “the slave holder,” in order to maintain an image of himself as civilized and free of parasitic appetites, “camouflaged his dependence, his parasitism, by various ideological strategies. Paradoxically, he defined the slave as dependent. This is consistent with the human technique of camouflaging a relationship by defining it as the opposite of what it really is.” Parasite is the perfect concept for my purposes, as it implies a range of consumptive acts, some resulting in immediate death but most involving the passage of time and the incremental feeding upon the human host. (p. 6) Indeed, if we are continually haunted by the afterlife of slavery, as Hartman (2007) argues, the parasitism that found expanse in regimes of enslavism, so too remains and helps us to understand the protracted inequity that pervades schooling. As such, Black people remain the life force for a gluttonous white supremacy and it is upon anti-Blackness that whiteness depends. ross (2021) makes clear this relationship between anti-Blackness and enslavement when arguing, [a]nti-blackness indexes the structural reality that in the larger society, blackness is inextricably tied to slaveness. While this doesn’t mean that Black people are actually still enslaved by white slave masters, it does mean that slavery marks the ontological position of Black people—that the relation between humanity and blackness is an antagonism, is irreconcilable. (p. 8) For ross, the irreconcilable reality is the structural antagonism around the ontological construction of Black people within white knowledge systems and institutions as the figure of the slave. It is, as my colleague and I have argued elsewhere (Henry & Powell, 2021), why critical race theorist Derrick Bell (1991) in discussing his concept racial realism stated, “Black people will never gain full equality in this country” (p. 373). That structural, foundational antagonism of modern western regimes, the anti-Black parasitism of whiteness, is what some political scientists would suggest is path dependent. White parasitism is self-reinforcing. The reversal is too costly to white- ness and the payoff is too high for white supremacy (Pierson, 2004; Roithmayer, 2014). The ontological rendering of Black people as “slave” in white epistemological and structural formations has material consequences. Inequity works for a variety of reasons, but most simply: it pays. And to be abundantly clear, I am not here to suggest Black people are any of the things white supremacy believes us to be. My theorizing around anti-Blackness in the form of parasitism is not an indictment against Blackness or to remotely suggest that there is a lack or nothingness in Blackness, but rather that there is so much in Blackness that the parasite of whiteness needs it for its own survival. In fact, this has nothing to do with what Black people think of ourselves, or our forms of sociality, joy, kindship and community, institution building, or our expressions of love. For we know, as Hortense Spillers (1987, p. 72) reminds us, of the “richness of possibility” that animates and grounds Black life. The goal, here, however, is to trace how parasitism and whiteness reproduce Black pain, inequity, erasure, and, yes, death. It is to consider how civil society and various state apparatuses extract from Blackness for its own survival causing the durability of inequity; how the ideological, institutional, and structural nature of whiteness is concerned with the socio-political consumption of Blackness. Parasitism

Parasitism and necropower

Ultimately, then, the parasitic behavior of the state and the institution of whiteness are concerned with extraction, dispossession, and death (Cacho, 2012; Henry, 2016; Wilderson, 2020). At base, white supremacy functions to determine who lives and who dies. Philosopher Leonard Harris (1999) succinctly states, when discussing the material and social realities of racism, that racism is “a polymorphous agent of death, premature births, shortened lives, starving children…” (p.437). White supremacy’s reach is not only about the stings of micro-aggressions or limited diversity in conference rooms, but the intimacy of knowing life, materially and corporally, in proximity to death. Similarly, then, racism is a form of necropower. Achille Mbembé, (2003) in his groundbreaking article discussing the role of the sovereign state in the production of life and death, suggests that necropower is a form of power operationalized to subject populations deemed superfluous, other, abject, and disposable to “new and unique forms of social existence” (p. 40). In Mbeme’s articulation, necro-power and necro-politics is not only about the ability to determine life or death, the “right” to kill—as in war among nations or police murdering Black people—but also the ability to subject people to “death-worlds” whereby we are located within the precincts of enslavement, social or civil death, or legal and extra-legal forms of violence. If we are to understand, as Mbeme (2003) has suggested via necropolitics and necropower, the relationship among power and death and how white supremacy and dominance shape the state, institutions, and everyday forms of social relations for Black people, attuning us towards social or civil death, then the notion of parasitism makes a bit more sense. Woodard (2014) reminds us that the parasite consumes in various manners, at times immediate death and in other instances incrementally. Whatever the case, the extraction from the parasite fundamentally alters the life of the host by draining it either fast or slowly. In fewer words, parasitic white supremacy is draining.