Anticolonial realism: The defensive governing strategy of a Black city in white space

ABSTRACT

School systems in Black-majority urban cores have been restructured as neighborhood schools have been closed and corporate charter schools have expanded. Drawing on the case of Newark, New Jersey, I interrogate the governability of this agenda. I ask: how does a municipal government elected to reinvest in public schools end up supporting the growth of privately managed charter schools? The answer requires understanding how a Blackled government of a multiracial city negotiates its position in a majority-white, suburban state. Newark’s governing regime has built a practical hegemony, rooted not in visionary idealism but the negotiation of racialized constraint. Its focus is on mitigating the dispossessions wrought by a school reform agenda it did not devise but argues that it has no alternative but to manage given central government coercion. This disposition, which I call “anticolonial realism,” points to how race and place matter in sustaining, revising, and, potentially, undoing neoliberal hegemonies.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• hegemony
• Newark
• race
• school reform

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Erin Lilli, Jaime Jover, Cindi Katz, Michelle Fine, and Richard Ocejo for their feedback on earlier drafts. My deepest gratitude goes to the participants of this study, many of whom make Newark the beautiful rebel city that it is. The faults are all mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I capitalize State to refer to the State of New Jersey.

2. For example: “Co-location [of charter schools in public schools building] is more like colonization” (as cited in Russakoff, 2014, May 12, para. 32).

3. Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from personal interviews.

4. Of these early charter schools funded by foundations, Ras Baraka noted: “no one back then was saying let’s give NPS money to Free Schools” (Obs. 2).

5. In later sections, I will show concretely how coercive state rescaling has shored up the power of white-led economic and political structures to maintain a grip over Newark, even as the State takeover has nominally ended.

6. For example, Don Katz, founder of Audible, was on the transition committee. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, a wealthy Newark suburb, and sits on the board of Uncommon Schools, a charter corporation with a growing presence in Newark.

7. This school specialized in business and commerce.

8. About 50% of NPS principals were fired or pushed out under State receivership and subsequently replaced by candidates hand-picked by power brokers like Chris Cerf, a white suburbanite, founder of the consulting group Edison Schools, as well as one of the superintendents formerly appointed by the State of New Jersey to run NPS (Russakoff, 2016).

9. For example, one participant challenged the board to broaden “its political imagination with its talk of equity. Just last week, there was fire at a school. When the students reported it, their teacher didn’t believe them. Let’s talk about what white supremacy looks like in our schools and how it risks students’ lives.”

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Claire Cahen

Claire Cahen received her PhD from the Graduate Center at CUNY and is now an Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech. Her research lies in the overlap of labor and urban studies and concerns neoliberal restructuring, urban governance, and teacher unionism.