Neoliberalizing race? Diverse youths’ lived experiences of race in school choice

Abstract

Critical racial studies of school choice elucidate the worsening effects of school choice policy on racial segregation in diversifying cities around the world. This paper contributes to this scholarship by illuminating how a neoliberal education policy of school choice has created racial divisions in new ways in a settler-colonial city. It focuses on how neoliberal education reform of school choice reconfigures and reifies race as a socially and spatially constructed category, fixing the racial identities of youths. I apply critical theories of race, space and youth to examine how diverse youths make sense of, and negotiate, race within and between schools in making “choices” in the local context of a historically racialized urban geography. This paper shows that neoliberal reforms of education do not erase, but rather reconstruct, racial identities and divisions by shedding light on 59 students’ (ages 11–19) accounts of racial exclusion and their constructions of new racial stereotypes in the processes and outcomes of school choice.