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

Abstract

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.