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

Claire Cahen

Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, 2023, vol. 4, issue 2, 153-175

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.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/26884674.2023.2168220

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