Economy & Pedagogy: Laboring to Learn in Camden County, North Carolina

Abstract

This paper explores one interview participant's performances of memory as didactic efforts to resist a diverse range of public memories concerning school segregation and desegregation in rural North Carolina. By exploring Mr. Charlie's narratives, this essay provides critical insight into the articulations between capitalism, education, and white privilege, frayed by local resistant memories and community praxis. Mr. Charlie's memories provide the opportunity to reimagine received traditions of race, education, and equality as marked by alternate forms of economic and social relations. Specifically, he articulates a gray education and gray market, and their place outside of traditional white pedagogy and the capitalist economy. These gray pedagogies and economies present larger implications for the ways race has crossed all of our paths.