Racial Control and Student Labor

The exploitation of labor has occupied a central role in historical analysis of race and racism. But when considering schooling as a site of institutional racism, the exploitation of student labor is seldom taken seriously. This is even more surprising given the extent to which schooling-in particular K-12 public education-is organized around the efficient extraction of student work, and the amount of thought that goes into maximizing productivity, achievement, and success. In this paper, I discuss schooling in two ways: as an institution of racial control and as a structure of labor exploitation. I first review problems with dominant scholarship dealing with economic reproduction in schooling before highlighting the historical dimensions of schooling as a site of racial labor exploitation. Next, I describe the utilities (corporate and social) of student labor in contemporary racial capitalism. Finally, I suggest that looking at schooling as a site of labor exploitation, enables us to locate a "general strike" -that is, the ways in which students of color refuse and disrupt the daily operations of an oppressive structure. Such an analysis encourages teachers to reimagine classroom management to: (a) read student disruption and refusal as a radical and political move toward freedom, and (b) cede the means of production of schooling to the students themselves. This is necessary, I argue, to produce a truly transformational and liberatory educational space.