Schooling and policy are merely extensions of the biopolitical state.

Policies, such as the alternative schools program, that were historically posited as “progressive” policies, and created previous to the advent of “choice,” are now firmly located within neoliberalism. Foucault (2008) posits the need to understand neoliberalism through the techniques by which states and individuals govern and are governed. The political-economic theory of neoliberal posits that markets are the primary rationalities of contemporary government and governance, with a particular focus on “choice” and “freedom” that indicates not the withdrawal of the state as such but the economization of the state (Brown, 2015; Peck, 2010). Neoliberalism is characterized by “its unevenness, its lack of self-identity, its spatial and temporal variability, and above all, its reconfiguration” (Brown, 2015, p. 21), while this plasticity has the effect of reconfiguring many of what were considered liberal democratic projects, including the project of anti-racism (Goldberg, 2009). For example, being part of the independent and community-driven school lineage, the AAS is located within a policy realm where parental choice is the primary market mechanism that defines and enacts much of what constitutes ideas such as “independent,” “community,” and “educational equity.” As Brown (2015) maintains,

As both individual and state become projects of management, rather than rule, as an economic framing and economic ends replace political ones, a range of concerns become subsumed to the project of capital enhancement, recede altogether, or are radically transformed as they are “economized.” These include justice (and its subelements, such as liberty, equality, fairness), individual and popular sovereignty, and the rule of law. (p. 22)

We could propose that economics provided conditions (in the form of choice policies) for the development of the AAS, where decades of anti-racist politics did not succeed. However, while significant, the story of the AAS is more complicated than the economization of equity, for it involves the connection of neoliberal policy to biopolitics.

Lather (2006) proposes that “[p]olicy is to regulate behavior and render populations productive via a ‘biopolitics’ that entails state intervention in and regulation of the everyday lives of citizens in a ‘liberal’ enough manner to minimize resistance and maximize wealth stabilization” (p. 787). Policy is central to biopolitics, as we can see in the following florid construction,

Policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction . . . This is the first rule of policy. It fixes others. (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 78)

We suggest that this “fixing” can be part of what Ash Amin (2010) contends is the new normality of racial biopolitics. Amin proposes that racial biopolitics involves the ways,

[b]odily traits and “ethnic” cultures are becoming the basis upon which peoples are allocated rights, identities, a place in the world . . . at the expense of other modes of marking community and negotiating difference (e.g., doctrinaire principles, ideas of good citizenship, moral and ethical values). (p. 10)

Traits and cultures are precisely the objects that Foucault (1990) referred to in his understanding of biopolitics, noting “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (pp. 141-142). School and schooling have long been forms of biopolitical governance (Ball, 2013), with neoliberalism and school choice policies now ushering in new forms of racial biopolitics.

Neoliberal policy has provided particular types of openings for the allocation of “rights” as bodily traits and “ethnic” cultures, such that any debates about anti-racism or equity politics occurs within neoliberalized framings. This is part of the shift from a state-supported anti-racist project to one in which there are new forms of race and racialization being produced as both invisible and visible within market forms in a colorblind State, and reconfigured as private and privatized forms of choice and selection (Goldberg, 2009; Gulson, 2011). The state is much less overtly involved in producing and arranging racializations, and has, instead, transferred or downloaded these forms of racial biopolitics onto populations that are “free” and “empowered” to produce and maintain variable raciologies.