Urban Students’ Critical Race–Class Narratives: An Examination of the Relationship Between Race and Class Within the Context of Punitive School Discipline

Abstract

Background/Context: In the wake of the 1994 national call for zero tolerance and the growth of school policing programs in the United States throughout the 1990s and 2000s, an abundance of research has demonstrated that Black and Latinx students are disproportionately targeted for suspension and expulsion from school, and students of color, particularly those attending racially segregated schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, are substantially more likely to be subjected to daily policing and arrests. In addition, there is a significant body of critical scholarly work that examines the larger social–historical context of punitive school discipline and policing. Such studies illuminate the historical and structural underpinnings that give rise to punitive school discipline and reveal how school discipline policies have become an extension of the societal project of mass incarceration and aggressive policing in high poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods in the United States and elsewhere. Existing critical studies of school discipline and policing generally acknowledge both the race and class dimensions of punitive discipline. However, most critical studies tend to situate punitive school discipline and policing in either a political economic or a critical race analysis, so they do not necessarily provide insight into the specific ways students’ class positions and racial identities work together to shape their experiences of punitive discipline, schooling, and a racialized political economy. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article offers an analysis of ways that students in a racially segregated urban high school with punitive disciplinary practices narrate their understandings of the impact of race and political economy on their experiences of schooling, the labor market, and policing in and out of school. The author, building on the political economic analyses of Jean Anyon, argues that the students’ “critical race–class narratives” offer important theoretical and practical insights into the ways social class and race intersect to shape students’ experiences of schooling and policing in urban schools. Research Design: This analysis draws on a previously published critical ethnographic study of school policing in a racially segregated high school in a high-poverty Bronx, New York, neighborhood. The larger study examined students’ lived experiences of school policing and the ways that order-maintenance-style street-policing tactics inside the school worked to funnel students into the criminal justice system, often for minor school infractions. The investigation also revealed a disinvestment in educational interventions and counseling services in favor of a social-control approach in the school. For this study, the author revisits the interview data with four key research participants to gain insight into the interconnectedness of race and class oppression within the students’ lived experience of schooling, policing, and the labor market. In addition, drawing on critical (Marxian) education theory, critical race theory, and historical analyses in the Black radical tradition, the author analyzes the students’ critical race–class narratives with the aim of contributing to a more integrated theory of race and political economy in educational research. Findings: The author identifies two interrelated narrative strategies used by the students as they discussed their experiences of racial oppression and economic exclusion. Specifically, students provided an integrated critical race–class analysis through the use of a collective frame and the use of spatial terms to describe their experiences. As they spoke in collective and spatialized terms about their local and immediate lived experiences of education, discipline, and the labor market, the students’ conceptualizations of race and class became fused. Their use of the word “ghetto,” for example, signified both a racialized and a social class experience. The author argues that the students’ narrative strategies reflect historical analyses within the Black radical tradition that reveal how race and racism are constructed to support the rise of capitalism. Conclusion: First, the critical race–class narratives of young people living in ghettoized neighborhoods and attending racially segregated schools can serve as an important starting point for examinations of contemporary mechanisms of social reproduction as well as the resistance practices, resilience, cultural resources, and lived experiences of students of color in urban schools. The narratives can hold urban education scholars who tend to dismiss the centrality of race or skirt around the dire impact of neoliberal capitalist political economy accountable to the lived realities of the students they study. Second, critical urban education researchers must recognize the tremendous significance of penal control and what it signifies in the lives of racialized youth in urban areas.