What’s Race Got To Do With It?

The first edition of What’s Race Got to Do With It (2015) addressed a moment when those working on the ground—activists, educators, young people, and families—were trying to understand and fight back against neoliberal education reforms (e.g., high stakes testing, school closings, and charter schools), while uncovering what race had to do with it all in the context of a supposedly post-racial United States. In the years since, the steady and grounded work of social movements has increased the visibility and critique of privatization, market-based reforms, and segregation; demonstrating the interlocking connections between racism and capitalism. In this period we have also seen an intensified attack on public education (alongside other public infrastructures) and a return to a more overt "racism as we knew it." This new edition of What’s Race continues the examination of neoliberal education reforms as they are being rolled back (or reworked) to track the changes and continuities of recent years—revealing the ways in which market-driven education reforms work with and through race—and share grassroots stories of resistance to these reforms. It is hoped that this new edition will continue to sharpen readers’ analyses concerning what we are working to defend and what we are working to transform, and provides a guide to action that emboldens the collective struggle for justice.

Edwin Mayorga is Assistant Professor of Educational Studies and Latin American/Latinx Studies at Swarthmore College. He is completing his first book, Dominance and Sobrevivencia: The Barrio and Latinx Education in the Midst of Racial Capitalist Urbanism. Ujju Aggarwal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School. She is completing her first book, The Color of Choice: Raced Rights and the Structure of Citizenship in Education, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States. Bree Picower is Associate Professor at Montclair State University. She is the author of Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets and co-editor of Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Counternarratives of Critical Practice.