Toxic Economics: Education and the Free Market
NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram
Backlashes, Free Market ideology, & Toxic Work Cultures
Dear friends and fam,
This week I’m thinking about the concept of “backlashes” and the rise of free market ideology. What first appeared as a correlation when I began researching the structural changes in higher education hierarchies that ushered in an explosion of administrators and the near-abolishment of tenure track. What a strange coincidence.
And then, when my research in inequity and higher education became focused on secondary education, specifically, urban public education, the correlation became more like causation.
I don’t know how y’all grew up, but I grew up surrounded by medical doctors in a small southern town. This meant family reunions were proving grounds for intense debates about the decline of healthcare and how medicare shouldn’t exist. How social security would bankrupt America, and how the welfare state only produced indigent resource drains. In other words, I grew up in an educated middle class white household.
The rise of a “free market” ideology in the U.S., what many refer to as neoliberalism, is something I spent a lot of time researching. As a Humanities PhD, you’d be surprised at how much economic theory I read in order to understand the assault on public education that picked up sickening power during the Raegan era.
GWM (Generic White Man) of the Week: James McGill Buchanan
In particular, historian Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, discusses “public choice economics” in the context of James McGill Buchanan, and his fears that America would depend too much on the voice of the people. McLean describes how, in the US, politicians get elected by delivering services and protections for the majority of voters. Understandably upset, Buchanan was deeply worried about what he called an “overinvestment” in public services, where he concluded that majority rule was an “economic problem.”
In other words, he was deeply worried that the civil rights reforms began in the JFK-era would shift the balance of power away from the hands of a few. How dare the government function as a resource and service provider for its citizens. Didn’t these fools know the government is for creating tax breaks and ensuring business grows without consideration of consequences for citizens? Gah, it’s almost like some think that’s the definition of democracy. But as republicans love to remind (though I do think sometimes this is not proving what they think it is), that “America is a republic.”
How influential was this guy? In 1986, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for “his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision making.”
Where was Buchanan’s thinking coming from? His significant efforts helping Virginia battle Brown versus BOE in 1952 and ensured schools remained segregated.
How successful was he? Today, public education is more deeply segregated than they were in the 1970s. Let that sink in. For instance, I checked my own lifetime to track the decline of education that's happened as I've grown into a mouthy lesbian: I was born in 1986, and that year, schools were less segregated than they currently are now.
Racism and neoliberalism, at least the CRT I read, is inexorably linked. Neoliberalism needs a cheap labor force in order for it to endlessly scale and reap maximum profits. Racism justifies the continued denigration and exploitation of minorities with an array of faulty-suppositions that are as banal as they are effective.
In Lawrence Glickman’s Atlantic piece from May, “How White Backlash Controls American Progress,” he situates the definition of backlash in the context of JFK-era civil rights reforms, noting that backlash “quickly became a synonym for a new and growing conservative force, signifying a virulent counter reaction to all manner of social movements and cultural transformations” in American politics.
Today, we are currently reaping the benefits of nearly forty years of economic policy meant to ensure that the needs and demands of the majority would not “control” politics. As in, forty years of economic policy that are in direct contradiction to the prerequisites of democracy. And on top of it, forty years of deeply unequal education for BIPOCs compared to whites. Ironically, the one exception to this is the south. But, because the federal watchdogs mandated school integration in the southern states, white politicians resolved to defund all of public education, in effect wildly screwing over entire generations of poor whites in the process.
Free Market; Oppressive and Toxic Cultures
The delusions of the far right-- or perhaps I should say “far white”-- wielded as weapons to stoke anger and division, have been incredibly effective.
And they remind me of a James Baldwin quote about how white Americans see only what they want to see, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Such as how we view July 4th as a day celebrating liberation for all Americans when irl it was a liberation…. of exclusively white men.
Baldwin says, when describing his conversations with white people, that
“A great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility…. The guilt remains, moer deeply rooted, more securely lodged, than the oldest fears.”
-James Baldwin “White Man’s Guilt” 1965 in the edited collection Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to be White
What I am most interested in with all this economic back-talk is the cultural ramifications this produces. If exploitation must be morally justified, that means who we exploit in this country is blamed for their own oppression.
It means that if an attractive white male rapes someone, he’ll only get a few years in a minimum security prison and a gentle slap on the wrist.
It means that when charter school founders cut corners, hire the cheapest and most inexperienced teachers, and utilize online curriculum that is regurgitated common core from yesteryear, and then treat students as if they are aspiring criminals, they get away with it. And are perversely awarded for doing so as white saviors.
And we, as a society, as a culture, mumble about how that’s horrible. But we do exactly nothing when it comes to educating ourselves and at the very least, researching city council candidates in your local elections (city council ties with the school board and the ‘misappropriation’ of funds has come up so much in my research about the toxic hellhole white people have made of urban education that I can barely proofread this sentence for run-ons because it makes me so mad).
Reparation Opportunity for the Melanin-Deficient:
Reconsider the ideals and definitions of nationhood, belonging, and equality you were raised with. How do they still show up in your thinking (if only unconsciously) today?
The biggest part of being invested in anti-racism requires us to do a fearless moral inventory for assumptions about meritocracy we have.
Be proud of admitting you were wrong. And if you want, I’d love to hear moments of internal mind-changing. I’ve been writing about all of my internal change of minds a lot of late, and would love to hear about others’!
Until next week,
A