A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism

Zachary A. Casey

Description

Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society of Professors of Education

Through an analysis of whiteness, capitalism, and teacher education, A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism sheds light on the current conditions of public education in the United States. We have created an environment wherein market-based logics of efficiency, lowering costs, and increasing returns have worked to disadvantage those populations most in need of educational opportunities that work to combat poverty. This book traces the history of whiteness in the United States with an explicit emphasis on the ways in which the economic system of capitalism functions to maintain historical practices that function in racist ways. Practitioners and researchers alike will find important insights into the ways that the history of white racial identity and capitalism in the United States impact our present reality in schools. Casey concludes with a discussion of "revolutionary hope" and possibilities for resistance to the barrage of dehumanizing reforms and privatization engulfing much of the contemporary educational landscape.
Prologue
Acknowledgments

1. How My Family and I Became White: Introducing the Task at Hand

2. Freirean Critical Study

3. Marx, Marxism, and Me

4. White Racial Identity in the United States: A Conceptual History

5. The Impossibility of Whiteness: On White Privilege and Race Treason

6. Whiteness, Nationalism, and Neoliberal Capitalism

7. Professionalizing the Teaching Force: Neoliberalism and the Complicity of Teacher Education

8. Anticapitalist Antiracist Pedagogy in the Classroom: A Pedagogical Framework

9. Anticapitalist Antiracist Pedagogy as a Programmatic Vision for Teacher Education

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Social studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 24 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438463070
• Langue: English

Extrait

A PEDAGOGY OF ANTICAPITALIST ANTIRACISM
A PEDAGOGY OF ANTICAPITALIST ANTIRACISM
Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Resistance in Education
ZACHARY A. CASEY
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Casey, Zachary A., 1985- author.
Title: A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism : whiteness, neoliberalism, and resistance in education / Zachary A. Casey.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007694 (print) | LCCN 2016020254 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438463056 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438463070 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Public schools—United States—Finance. | Discrimination in education—United States. | Capitalism and education—United States. | Privatization in education—United States. | Teachers—Training of—United States. | Whites—United States—Race identity.
Classification: LCC LB2825 .C327 2016 (print) | LCC LB2825 (ebook) | DDC 370.11/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007694
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my teacher-students, and student-teachers
Contents
Prologue
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. How My Family and I Became White: Introducing the Task at Hand
Chapter 2. Freirean Critical Study
Chapter 3. Marx, Marxism, and Me
Chapter 4. White Racial Identity in the United States: A Conceptual History
Chapter 5. The Impossibility of Whiteness: On White Privilege and Race Treason
Chapter 6. Whiteness, Nationalism, and Neoliberal Capitalism
Chapter 7. Professionalizing the Teaching Force: Neoliberalism and the Complicity of Teacher Education
Chapter 8. Anticapitalist Antiracist Pedagogy in the Classroom: A Pedagogical Framework
Chapter 9. Anticapitalist Antiracist Pedagogy as a Programmatic Vision for Teacher Education
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Prologue
“W hat are you?” she asked.
It was the first week of class, in the first semester of my PhD program at the University of Minnesota. We were sitting in a circle at the Kitty Cat Klub, a local bar, just after a public talk called Policy and a Pint. The event featured a representative from Teach For America and the TFA alum who had just won Teacher of the Year for the state of Minnesota. We were all in the same program, at the same university, and we were all white. We then had a conversation that I have engaged in many times with people of many different races, but particularly with white people. For some reason, it seems to me that these conversations happen more often with white people who have an aversion to alienating racial others, or more bluntly, to sounding racist. “What are you?” in these moments most often asks the questioned party to list one or more (for white folks, European) countries they are descended from, and thus “are.”
When prompted I usually answer, “I’m white, and from the U.S.” Which of course does not answer the question in the way it was intended, and so I shift to saying, “I’m mostly Irish, Swedish, French, and Ukrainian.” I am sure there are many countries missing from this list, but of course, any list of this kind is absurd. I’m from the United States, and having had the unique privilege to visit the countries I am “from” in this context, I can assure the reader that I am not from any country in Europe, and thus a term such as European American lacks any relevance for someone like me, whose ancestors have been in the United States for many generations, and who have been white so long that any other identity would simply not do us justice.
Answering the question “What are you?” represents a form of hailing 1 that places the respondent in a series of codes of conduct, which I will refer to moving forward in this work as ideology. 2 And this very move may well turn off some readers—because it brings us back to the problem of “What are you?” This is a work that makes explicitly materialist, structuralist, and Marxist arguments (among many influences) to better understand our present realities of white supremacy, white racial identity, antiracist pedagogy, and teacher education. But it is not a text that is only for those who would answer the question “What are you?” by stating, “I’m a Marxist.” This kind of attitude is rife in the academy, and can be seen in an array of books, articles, and lectures with titles like “Marxism against Postmodernism in Educational Theory” 3 and “Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism.” 4 These works seek to defend the insights of critical theory in the Marxist tradition against the influx of critical work that characterizes itself as poststructural, postmodern, and the myriad other “posts” we could list here. It is not my aim to make such arguments here—in other words; this is not a text that is written solely for Marxists, or a text that attempts to dissuade people from mobilizing poststructural insights or theories. I have made every effort, in fact, to present the theories and histories I detail in such a way that many different practitioners and thinkers can appropriate for themselves what they deem to be the worthy elements and arguments of this work. For me, this brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from bell hooks (1994), who in her discussion of Paulo Freire’s work that includes sexist and patriarchal language writes, “Think of [his] work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water” (p. 50).
Thus, I ask the reader to not get stuck at the level of “What are you?” and rather to approach this work critically with an aim to extract whatever “water” might exist in it for you, and to spit the “dirt” as it may feel to you, in an effort to appropriate for yourself what this text can help us with. Specifically, this work is imagined for teacher educators and antiracist practitioners in a variety of pedagogical settings. This work offers historical accounts, theoretical critiques, and details of anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy broadly imagined.
As will become clear in the chapters that follow, there is much work to be done to mobilize white people, and white teachers in particular, for antiracist action. We should take seriously the finding that white privilege as a concept and as the primary means of engaging white people in antiracist struggle has not been able to capture the hearts and minds of all of those for whom it was intended. We should also take just as seriously that the “professionalization” of the teaching force has not brought with it the longed-for outcome of a more critical, respected, and better prepared mass of teachers. There is more work to be done, that must be done, and there is a need for new theories, arguments, and discourses to aid us in this work. My aim here is to move antiracist pedagogies toward a position of radical solidarity—a comprehensive attitudinal paradigm that creates spaces for all those engaged in anti-oppressive struggle to approach their work with new insights, aims, and questions.
And thus, with these caveats and frames in mind, I begin.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the support on this project from Elyse M. Wigen, Timothy J. Lensmire, The Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective, Shannon K. McManimon, and Brian D. Lozenski. This text would not have been possible were it not for the countless hours spent discussing, reading, and learning together.
Portions of chapter 6 are adapted from Casey, Z. A. (in press), Whiteness, Nationalism, and Neoliberalism: What Pat Buchanan and the Right Can Teach Us about Resisting Neoliberalism in Schools. In M. Abendroth B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), School against Neoliberal Rule . Information Age Publishing.
Portions of chapter 7 are adapted from Casey, Z. A. (2013). Toward an Anticapitalist Teacher Education. Journal Of Educational Thought , 46 (2), 123–143.
ONE
How My Family and I Became White
Introducing the Task at Hand
Therefore this presupposition by no means arises either out of the individual’s will or out of the immediate nature of the individual, but that it is rather historical, and posits the individual as already determined by society.
— Grundrisse
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
— Theses on Feuerbach
Introduction
I have spent virtually the whole of my teaching life feeling too young to be doing what I do. The result is that very few people actually know how old I am, and I like it that way. Now, in my work to understand the history of white supremacy and the ways in which my own experiences and history have been shaped by its ongoing legacy, it feels important to locate myself and when I was born