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Souls A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

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Challenging Neoliberal Education at the Grass Roots: Students Who Lead, Not Students Who Leave

George Lipsitz

To cite this article: George Lipsitz (2015) Challenging Neoliberal Education at the Grass Roots: Students Who Lead, Not Students Who Leave, Souls, 17:3-4, 303-321, DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2015.1125185

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Souls Vol. 17, Nos. 3--4, July–December 2015, pp. 303–321

EDUCATION IN NEW ORLEANS: A DECADE AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA

Challenging Neoliberal Education at the Grass Roots: Students Who Lead, Not Students Who Leave George Lipsitz

The Students at the Center (SAC) learning community in New Orleans challenges the premises of neoliberal education reform through an alternative social vision and an oppositional social praxis. It encourages students to be people who lead their communi- ties rather than people who leave. SAC presents a model of democratic and egalitarian education that exposes, challenges, resists, and counters the enormous harm perpetrated by the neoliberal reorganization of public institutions. The young people who participate in the classes run by SAC view their own fate as individuals as linked to the survival, dignity and democratic potential of all people.

Keywords: disposability, exceptionality, neoliberal education, New Orleans, story circles

The late Clyde Woods organized all of his scholarly work around one central contention—that the key to the entire racial order of the United States emanated from the history, politics, and poetics of the city of New Orleans and the hinterlands surrounding it. This was a matter of the historical record for Woods, a function of the foundational and formative economic and political power of the plantation bloc in forging the nation as a slave holding republic and then authoring and authorizing succeeding forms of segregation, debt peonage, land enclosure, labor exploitation, incarceration, and containment. Yet Woods also insisted that the centrality of New Orleans to the U.S. racial order did not end in the past, that the city continues to be a crucible where new forms of calculated cruelty and organized abandonment are perpetually produced, resisted, and countered. Attaching literal meaning to

ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online #�2015 University of Illinois at Chicago DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2015.1125185

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Martin Luther King’s figurative claim that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere, Woods argued that the persistence of racialized imbalances of resources and power in New Orleans make the city a self-renewing laboratory for the present day development of new neoliberal forms of dispossession and displacement.1 Woods perceived correctly that New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta have been laboratories for neoliberalism, test sites for experiments in policies that subsequently became embraced nationally by leaders of both major political parties, policies that include deregulation and tax subsidies for large corporations, ecologically unsound develop- ment, mass incarceration, draconian reductions in social spending, union busting and the privatization of public education. Woods asked us to understand New Orleans not as provincial backwater bypassed by history, but instead as one of the key places in the present where our collective future is being created. “New Orleans is a not an excep- tion,” Woods insisted, “New Orleans is our future.” What happens in New Orleans today, he maintained, can happen anywhere tomorrow.2 Woods recognized that the neoliberal reorganization of the school system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 served as the key component in a “rebuilding” strategy for the Crescent City designed to produce irreversible moves toward privatization, fiscalization and class polarization that could then be exported elsewhere. As the Call for Papers for this spe- cial issue of Souls observes “New Orleans style reform has been marked as a model for other urban school districts throughout the United States.” Replacing open admission public schools with selective private charters, shifting emphasis away from holistic edu- cation toward preparation for competitive high stakes multiple-choice tests as part of a punitive audit system rigged to take resources away from the students who need them the most, and supplanting credentialed, experienced, unionized and lifelong New Orleans resident teachers with inexperienced, unaccredited, temporary, transient volun- teers imbued with an ethos of unctuous paternalism, school reform in New Orleans por- tends similar schemes elsewhere.

Yet in the very locality where this toxic stew is being concocted, teachers, students, parents, and community members rooted in the Black Resistance Tradition of New Orleans have conjured up an alternative social vision and developed an oppositional social praxis by forming the learning community they call Students at the Center (SAC). Seeking “education for liberation, not mainstream socialization,” SAC con- ducts classes for eleventh and twelfth grade students. Its instructors, Kalamu ya Salaam, Jim Randels, Mosi Makori, and Ashley Jones reject completely the logic of neoliberalism that revolves around binary oppositions between the worthy and the unworthy, that extends full citizenship and social membership only to those it deems exceptional while treating everyone else as disposable. The learning communities that SAC creates in its classrooms and beyond encourage students to be people who lead their communities rather than people who leave them. Deploying an inter- active, collective, and improvisational pedagogy derived from the story circles of the Free Southern Theater, these classes enable students to grapple with challenging readings and connect them to their own lives, to write and critique collaboratively the essays, reflections, and ruminations authored by other students and to test their ideas in practice through engagement within activist movements for social

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justice. SAC presents a model of democratic and egalitarian education that exposes, challenges, resists, and counters the enormous harm perpetrated by the neoliberal reorganization of education.

Neoliberalism is not a unified theory, practice, or ideology. Like most hegemonic formations it is a concept used to mark a historical moment of conjuncture, an amal- gam of diverse and sometimes competing interests, strivings, practices, and processes. One recurrent feature of neoliberalism is the assertion that capitalist market relations should be the model for all social relations. In practice, this often means that exchange value has innate social value and that people are consumers, investors, and owners rather than workers, citizens, and community members.3

The key element in the neoliberal educational philosophy revolves around what Chandan Reddy describes as the dialectical relationship between exceptionality and dis- posability.4 Educational “reform” in New Orleans and other cities means providing the appearance of a modicum of educational opportunity and economic mobility to a small number of students judged to be exceptional, while writing off the rest as disposable. High ability and high achievement students who are poor and Black are encouraged by the school system to separate themselves from their surroundings, to seek opportu- nities for themselves and to ignore their neighbors, relatives, and friends who are con- signed to second rate schooling, who are then blamed, shamed, and punished as failures, when in fact, it is the school system and the society that have failed them.

The high ability and high achieving young people who become part of SAC recog- nize fully that the school system wants them to leave rather than lead their communi- ties. In The Long Ride, an extraordinary book of essays and reflections by SAC students and their allies, Christopher Burton recalls how his success in middle school led to pressure on him and other successful students to separate themselves from others, to perceive themselves as better and more worthy than the low performing students, to abandon their friends and compete for slots in schools reserved for high achieving students.5 Burton objects to those values. He describes them as reflective of a larger system where “the privileged few get all the resources and the majority is given close to nothing.”6 In the same volume, Sadiq Watson writes “The abandon- ment of public schools and the separation of students continues to grow. When I look at it, separation is wrong, but it is a common practice. People want to be on top, which will always leave someone on the bottom.”7 Crystal Carr reports in her entry that students at McDonogh #35 are taught to disassociate themselves from the neighborhood that surrounds it. She relates this to a section she read in Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker. In that book Ransby reports that when Ms. Baker attended Shaw Academy and later Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, she and other students were forbidden from interacting with local Black residents.8 Criti- cal of the efforts by the culture of uplift in which she was raised to distance itself from poorer, darker, and more vulnerable people in their own community, Ms. Baker went on to an activist life that involved and served all strata of Black society—the town drunk as well as the town doctor, the farmer as well as the pharmacist, the woman who could not afford to buy a coat and the woman who owned a fur coat. Compar- ing the rule in place at Shaw in Ms. Baker’s time with her own school’s similar policy,

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Carr contends “This rule created a separation that Ella Baker later fought against in her civil rights and black power work.”9

Every weekday morning and afternoon, students in New Orleans high schools gather for classes run by the SAC program. The class members include both African American and Vietnamese American youths. These two communities do not share the same bloodlines, but they do share complex and complicated histories of blood shed that place the students in productive dialogue with each other. The narratives the students write profit from both their similarities and their differences. Team taught up through 2015 by public school teacher Jim Randels and Ninth Ward poet, activist and educator Kalamu ya Salaam, and turned over to Mosi Makori and Ashley Jones starting in the 2015–2016 academic year, these classes encourage listeners to talk, require readers to write, and prompt witnesses to social injustice to take action against it. Student writers gain authority by authoring narratives that authorize a dif- ferent future than the one designed for them by the pain inflictors of this world. They become urban alchemists, turning disadvantage into advantage, humiliation into honor. They find value in undervalued people, places, and perspectives. The makers and shakers and gatekeepers of this society generally do not look to them, or people like them, for advice. They are not asked about the many things they know about the problems caused by poverty, political powerlessness and mass incarceration. The people in power generally do not care what they think, or even if they think. They do not invite these young people into the circles where decisions are made. Yet as eye- witnesses to the criminalization of poverty, the organized evisceration of the social wage, the ravages of sexual racism, and the deadly consequences of prioritizing pun- ishment instead of justice, these students have expert knowledge and advanced abili- ties to solve serious social problems. No one has invited them to stand up, step up, and speak up, so they invite themselves to be participants in deliberative talk and face-to- face decision making. They write words that they hope can heal the wounds they wit- ness every day.

In a city where neoliberal privatization schemes orchestrated by hedge fund managers and backed by leaders of both major political parties have funneled money to for-profit charter schools that are largely unaccountable to the communities they serve, the SAC curriculum draws on resources of another sort, resources rooted in student-based interactive leaning circles. In these classes, young people read and write about racism, poverty, and mass incarceration. Perhaps most important, the students work together every day in groups to acknowledge, assess, and analyze how racism, poverty, sexism, and the organized abandonment of their neighbor- hoods produce the radical divisiveness that encourages largely powerless people to attack each other. The students write about absent and abusive fathers and mothers, domestic violence, street crime, hunger, status rivalries, antagonisms, and arguments. They see that in its final stages, attempted genocide can look like suicide. They know all too well that individuals who have been hurt, may well want to hurt others. Oppressed people find themselves compelled to compete with each other constantly, to battle for scarce jobs, for romantic partners, for prestige. Drastic reductions in employment in industrial and longshore jobs have given rise to a concomitant

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increase in service jobs and state employment, some of which require impoverished Black workers to police, jail, and guard other Blacks. Under these conditions, it should not be surprising that Black people can come to despise themselves and each other, to discern in each other’s eyes a reflection of their own subordination and humiliation. The people closest to them can come to seem unworthy of love. Yet by addressing the hand they have been dealt by history openly and honestly, by sharing their burdens, and by helping others recognize and respond to common con- ditions, the students’ writings succeed in the arduous task that Lorraine Hansberry described as the indispensable work of finding something left to love in others and in ourselves.10

The pedagogy of SAC requires students to read challenging works by (among others) Edwidge Danticat, Mark Twain, Michelle Alexander, and Virginia Woolf, to connect the readings to their own lives, and to address big issues like segre- gation, imperialism, and mass incarceration. Most of the students in these classes do not own personal computers, so they compose their essays on phones, sending their work to their instructors as e-mail attachments. They read out loud to the other students from their phone screens during class. Listening and providing criticism to others becomes as important as one’s own writing in this curriculum. The instructors begin each session by asking one student to read the current draft of his or her essay. After doing so, the student picks two other students to offer comments. The “pick two” process allows for both predictability and rupture. Some responders are chosen for their expertise about writing techniques. Others get selected because their life experiences compare closely to that of the writer. Some are prized because they are gentle with their critiques; others are valued because they are blunt, forthright and thorough. Choosing a critic can depend on how the author feels on that particular day or on the focal point of any parti- cular paper. According to the teachers and teachers’ aides, eventually nearly every- one is asked to respond to everyone else. The process allows for individual differentiation, yet locates authority in the abilities and traits that the group possesses as a totality. Through their individual writings and their shared conver- sations the students transform the space of the classroom into a site of mutuality and solidarity, a forum for deepening their collective capacity for mutual recog- nition and respect for democratic deliberation and decision making.

The young people enrolled in Students at the Center classes, are told that they not only have the opportunity to write, they have a responsibility to write. They are taught that every problem has a solution, that meaningful work in the world can make a dif- ference. During one class, a student reads a heart-wrenching story about a cousin who is a few years older than she is.11 The young man had been a positive presence in her life, caring for her when her parents were away, cheering her up when she was sad, introducing her to fashions, fads and slang terms. One day he murdered another youth and soon was sent off to prison. In her paper the girl acknowledged that he was guilty. She is mad at him for committing the crime. She had long feared being killed herself by a stray bullet fired recklessly by someone acting the way he did. Her cousin’s incarceration strains the family’s already limited material and emotional

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resources in many ways. She is upset by the ways his incarceration taxes the family’s fragile networks of support to the breaking point. Yet she has not stopped caring about him or loving him. The murder, she wrote, was not the only act he ever committed. For a while, the girl and her mother could visit the cousin in the Orleans Parish prison. Despite the circumstances and surroundings, on those visits he seemed to be the same person she remembered fondly. Yet when friends of the man he killed learned where he had been incarcerated and when some sensationalized journalism made it seem as if he was proud of the murder, the authorities transferred him to a jail that was too far away for the family to visit regularly. The student poured forth a complex mixture of emotions—shame about what he had done, anger toward him because of the crime, fear for herself of being retaliated against, but also com- passion for her cousin, his victim, and the victim’s friends and family for the suffering they were all experiencing.

When it came time to “pick two,” she made what might have seemed like an odd choice. One boy that she picked was not a surprise. He was someone selected by stu- dents in this class over and over again. He was clearly the top student in the class, a helpful and insightful critic able to make suggestions about both the form and the con- tent of other students’ papers. He spoke quietly and respectfully, making intelligent and valuable comments about how readers might misunderstand her words, pointing out places that could use more elaboration. The author’s second choice in the “pick two,” however, was a surprise. She selected the class clown, an impish, mischievous, playful person who seemed to make light of everything, making jokes that often failed to hit the mark about papers, other students and the class in general. In this instance, however, he dropped his clownishness completely. He asked the writer if she felt embarrassed sharing her story, wondering if she was afraid people would think badly of her for having a cousin in jail, or for not simply condemning him and his actions outright. The author responded carefully. She admitted that she had some trepidation about writing the piece and reading it in public. “But you never know,” she asserted, “who can help me if they know about what I’ve been going through.” Then she took a long pause and said with emphasis, “or who I can help.”12 Her answer revealed a con- viction that sharing a burden can lessen it, that helping others can be an indispensable survival strategy, that moral decisions are neither simple nor easy. Her answer resonated with the dialectical prescience of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that the darkest moments of our despair can also be the first moments of our eventual victory if we know how to use them properly.13

One part of the required curriculum of Students at the Center entails social movement activism. The students not only study society and write about it, they also take direct action to change it. Often, this activism addresses the issue of mass incarceration that looms large in their lives. The United States incarcerates a greater proportion of its population than any other nation in the world. The state of Louisiana places a larger percentage of its population behind bars than any other state. The city of New Orleans sends a greater proportion of its population to jails and prisons than any city in Louisiana. The students live in the neighborhoods most impacted by mass incarceration in the most impacted city in the most impacted state in the

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most impacted nation. It is hard to find even one student who does not have some personal or family connection to the criminal justice system. A way they have discov- ered how to engage with this system and its effects on their lives has been to assist the local branch of the Innocence Project, the New Orleans Resurrection after Exoner- ation re-entry project. The students write letters to inmates identified as wrongly con- victed, and they join public campaigns attempting to win their freedom. One of the recipients of their letters and a beneficiary of their activism has been Jerome Morgan.

Morgan is a native of New Orleans who was wrongly convicted of a crime that he did not commit. He had been incarcerated in the state prison in Angola for nearly two decades when the students came across his case in their readings about the Innocence Project. In a community that rightly sees itself as at war with the criminal justice system, a wrongly convicted inmate becomes an important symbol of—and an imaginary surrogate for—the “rightly” convicted fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews and neighbors whose incarcerations cannot be so easily mourned or challenged publicly. Because of racially targeted policing and prosecuting, and the mandatory sentences central to the “war on drugs,” many of the people in jails and prisons have been convicted of non-violent drug offenses and parole violations. Some of them have been home- less, many have undiagnosed and untreated disabilities. Their offenses are often as much crimes of condition as they are crimes of conduct. As Michelle Alexander demonstrates in The New Jim Crow, possession of a small amount of drugs on an inner city street is treated very differently than possession of the same quantity of the same drug in a college fraternity house.14

The students’ correspondence with Morgan quickly extended far beyond initial exchanges about Morgan’s innocence. In the process of working together to right a legal wrong, Morgan and the students forged unconventional relationships with each other based on mutual needs, interests and desires. In letters to their incarcerated correspondent, students Wesley Alexander and Tareian King inhabited new identities. At first, they wrote careful, tactful and polite messages, introducing themselves to a man they had never met in person. His replies were gentle, humble and direct. As they get to know each other through the letters, each writer discovered a void being filled. King and Alexander are children whose fathers are no longer in their lives. Morgan is a father whose incarceration largely severed his connections with his son, a rupture exacerbated by the youth’s subsequent displacement to Georgia after Hurricane Katrina. King found herself relating things in her letters to Morgan that she imagined she would tell to a father if she had one in her life. She started to describe him as “my new dad.”15 Alexander felt a similarly powerful connection to Morgan. “Growing up in a world that exists beyond the walls of a prison hasn’t been so free for me,” he wrote to the man that he too had come to relate to as a father. “That’s why I sympathize and feel connected to you in this abstract way. I too await to one day be set free.” The gener- osity, openness and love these young people displayed moved Morgan deeply. He wrote them that “we need each other more than we know.” When he received Father’s Day cards “from the very two children who have so proudly adopted me as the father they never had,” Morgan experienced a new feeling of elation tempered with

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responsibility. He wrote to Alexander that he had found “great joy” and experienced “an authentic happiness in being all that I desire for others to be to me and our people. We have to be fun-loving and serious about affording the world with hope, justice and peace.”

King and Alexander wrote letters in support of a new trial for Morgan, pointing to flaws in the original trial unearthed by the investigations of the Innocence Project. They took time off from school to be spectators in the courtroom when he appeared at a hearing for a new trial. In what seemed to them like a miracle, their efforts paid off when a judge ruled that Morgan had been wrongly convicted and was entitled to a new trial. By the time Morgan was released, King and Alexander had enrolled in Bard College in New York as part of a special recruitment relationship between that institution and Students at the Center.16 During the spring break of his freshman year, Alexander was able to travel to New Orleans to see Jerome Morgan as a free man for the first time in eighteen years, albeit one waiting a retrial that could send him back to Angola Prison. The pair showed up together at the SAC class at McMain, the school that Alexander had attended. As the two of them sat together quietly in the circle, a girl asked them “Are you two related?” A long silence followed. Wesley then gestured toward Jerome and said quietly and firmly, “That’s my father.” Jerome gestured back toward Wesley and said “That’s my son.” Seeing the opportunity to teach an impor- tant lesson, ya Salaam explained that going back to the days of slavery Black people could not always guarantee that their biological families could remain intact, so they developed family-like relations with people who were not actually kinfolk. Even today, he explained, we sometimes become family to people who are not really in our family. Either misunderstanding the lesson, or else moved by the serenity and strength displayed by Alexander and Morgan, the girl replied “I thought you two looked alike.”

King, Alexander, and Morgan found a way to counter the system’s radical dehuma- nization with determined and creative re-humanization. Their “family” ties had to be forged, not simply found. College bound students King and Alexander rejected the exceptionality/disposability binary to affirm their connections to a man convicted of murder and locked up in prison for eighteen years. In a society that constantly entices people to “want more” and “have more,” King, Alexander, and Morgan discov- ered ways to “be more.”17 Ties to each other made them feel stronger as individuals. In that respect, they follow in the footsteps of their enslaved ancestors who expressed their love for one other by citing Proverbs 27:17 that says “as iron sharpens iron so one person sharpens another.” People need people, not only for affection and security, but to become sharper, smarter, braver, and better. Individual actions can fill personal needs, but they also work to enable the entire community to survive. As musicologist Christopher Small writes, in Afro-diasporic cultures, “the supreme value lies in the preservation of the community: without a community for support the individual is helpless, while with it he or she is invincible.”18

King, Alexander, and Morgan invented familial relationships to replace the ones shattered by systemic social oppression. They are not alone in this ingenuity. Mosi Makori after college came back to work as an advisor, community ally and now

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teacher for the community. He explains that an important party of his life story entailed “adopting” Alabama activist Connie Tucker as his “Godmother in the Black Radical Tradition.” He describes his subsequent work on behalf of wrongly convicted incarcerated men as a kind of compensation and reparation for his feelings of personal powerlessness. “I subconsciously aligned myself,” he reveals “with the opportunity to possibly achieve for other black men what I was unable to do for the men in my family including my father—resurrect them through exoneration.”19

The emphasis on mutual respect and recognition as the key to the Black community’s survival, humanity and democratic hopes enables the creation of “family” connections with people who are not blood relatives. An example of this pro- cess took place on March 24, 2014 when Jerome Smith joined the afternoon session of Students at the Center at McDonogh #35 in the Treme neighborhood. Smith began battling segregation in New Orleans as a teenager when he was evicted from a street- car for sitting in the section of the car designated for whites only. As a young activist Smith sharply rebuked then Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s superficial under- standing of the Black freedom struggle at a meeting that included James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Smith participated in countless direct action protests aimed at desegregating employment and public accommodations in New Orleans, helped mobilize a vital support system in New Orleans for the Mississippi Freedom move- ment, and even traveled to upstate New York to report on the situation in Mississippi at a benefit sponsored by Hansberry. Donations collected at that meeting paid for the station wagon occupied by James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner when they were stopped and murdered by Klan members led by Neshoba County Sheriff Wayne Raney and his deputy Cecil Price in June 1964. Smith has remained in the forefront of activism for decades, fighting for educational equity, affordable housing and political self-determination. Yet none of the students seemed to know who this seventy-five-year-old man was or why he was in their classroom. Moreover, his appearance seemed to signal a break with the standard security regime. In schools where security guards vastly outnumber college counselors, it is not easy for outsiders to enter the buildings. Visitors must notify the school in advance, check in with secur- ity personnel by presenting a picture identification card, and walk through a metal detector. Approved visitors are then given a stick-on name tag that signals that they have permission to be in the school. Smith, however, ambled into the room in the middle of the session with no name tag visible. As he took his seat in the circle, Kalamu ya Salaam wanted the students to know who he was, so he joked, “Well, some- body must have spilled a whole lot of sugar on the floor because we got a roomful of roaches here today. Let’s have our new visitor tell us who he is.”20 In a deep resonant voice, Smith declared “They call me Big Duck. Because when I was a little kid I was tall for my age and when the other kids followed me, the people would say ‘there’s the big duck and all his little ducks following after him.’ And I’m still Big Duck, and that’s why I’m here today (pointing to the students) to see how all my little ducks are doing. You know, I went to jail with Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi years ago and I’m here today to let you know you have to work hard to carry on the struggle for our people.” Still eager to let the students know who was in their midst, ya Salaam asked “But what

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is your government name?” Taking mock offense, Smith answered slowly “I am gov- erned by the historical struggles of our people who have named me Big Duck.” Trying again, ya Salaam asked, “Well what’s the name on your driver’s license?” Smith winced and said “A driver’s license is only a document issued by the state that admin- isters and controls us.” Laughing along with the rest of the class, ya Salaam asked, “What did your parents name you?” Big Duck said calmly, “Oh. Jerome Smith.”

In the session that Big Duck attended, a student read her paper relating Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn to her life. She focused on the part of the novel where Jim’s belief in magic serves as a locus of ridicule. The student explained that she felt hurt by this part of the book. As an immigrant from Belize, she had known people all her life who believed in magic. She discerned that the author of Huck Finn wanted her to feel ashamed of these beliefs. She wondered if people like Jim and the people she knew in Belize learned to believe in magic because so many horrible things in the world go beyond rational explanation. “After all,” she argued, “everybody in Huck Finn believed in slavery.” Big Duck and this young woman made their arguments in different ways, but the 75-year-old activist and the 17-year-old student together demonstrated the continuing trajectory of Black survival, Black humanity, and Black democracy, providing current day manifestations of Cedric Robinson’s argument that the Black radical tradition is first and foremost a “collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”21

A two-tiered educational system harms all students, but it is especially damaging to Black communities that have historically needed to nurture and sustain group solidarity in order to survive. Neoliberal educational reform is thus not simply a betrayal of the educational needs of the overwhelming majority of Black students, it is also part of a concentrated political attack on the Black community as a whole, one more manifestation of fifty years of policies designed to repudiate the politics and reverse the gains enabled by the Black freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century. The Black community made progress in that era by constituting itself as an aggrieved and insurgent polity. To do so, it had to replace the radical divisiveness among its members created by the injuries of racialized capitalism with a radical unity that turned systematic dehumanization into exuberant rehumanization while provoking bystanders to become upstanders. Martin Luther King, Jr. encapsulated that transformation in the remarks he made to striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. King maintained that the strike proved that the “Negro Haves” must unite with the “Negro Have Nots,” that the dignity and desires of the person with no “D” were as important as those of the person with a “PhD,” that the indi- vidual who had “no house” was as crucial to the movement as the person who went to Morehouse.22 In a similar vein, the Mississippi Freedom movement developed consensus-based participatory democracy in its organizing as a way of creating solidarity across caste and class lines within the Black community, as a means for building an alliance between the chicken eaters and the chitlin’ eaters, the grip toters and the sack toters.23 Over the last four decades, a revanchist

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repudiation of this movement and its victories has revolved around efforts to grant limited cosmetic concessions rather than making systematic changes in the social order, to create and publicize what Charlotta Bass derided as the practice of placing a few dark faces in high places rather than attending to the needs of the community as a whole. As Cedric Johnson argues, the white power structure responded to the egalitarian and democratic politics of the Black freedom movement by offering lim- ited access into the system only to those people able and willing to serve as power brokers, to become race leaders rather than revolutionaries.24 This process was pre- figured, encapsulated, and emblematized by the response by leaders of the national Democratic Party in 1964 to the demand by the elected representatives of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the party’s national conven- tion as the recognized delegates from the state of Mississippi. Through a “compro- mise” engineered by Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, the national party chose to seat the entire delegation of white supremacists selected by the regular party organization, but to also allow Black pharmacist Aaron Henry and white sociologist John Salter from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to serve as delegates at large. Henry and Salter could secure entry into the proceedings for themselves, but only by promising to shut the door behind them, and exclude the rest of the delegation. The national party officials could tolerate the presence in their midst of a pharmacist but not a farm worker. They could offer inclusion to one white ally, but not to an entire group of Black activists. As Robert Moses later explained, the party was saying that the masses of poor and working class Black people could be the recipients of other people’s largesse, but not authors of their own fate. They could be represented by others, but were forbidden from represent- ing themselves.25

Yet despite the enormously powerful repressive forces arrayed against it, the radical edge of the Black Freedom Movement survived in dispersed sites and forms. Social crises are settled, but never completely solved. The terms of order authorized by temporary settlements never bring complete ideological closure.26 SAC exists today and poses a challenge to the contemporary common sense of neoliberalism precisely because it draws directly on the enduring influence of the Free Southern Theater (FST), one important 1960s institution that survived the closures of the era of repression and repudiation that took hold with the ascendancy of neoliberalism.

The pedagogy, perspectives, and practices of SAC are grounded in the Black Resistance Tradition of New Orleans, especially the “story circles” and attendant forms of improvisational co-creation pioneered by the FST, which started at Tou- galoo College in Mississippi in 1963, but moved its base of operations to New Orleans in 1966. In that era, the organizing efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) shook up social relations and fired up social imaginations in communities throughout the south. Suddenly, the old ways of doing things seemed obsolete and new ways of working seemed possible. Mass mobilization entailed a vortex of creativity that threw forth a wide array of new politics and polities, theologies and psychologies, pedagogies and aesthetic

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practices. In their work as field directors for SNCC organizing drives in Jackson, Mississippi, FST co-founders Doris Derby and John O’Neal had been eyewitnesses to the efflorescence of new desires, imaginations, and energies that the movement provoked. Along with their Tougaloo colleague Gilbert Moses, they sought to create a theater project that revolved around the democratic impulses of the move- ment.27 As Moses explained in a manifesto co-authored with Tom Dent and Richard Schechner, they believed that “There must be a form in which the theatri- cality of the black church, the black freedom movement, black music, black militancy—black power in its widest and deepest sense—can be made into myth, allegory, public performance.”28

The adjective “Free” in the FST referred both to the freedom movement at large and to the need for a theater free of white supremacist control and influence. The group’s founders also believed that performances should be free of charge so that poor and working class people would not have to pay a fee in order to be part of the theater experience. The modifier “Southern” signaled the group’s commitment to a particular constituency, to the sharecroppers, day workers, farmers, machine operators, truck drivers and domestics they encountered in SNCC organizing drives. These inflections of the adjectives “Free” and “Southern,” however, led to a modifi- cation of the noun “Theater.” Plays that spoke to the needs of rural southern Blacks had not yet been written. Performances aimed at a population dispersed throughout rural areas and under intense surveillance by white supremacists generally could not take place on stages in theaters but would have to be staged on an ad hoc and impromptu basis in churches, barns, and open fields. In order to reach the people, the artists needed to rethink the very concept of what theater is and what it can do and should do.

In the performances of the FST, the process became part of the product. Plays were not pure or autonomous works of art, but primarily served as provocations for public discussions. In a letter to group member (and later renowned television and film actor and novelist) Denise Nicholas in 1966, Tom Dent contended “Plays have a value in themselves, if for us, they deal challengingly with the reality of the black man in America. Plays then constitute a method by which an audience is forced to face up to a reality about itself, and if a play is good, then it illustrates before an audience a type of truth which cannot be stated as well any other way.”29 As they took the stage, FST performers informed the audience that “you are the actors.”30 They invited spectators to act and to interact, to engage with the play as it proceeded and to participate in discussions about it afterwards. These discussions often began with direct responses to the play, but quickly progressed to conversations about ideas significant to the social and historical conditions of life in the community. For example, a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Ruleville, Mississippi led activist, organizer and talented gospel singer Fannie Lou Hamer to observe

Every day we see men dressed just like these, sitting around the bars, pool halls and on the street corners waiting for something! They must be waiting for Godot. But you can’t sit around waiting. Ain’t nobody going to bring you nothing. You got to

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get up and fight for what you want. Some people are sitting around waiting for somebody to bring in Freedom just like these men are sitting here. Waiting for Godot.31

The intensity, clarity, and creativity of audience discussions led to the development of the story circle. The troupe initially performed plays they wrote themselves in addition to works by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Ossie Davis, Berthold Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. The eloquent and impassioned discussions that followed the performances, however, opened a door to a different possibility, to the audience collectively creating plays grounded in their own experiences and ideas. It was not just that people had memorable things to say, but rather that group discussion enabled them to take stock of their collective condition and linked fate. “Hearing is a creative act,” John O’Neal observed, “the listening is what gives definition to the story.”32

Sitting in a circle and successively telling stories resonated deeply with long estab- lished ways of knowing and ways of being in Black communities. In midnight prayer meetings and frolics staged in brush arbors (sometimes called hush harbors) on slave plantations, people from diverse African cultures fused themselves into a unified totality through the Ring Shout, an African form that survived in America. It served as a kind of lingua franca, a practice recognizable and valuable to people from dif- ferent regions who worshipped different deities and who remembered their ancestors in different languages, but who found common ground in the idea of a danced faith. The Ring Shout always moved in a counter-clockwise direction. It required everyone present to participate. Dancing together demanded coordinated movements to shift- ing rhythms constructed by the group as a whole. Chanting and singing produced both harmony and polyphony as diverse voices blended together differently each time songs were song. The ring shout was both spontaneous and patterned, both individually inflected and socially organized. Moving counter clockwise in a circle, members of the ring clapped and danced while improvising verses in call and response singing. Sterling Stuckey identifies the Ring Shout as not merely a perfor- mance practice, but as the core component of a distinctly Black epistemology central to the thought of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson.33

The artist-activists in the Free Southern Theater had been trained as actors, play- wrights, and directors. The process and products of the FST required them to rethink their previous identities and to develop new ones. The respect, humility, and friend- liness needed to forge reciprocal, trusting, and mutually accountable relations across lines of caste and class challenged the individualism of the dominant art tradition. As the FST became the foundation for a broader Black Arts movement grounded in southern communities, and conditions, participating artists began to see that their work more closely resembled the social relations of jazz musicians than those of thea- ter professionals. As Kalamu ya Salaam observes, the collective identity superseded but did not erase individual differences. “As far as we were concerned,” he recalls, “just as most people didn’t know the names of all the members in a big band, they didn’t need to know our names individually. The band was more important than the soloist, in fact, it was the band that provided the platform for the soloists to blow and

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develop—even the most novice poet could be accommodated and given room to recite at least one poem.”34

In creating SAC, Kalamu ya Salaam drew directly on the legacy of the FST. He had collaborated with Tom Dent in 1966 to create the community based writing and act- ing workshop BLAKARTSOUTH. Thirty years later, he brought the improvisational story circle pedagogy of that group and the FST into the first SAC classes as Frederick Douglass High School in the Ninth Ward. For two decades, SAC has challenged the exceptionality–disposability paradigm. It teaches students that not only that they can write, but that they must write. The project publishes books of writing by students and their community allies that circulate in the community, that sit proudly on family cof- fee tables, that are assigned as required reading in college courses. Students hold forth on topics ranging from the failure to implement fully the desegregation mandates of the Supreme Court’s Brown v, Board ruling to the positive and negative dimensions of gendered identities in their lives. They recover and recount lost histories of slave insurgencies and community mobilizations. They grapple honestly, realistically, and sometimes painfully with the vexed and vexing nature of gendered hierarchies and the contradictions of masculinity in community life. SAC also involves young people routinely in activist social movement struggles for justice as a routine part of their studies. The young people who participate in the classes run by SAC have skills, abilities, and ambitions that might enable them to secure the rewards of exceptional- ity, but the program encourages them to remain part of their community even as they critique it, to view their own fate as individuals as linked to the survival, dignity and democratic potential of Black people and of all people.

The harsh opposition between exceptionality and disposability that structures public education “reform” in New Orleans today evidences the enduring costs of the repression of the radical visions of 1960s the Black freedom movement and the ways in which the common sense of neoliberalism seeks to make new insurgencies unthinkable. As Lester K. Spence argues, neoliberal governmentality proceeds from unquestioned assumptions about the naturalness and fairness of the capitalist “market,” the value of competitive individualism and the substitution of private profit for public provision. Systemic social problems are attributed to the private and personal failings of unworthy individuals to be solved not by political deliberation and decision making but by a combination of external technocratic expertise and inter- nal self-management.35 In regard to race, this binary participates in a broader project of managerial multiculturalism that offers partial inclusion to some Black people in order to occlude, excuse and justify the impoverishment, immiseration, and subordination of the great majority of the poor and working class of all colors.36 Through this lens, the prominence of Barack Obama as one Black person in the White House erases the plight of the more than a million Black men and women locked up in the big house.37 The visibility of Oprah Winfrey as a Black woman with a net worth of three billion dollars diverts attention away from the twenty-three million Black women who have an aver- age net worth of less than one hundred dollars and a net worth of zero if they have children.38 People with problems are portrayed as if they are problems.

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Neoliberalism is thus not just a set of economic policies and assumptions. It is a social pedagogy that permeates every aspect of contemporary existence, from the cal- culated cruelties of social policy to the sadistic competitions and perpetual stokings of insatiable desires in popular culture, from the hostile privatism and defensive localism that pervades prosperous propertied suburbs to the insecurity, uncertainty, and unpredictability of low wage labor. Social practices, processes and institutions function as self-reproducing mechanisms designed to create not only market-oriented opinions and policies but market-oriented dispositions and personalities as well. Educational reform in New Orleans and other cities is designed to legitimate the sub- jection of people presumed to be failures who are unfit for freedom and to cultivate a subjectivity of apolitical self-absorption in those deemed to be winners.39 The peda- gogy of the FST and SAC represents the polar opposite of this perspective. Part of the purpose of the story circle is to learn to value others. “Listening is always more important than talking” in the story circle according to John O’Neal because “if you’re thinking about your story while someone else is telling theirs, you won’t hear what they have to say.”40 The respect that students gain for each other through this practice prepares them to extend it to others in their community in their social activism. In deepening their own personal capacities for critical thinking, creative problem solving and lifelong learning, the students also deepen their collective capacity for democratic deliberation and decision making. Reading historical accounts of previous Black struggles for freedom by slave rebels, maroons, and civil rights and black nationalist progenitors makes students question dominant ideas about failure and success. Com- menting on reading about Nat Turner and other enslaved insurrectionists, Adrinda Kelly writes in The Long Ride “There is no need for me to be ashamed. Slavery was not a passive institution, and mine is not a race of domesticated animals.”41

The distinction between exceptionality and disposability that guides top down edu- cational reform in New Orleans provides a template for an entire system organized around the imperatives of displacement, dispossession, deportation and incarceration. Neoliberalism punishes the poor. It promotes the secession of the successful from the commons. It fragments the public realm, evades collective accountability, and produces many of the very social problems it purports to solve. As economic theory and practice, neoliberalism privileges the desires of investors and owners over the needs of workers and consumers. It promotes the unfettered movement of capital across borders while restricting the migration of labor. Neoliberal policies transfer public resources into private hands, dismantle state funded social safety nets, reduce progressive taxes on wealth gained through corporate profits, inheritance, and capital gains while increasing regressive levies on wages, consumer purchases and user fees for state services. Often described inaccurately as a preference for “small government,” the neoliberal conjuncture in actuality requires “big government” to spend money on war, incarceration and subsidies to corporations, but insists on “small government” for the masses through reductions in social spending and barriers against efforts by municipalities, states, and nations to regulate or tax the businesses that make money in their jurisdictions.

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Neoliberal economic policies require ideological and political legitimation. They author and authorize a widely shared common sense about how the world works. The social warrant of neoliberalism conceives of society as an amalgam of atomized individuals engaged in a relentless zero sum competition. The neoliberal project needs to make inequality, exploitation and hierarchy seem natural, necessary, and inevitable. It elevates enmity, envy, and contempt for others over mutual recognition and respect. It substitutes individual consumer choice for collective political agency, and substitutes revenge for justice. It offers wealthy people the promise of personal autonomy free from any form of collective responsibility or accountability, while making benefits to middle class or poor students, teachers, workers and welfare recipients contingent on conforming to punitive, inflexible, and essentially rigged audit systems designed to excuse and justify their abandonment by the state.

Neoliberalism promises people prosperity but gives them only austerity. It priva- tizes reward but socializes risk. It offers the illusion of independence yet poisons the well from which we all must drink. It fails to fulfill the promises it makes, but these failures can never be allowed to be blamed on the system itself. The free market fundamentalism that guides neoliberalism has no falsifiable hypotheses. When neo- liberalism fails, the proposed solution is always more neoliberalism. As a result, a neoliberal society needs to find scapegoats, to deflect attention away from its own record. It stokes exaggerated fears of difference and mobilizes anger and resentment against vulnerable populations. It renders those most in need as disposable, displace- able, or deportable and then profits from their vulnerability, People who are locked out of opportunities because of the locked advantages of the rich are then locked up in prisons and jails. As Kalamu ya Salaam explains, under this system, people who control virtually nothing are blamed for virtually everything, while people who control virtually everything are blamed for virtually nothing.42

Ties to the legacies of BLAKARTS SOUTH, the FST, and the institutions and prac- tices that inspired them, position Students at the Center outside of market time and space. Their express commitment to the Black Resistance Tradition positions them as critics and opponents of neoliberalism’s pernicious simultaneous disavowal and deployment of racism. By focusing on market time rather than historical time and portraying deeply political problem as purely personal issues of self-management, neoliberalism relies on colorblindness and post-racialism. Yet the project of neoliber- alism requires the relentless deployment of racism, because in actual historical time the most effective way of delegitimizing public programs and institutions is to make them synonymous with people of color. Neoliberalism’s presumed anti-statism does not lead to challenges to state support and subsidies for corporate projects and profits. As Ian Haney Lopez demonstrates, it is an anti-statist whiteness that deploys opposi- tions between public and private, producer and parasite, exceptional and disposable as distinctly racialized metaphors.43 Contempt for aggrieved racialized communities provides neoliberalism with its prime justification and excuse. When neoliberalism fails to deliver its promised prosperity, autonomy, and stability, and it always fails, moral panics about the deficiencies of racialized others protect it from the scrutiny and accountability it constantly proclaims but never practices. The location of SAC

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in expressly racial histories and anti-racist practices distinguishing it as one of the fleetingly visible but powerfully instructive alternatives to the hegemony of neoliberal market time and place.

In promoting education for liberation rather than for mainstream socialization, by encouraging students to be people who lead rather than leave their communities, and by teaching students to compile portfolios of writing, co-author books, and engage in concrete struggles for social justice, SAC defies the dominant logics, imperatives and favored subject positions of neoliberalism. By pursuing a logic grounded in historical time and collective accountability, they are like to be illegible or deemed illogical by those in power. Yet they are not alone. In Los Angeles, homeless activists and advocates demand a role in urban planning for people without property and argue that the way to make downtown safer is to have less police presence and fewer arrests. In Houston, artists, activists, and community residents associated with Project Row Houses purchase and restore row houses not for resale but as residences for single mothers with children attempting to finish college. They argue that the use value to the neighborhood of meeting the desperate housing needs of women attempting to be educated and helping them raise their children in a safe and supportive environ- ment is more important than the profits they would make from the exchange value of these homes if they sold them and allowed the neighborhood to be gentrified.44

The calculated cruelty that permeates our society produces enormous suffering. It is depressing to consider the depths, duration and dimensions of white supremacy, of sexism, classism, imperialism and homophobia. But it is not at all depressing to realize that a new generation is on the scene armed with knowledge, a determination to struggle and the lessons learned from centuries of battles for survival, humanity and democracy.

Notes

1. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998). The plantation bloc supported the “southern strategy” that enabled Republican presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to win elections and implement policies that made national policies based on the plantation bloc’s views of civil rights laws, welfare policies, criminal justice and taxation. In the 1990s, the majority leader in the Senate was Republican Senator Trent Lott from Mississippi and the chair of the Repub- lican National Committee was former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. The bloc also promoted the electoral success of Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Wil- liam Clinton and their policies of “ending welfare as we know it,” mass incarceration, and deregulation.

2. Clyde Woods, “Concluding Remarks,” Reimagining the Global South Conference, Santa Bar- bara, CA, January 21, 2011; author’s notes.

3. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, “After neoliberalism: Analyzing the present,” Soundings 53 April (2013): 9; Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Poli- tics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 14 no. 3–4 (2012): 140.

4. Chandan Reddy, “Plenary Discussion,” Anti-racism Inc./Works Anti-conference, Santa Bar- bara, CA, May 16, 2014; author’s notes.

5. All student names used in this article are authors in books available to the public published or in press by Students at the Center.

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6. Christopher Burton, “Raising a Ruling Class,” in The Long Ride by Students at the Center, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 301.

7. Sadiq Watson, “Public Means for Everyone,” in The Long Ride, 2nd. ed., by Students at the Center (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 261.

8. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

9. Crystal Carr, “Separate But Equal,” in The Long Ride, 2nd ed., by Students at the Center (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 258.

10. Tricia Rose, “Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and the ‘Illegible’ Politics of (Inter)Personal Justice,” Kalfou 1 no. 1 (2014).

11. Author’s notes, March 24, 2014. New Orleans, Louisiana. 12. Ibid. 13. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 68. 14. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New

York: New Press, 2010). 15. All quotes from this correspondence are from the as yet uncontracted manuscript by Students

at the Center “Go to Jail” in the author’s possession. Quoted with permission from Students at the Center.

16. It is of course possible that the Orleans Parish School Board, which has allowed ninety percent of the public schools in New Orleans to be charter schools, will claim credit for the success of King and Alexander, and identify them as exceptional. They do have strong role models, however, in Ashley Jones and Mosi Makori, once students in the system who are now SAC teachers.

17. The phrase “to be more rather than to have more” comes from the martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

18. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 86.

19. Quote from Students at the Center, Go to Jail, manuscript in author’s possession. 20. All quotes in this section are from the author’s notes, March 24, 2014. New Orleans,

Louisiana. 21. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171. 22. Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 171. 23. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi

Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 140. 24. Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African-

American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 25. Freedom on My Mind, directed by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford (Clarity Educational

Productions, 1994). 26. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, “After Neoliberalism: Analyzing the

Present,” Soundings 53 April (2013): 20. 27. Catherine Michna, “’We Are Black Mind Jockeys’: Tom Dent, The Free Southern Theater,

and the Search for a Second-line Literary Aesthetic in New Orleans,” Journal of American Ethnic Literature 1 (2011): 56.

28. Gilbert Moses, Thomas C. Dent, and Richard Schechner, “Preface,” in The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater, ed. Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner (Indiana- polis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1969), xi.

29. Thomas C. Dent and Richard Schechner, editors, The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1969), 115–16.

30. Dent and Schechner, The Free Southern Theater, 24.

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31. John O’Neal, “Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theatre,” The Drama Review 12 no. 2 Summer (1968): 76.

32. Catherine Michna, “Stories at the Center: Story Circles, Educational Organizing, and Fate of Neighborhood Public Schools in New Orleans,” American Quarterly 61 no. 3 (2009): 539.

33. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford, 1987).

34. Michna, “’We Are Black Mind Jockeys,‘” 56. 35. Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black

Politics, Culture and Society, 14 no. 3–4 (2012): 153. 36. Reddy, “Plenary Discussion”; James Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multicultur-

alism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2004. 37. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “While we may have one Black man in the White House, we have one

million Black men in the big house,” quoted in Leewana Thomas, “American Studies Keynote Advocates Student Activism,” Mac Weekly, February 18, 2011.

38. Kimberly Gedeon, “Challenges Black Women Face in Wealth-Building,” Madame Noire April 9, 2015, http://madamenoire.com/524915/the-challenges-the-black-women-face-in-wealth- building/ (accessed May 27, 2015).

39. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” 153. 40. John O’Neal, “Guidelines for Story Circles” in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative

Transformation of Conflict, ed. Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutierrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker, Building Just and Inclusive Communities, vol. II (Oakland: New Village Press, 2011), 214.

41. Adrinda Kelly, “Resistance,” in The Long Ride by Students at the Center, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: Students at the Center, 2013), 50.

42. Kalamu ya Salaam, “Poetic Visions” (presentation, American Studies Association annual meeting, November 5, 2009; University of California Center for Black Studies Research), DVD.

43. Ian Haney Lopez, “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama,” California Law Review 98 no. 3 June (2010).

44. Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton, editors, Policing the Planet (New York: Routledge, 2016); George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 149–66.

About the Author

George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. His books include Midnight At The Barrelhouse (2010), Footsteps In The Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (2007), The Possessive Investment In Whiteness (2006), Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (2001), and A Life In The Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1995). Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin.

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