Accumulation by Dispossesion
Kirsten L. Buras has written a scathing indictment of the neoliberal reform agenda in Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism: On Spatial Politics of Whiteness as Property (and the Unconscionable Assault on Black New Orleans).. Though it was written 2 years ago (2011), and though it focuses on New Orleans in its Post Katrina reform, this paper outlines what is now going on across the country. It’s an important contribution to naming and recognizing a pattern constituted of pieces that, when considered separately, are seemingly harmless pieces of policy. However, when considered as a whole, as Buras does so well, it becomes clear that these policies work towards the deconstruction of the ‘common’ in public education and replace it with a privatized conception of the market that benefits the elite. Buras’s paper is also important in that in excavates the importance of race in the creation of policy, and the ways in which race is used to leverage policy in favor of the privileged in spite of the language the privileged generate.
Buras argues that, regardless of the stated intent of restructuring education for