Zones of Nonbeing: Abjection,White Accumulation,and Neoliberal School Reform

Abjection and Zones of Nonbeing

They see in her an opportunity [emphasis in the original] . . . she is the ejection, the abjection, by, on, through, which the system reimagines and reconstitutes itself. (Sharpe, 2016, p. 29)

At the outset of “The Ship: The Trans*Atlantic,” the second chapter of Christina Sharpe’s (2016) groundbreaking text, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, she unpacks Sekula and Burch’s 2010 film, The Forgotten Space—A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea. Blending descriptive documentary with interviews, old footage, and stills, the film tells the story of “global capital and the wreckage it leaves in the wake” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 25). While the film details how capitalism capsizes the lives of many of its White subjects, Sharpe observes a central legacy of the sea that remains unexplored in the film, an absent presence—transatlantic slavery. In this space, Sharpe makes an intervention by foregrounding the life of Aereile Jackson, the film’s only Black speaking figure, who offers from a location of alterity the “deep hurt and deep knowledge” (p. 27) that such a site engenders.

In Sharpe’s assessment, Jackson’s suffering cannot be contained by and is inadequately addressed in the film. Jackson, a mother, referred to in the film as a “former mother,” now is homeless and has had her children stripped from her by an inhumane state—a state that cannot actually hold her humanity. Sharpe (2016, p. 27) asserts that, “Jackson appears only to be made to disappear . . . [h]er appearance in the film makes no sense within the logic of the film.” Yet Sharpe provides a rejoinder. Aereile Jackson’s life pulls together the sea, slave trade, and Black abjection. For Sharpe, Jackson’s life and the loss she experiences is a sine qua non for the structural violence that stitches together the fabric of anti-Blackness, rendering that which is Black as constitutive outside, as ejected, as excluded, as abject.

Abjection is to push aside and lower in status, to degrade (method); the condition of experiencing such abjection is to be abject (ontology). Casting Blackness as abject makes legible the movement of White capital and power. That is to say, by understanding Blackness as constituted as the abject in White perceptual and structural formations, one is able to not only trace the muted utterances of power but also understand its sadistic fascination with and parasitic reliance on Blackness. Blackness as abject is how White supremacy and dominance funds and constitutes itself, and as such outlines figurations of (hu)man and attendant distributions of power, privilege, and prestige.

In his discussion of abjection, Darieck Scott (2010) argues for us to read against history to understand how we might be able to find transformative potential in abjection in Black suffering. Scott suggests that in the obvious defeat of abjection there remains an undefeatedness that can be instructive, one that gestures toward other forms of power, resistance, and pleasure. Although Scott’s central argument resides in rethinking abjection, he critically states,

Abjection establishes itself in the development of subject-object relations: the subject is produced by relation with objects, as the two mutually bring one another into being. Abjection is experienced in the realm where the development of object relations is belayed or strays—thus preventing, even if only transiently, the subject from making its “normal” appearance. Abjection is part of the process of becoming a subject . . . (D. Scott, 2010, p. 15)

This subject–object relationship is central when considering dynamics of power and how abjection becomes constituted in the structuration of race and the resulting stratifications. The Black abject becomes that which is forced aside/outside for the healthy constitution of the White subject. The abject troubles and disturbs the system while simultaneously being one of the system’s central fabrications (Kristeva, 1982). The abject provides stability for the subject and an always already object for utilization, which may shift based on the needs of power.

As object, the Black abject becomes privy to the imagination of the White subject. Because abjection has been ingrained in Western regimes of thought and practice, it seems removed from the visible racio-capitalist projects that result in gratuitous violence (Lawrence, 2008; Wilderson, 2010). Yet abjection is not merely an abstract process with no ties to actual bodies. Broeck (2014) reframes Black abjection by focusing on what she terms “white abjectorship.” In doing so, Broeck recalibrates the analytical focus from Black suffering to White enactments and reproductions that enable Black suffering. Her recasting ensures that the “disappearance of the white European role in modern transatlantic enslavism” is not normalized, as if Black abjection just happens naturally. Broeck (2014) notes,

European modernity as an empowering fiction, and the free and bordered European subject as humanist telos, rose to prominence in early modernity as a tool of political and epistemic self-empowerment of European white men and eventually also white women. This process itself was structurally contingent on transatlantic enslavism which constituted African populations, under that European subject’s reign, as a fundamental category of thingbeings categorized as un-human, which existed outside the victorious European humanist scheme of sociability. Enslavism, that is, provided the grounds which enabled the white European subject to “invent the n—-,” as James Baldwin so aptly phrased it . . . That “n—-”—in a valid one-for-all signification of abjection—has figured for the human as the state of sentient being which the human has kept struggling successfully not to become, to never to be turned into, or to distance oneself from. (p. 117)

This mode of racialized classification and social organization has persisted since the advent of White European colonialism, as well as the Enlightenment period and beyond (Wynter, 1995). Importantly, as a regime of truth, it arranges social interactions and phenomena, relying on the abjection of Black people for system stability, operation, and maintenance. This is critical as normative white gauges of humanity are predicated on this model, which differentiates between subject and object, self, and other (Ansfield, 2015).

Frantz Fanon (1952/2008) addresses the abjection and ontological capture that is embedded in Eurocentric regimes of truth, which create borders around the human that are made possible by the fictions of race that maintain White supremacy and dominance (Martinot, 2010). In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon goes on to note, “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge” (p. xii). As a “veritable hell” (p. xii), the zone of nonbeing, with its necessary “zone of being,” becomes a central perceptual and political frame for understanding the organization and ultimate distribution of humanity within White capitalist power structures. The devaluation of Blackness allows for the gluttony of Whiteness to extract value, wealth, meaning, power, prestige, and a host of other accumulations from supposedly nonvaluable bodies. Those in the zone of nonbeing ultimately are constructed structurally as inferior and subpersons, severed from full humanity, abjected and suspended in “social death” and political precariousness (Patterson, 1982), such that Blackness is “denied humanity and thus ineligible for full citizenship and regard within the polity” (Dumas, 2016, p. 12).

Fanon’s zone of nonbeing and its connection to abjection are central in our understanding of educational degradation and current manifestations and formations of power. These zones are a founding Western structural antagonism that serves as a prerequisite for White accumulation, dominance, and gauges of humanity. The violence of accumulation, be it symbolic or material, is made possible by a tacit or explicit—but nonetheless understood and enacted—engagement with the zone of nonbeing. This zone allows for the rejection of any true ethical commitment with/to the abjected. As Mills (1997) has reminded us with “subpersonhood” and Dumas (2016) with “nonhumanness of the Black,” those located in the zone of nonbeing, abjected, have inferior or nonexistent rights and liberties. As such, educational degradation, dispossession, and suffering become both possible and animated because “it is possible to get away with doing things to subpersons that one could not do to persons” (Mills, 1997, p. 57). The prerequisite zone of nonbeing enables White accumulation by abjecting Black people from the sphere of humanity; it lubricates the diurnal frictions of racial antagonisms; it preconditions conditions.

Using this frame for understanding the interwoven relationship of Black abjection and White abjectorship, I next move to discuss the specific contexts of New Orleans educational reform. This contextual backdrop illustrates how Blackness is rendered unnecessary to the “body politic,” yet vital to processes of White accumulation as the city and her inhabitants—constructed as Black abjects—were acted upon to further White capitalist expansion.

Contextual Considerations: New Orleans as Neoliberal Educational Laboratory

Hurricane Katrina has been described as a “destabilizing event” (Brunsma et al., 2010). New Orleans continues to experience destabilization and disaster. The hurricane resulted in the death of over 1,800 people, significant structural damage to the city, and an ongoing cycle of “secondary disasters,” such as the amplified loss of wages for New Orleanian workers, which increased levels of child poverty (Shrinath et al., 2014); reduced housing spaces for low-income individuals (Adams, 2013; Arena, 2012); exorbitant rates of incarceration and linkages to the prison industrial complex for Black people (Chang, 2013); and the abrading of Black New Orleanian culture and mores (Buras, 2015; Dyson, 2007; Edney, 2006). At the same time, the natural and constructed disasters of Katrina have provided opportunities for redevelopment and capital accumulation, rooted in neoliberal rationalities that are informed by White abjectorship (Adams, 2013; Johnson, 2011). White abjectorship affects not only corporealities but also space and geographies (Ansfield, 2015; Pulido, 2016). New Orleans as an endarkened space, as a Black geography, is a racialized site that makes apparent the link between Blackness and dispossession. In fewer words, it connects neoliberalism, the right to the city, and the possessors of such right (Lipman, 2011).

Cedric Johnson (2011) notes, “Neoliberalism is a form of world-making predicated on the abatement of labor rights, social provision, public amenities, environmental regulation, and other artifacts of social democracy deemed impediments to capital accumulation” (xxi). Neoliberalism rearticulates democracy as an economic concept, understands competition as superior to cooperation, orchestrates shifts from democratically elected “government” entities toward “governance” entities and boards selected by elite actors, and disposes of “surplus” bodies no longer needed for accumulation or signifies bodies as desirous sites for accumulation (Apple, 2006; Gilmore, 2007; Henry, 2016; Lipman, 2011). Neoliberalism as the ideal method of change, social organization, and governance ultimately is a plan of redistribution, and more precisely the compounding of power to elite, White actors and entities. As part of a redistribution scheme, new markets are projected, opened, and sustained, often under “creatively destructive” and “disastrous” circumstances (Harvey, 2007; Klein, 2008).

As such, New Orleans represented a prime space for the unfolding of neoliberal restructuring and a continuation of the market-based movement in education, which had already been under way in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia (Dixson et al., 2014). Key architect of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, in a 2005 Wall Street Journal piece declared,

Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.

While the city was decimated by Hurricane Katrina with most of her inhabitants still dispersed across the United States and therefore with little knowledge of and muted voice regarding the political winds that whirled, local and national business and political elites began cultivating and creating new political dynamics for city schools (Buras, 2015). Indeed, a radical reform was under way in New Orleans, which shifted the terrains of public education.

Proponents of neoliberal, market approaches to education had tried unsuccessfully prior to Katrina to advance a voucher program in the Louisiana legislature. Despite this obvious setback in 2003, two years before Katrina, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 9. ¹ This consequential act created the Recovery School District (RSD), which serves as a conduit institution for the takeover of schools legislatively contrived as failing (Buras, 2015). The RSD would absorb schools that fell below a threshold on their School Performance Score (SPS), which was based on student performance on state-mandated tests.

By fall 2005, after Katrina, several policy shifts were unfolding. At the federal level, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, under the Bush administration, released funds nearing $20 million to help create charter schools with no equivalency offered to traditional public schools (Cook & Dixson, 2013; Newmark & DeRugy, 2006). At the state level, Act 35 significantly altered the calculus for determining if a school would be subsumed within the RSD. The Act raised the standard of success from an original score of 60 to 87.4 on the school performance matrix, and this nearly 30-point jump forced more schools in New Orleans under the control and purview of the RSD. ² Eighty percent of the New Orleans legislators in the Louisiana state legislature voted against what they understood as a hostile takeover of public schools in New Orleans (Cook & Dixson, 2013).

Beyond Act 35 and the narrow funneling of money for charter schools, two other policy events took place that created an atmosphere conducive to neoliberal approaches in education. In 2005, then state governor Kathleen Blanco issued Executive Orders 58 and 79, which eliminated preexisting charter school laws that required parental, faculty, and staff votes of approval before a school could be taken over as a charter. In addition, veteran educators of New Orleans, nearly 75% of whom were Black (Buras, 2015), were constructed as “criminal” and summarily dismissed, creating one of the largest displacements of Black educators since Brown v. Board of Education (1954) (Henry, 2016; Henry & Dixson, 2016). With the RSD taking control of a majority of the schools, teachers’ contracts were nullified. Not only did the mass firing eliminate the pedagogical expertise of Black teachers in schools, but it also effectively dismantled the teachers’ union, inhibiting Black wealth creation in New Orleans post-Katrina (Henry, 2016). These overwhelmingly Black educators were replaced with temporary teachers associated with market-based programs such as Teach for America and The New Teacher Project (Kretchmar et al., 2014).

The above contextual history illustrates the maneuvers that took place to create New Orleans as a neoliberal educational laboratory. These legislative initiatives privileged market-based practices and created opportunities for the expansion and proliferation of charter schools and other market mechanisms and rationalities, such as the emphasis on high-stakes testing, de-professionalization of teaching and reliance on temporary teachers, and the dismembering of labor protections. Lipman (2011) and others have articulated that a core feature of neoliberal reforms is that of “accumulation by dispossession,” the feasting on, utilization of, and profiting from assets that were designated for one group by another more powerful group (Au & Ferrare, 2015; Harvey, 2005; Henry, 2016, 2019). Critically, these reforms have been understood as an assault on Black New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, robbing this community of resources, democratic representation, and respect (Dixson et al., 2015). As such, the post-Katrina restructuring remains contested, riddled with racial antagonisms.

Method

Primary data for this article was drawn from a larger critical race qualitative case study on the charter authorization process in post-Katrina New Orleans. The study analyzed how Whiteness was reproduced and solidified in the restructuring of New Orleans public education. The study included 26 participants who were selected based on their connection to the authorization process (i.e., applicants, reviewers, district-level administrators, or local stakeholders with in-depth knowledge and experience with charter schools). Participants engaged in semi-structured interviews, ranging from 60 to 90 min. Initial interviews were coded using a priori, critical race theory codes and both deductive and inductive data-driven codes (Crabtree & Miller, 1992; Creswell, 2013). Additional archival documents such as advertisements for charter schools, notices for community and school board meetings, promotional materials from approved schools, as well as blog and journalistic accounts were collected.

For the purposes of this article, I share and analyze narratives from interviews, as well as youth digital narratives to illuminate the ways in which abjection and the zone of nonbeing operate. All study participants’ names are pseudonyms. Names from the Rethink New Orleans blog and Our New Orleans report are listed as they appear in the text. I have decided to utilize various sources of data, not to confuse or be undisciplined in approach, but rather in an effort to trace the often hidden, yet palpably felt movements of power. Not only do these various sources come together to help crystallize the movements of power, but they also illustrate the performative and textual efforts of resistance that Black people have long employed. In this way, I’ve engaged in a type of nomadic method, never settling in one place, moving from interview data to digital text, from source to source. A nomadic method reflects that as power moves, so too must we.

Finally, I must acknowledge that surviving Hurricane Katrina and the later restructuring of New Orleans have shaped and animated my research interests. As a native New Orleanian, I have experienced the post-Katrina educational restructuring first as a student in one of our city’s first schools to reopen and be converted to a charter, then as a preservice teacher, then a volunteer, and now as a researcher. These intimate experiences propel and inform my scholarship.

Hinging on Humanity? Degrading the “Abject” . . .

In this section, I want to highlight the various narratives that illuminate what I mean to suggest by abjection and zones of nonbeing as linked to Anyon’s observation of degradation. These frames help to situate mechanisms of educational degradation as necessary in racialized capital’s quest for expansion. The frames become most enunciated in the structural realignment of schools as charters, mapping onto the lives of Black children, parents, and educators in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, I have tried to demonstrate how anti-Black inequity is reproduced in the reconstitution of public schools as neoliberal charter schools in New Orleans. More precisely, I have attempted to extend Jean Anyon’s scholarship on the political economy of education, by focusing on the entanglement of race and political economy. I illuminate the everyday, taken-for-granted realities of degradation and dispossession that Black people experience. Moreover, in extending her work, I have also attempted to lay bare the logics of dispossession (abjection and zones of nonbeing) that undergird the political economy of market-based education reform. The neoliberal restructuring of New Orleans public schools and the subsequent effects of that restructuring on Black populations is the central focus of this article, and my chief argument is that neoliberal charter school reforms in post-Katrina New Orleans are sites of abjection for Black youth, parents, and educators. I have attempted to situate the degradation that Black people experience as connected to abjection and what Fanon terms “the zone of nonbeing.” In many ways, the degradation of Black people is a normalized aspect of Western power arrangements. In situating Black people within this zone of nonbeing as abjects, the conservation, consolidation, and cohering of White dominance (both symbolic and material) and expansion of capital becomes significantly easier. In other words, White actors are able to get away with both degrading and dispossessing Black communities because Black people are constructed as abject and located within the zone of nonbeing, as the above narratives illustrate.

Anyon’s scholarship attends to race by focusing on the deep economic and political structures that delimit (Black) mobility and reproduce inequality in a society structured in dominance. This project is critical as class domination often remains ignored and unengaged. Yet we must question how such a reproduction is made possible. Why is it that capital accumulation most assuredly and consistently occurs on the backs of Black people and other people of color? Such questions guide us beyond economic reductionism and traditional Marxian analysis that assumes an all-encompassing economic “base” (Hall, 1980; Mills, 2017). In extending Anyon’s analysis, I am suggesting that we must confront the co-rooting of White dominance and capitalism in U.S. society. While each formation—race and class oppression—has specificities and articulations that cannot and should not be easily collapsed into each other, these articulations talk through and to each other, “bringing white supremacy and capitalist accumulation together in a single dialectic” (Brown & De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 585).

In the narrative data that span across three central domains in K–12 education—parental relations, classroom interactions/pedagogical negotiations, and labor issues—the abjection of Black populations coincides with the expansion of neoliberal charter regimes. For instance, the way that Jasmine is castigated and seen through deficit perspectives not only abrades whatever positive relationship could have existed between her and her child’s teacher, but it also strengthens already-existing power imbalances. Similarly, the abjection evident in the student narratives illustrates how neoliberal restructuring is concerned with controlling the minds and bodies of Black youth. By controlling the corporeal functions and the physical presentations of youth, as well as committing epistemic violence in the form of culturally irrelevant pedagogy and curricula, neoliberal charter expansion exacerbates long-standing inequities. Neoliberal educational reform corresponds to the already-existing and mutating dictates of a racio-capitalist state and market. Finally, when considering Black educators who were summarily dismissed and replaced with non-union educators, often associated with Teach for America, it is clear that the Black educators’ abjection was necessary in the expanding of markets under presumed austerity and reform. This should pose a problem for neoliberal education advocates, as they link market reform to the Civil Rights Movement (J. Scott, 2013). Each of these aforementioned examples illustrates the interplay of everyday capitalism and White dominance, linked to enunciated racial abjection. It’s the normalized, taken-for-granted degradation.

The banality of Black degradation is often overlooked precisely because Black people are constructed and understood as abjects within White imaginaries and a structural arithmetic that has yet to fully add our humanity to the equation. Moreover, to be located in the zone of nonbeing is to be ontologically captured in a space, under conditions not of one’s choosing. Ontological capture renders one abject and situated as object, as thing, as property, as animal, as fungible, as surplus, as anything but a human subject. This racialized classification system has been written into capitalism’s coding and operation since its inception (Robinson, 2000).

As such, neoliberalism rearticulates and refashions anti-Black modalities that were concretized in Enlightenment theories about the “savage” and “other” (those in the zone of nonbeing/the abject). Therefore, the “neo” in neoliberalism is crucial as it is predicated on older liberal regimes that were unable/unwilling to hold the humanity of Black people in the liberal project (Losurdo, 2011). These ontological constructions and categorizations overlay the material manifestations of degradation that lubricate capital’s expansion and extension. The social ontology of race becomes linked to the quotidian indignities of oppression. That is to say, as Mills (2017) has noted, “race functions as a ‘materially embedded’ moral category, signifying membership or nonmembership in the subset of humans recognized as fully human, and linked to the materialist political economy of Euro-domination” (p. 8). As with liberalism, neoliberalism relies on the nexus of racism and capitalism—to say nothing of patriarchy and heteronormativity—for its formation and articulation (Camp, 2016). ⁴ The neoliberal restructuring of New Orleans education after Hurricane Katrina illustrates how abjection and zones of nonbeing form a guiding constellation for the accumulation and solidification of White power and capital. At both symbolic and material levels, the dismantling of Black space, hollowing of the public sphere and reconstitution of schools in the form of charters, displacement of Black educators and reworking of labor conditions, as well as the policing of Black youth, all illustrate how White power and capital are tacitly or explicitly solidified.

Those located in the zone of nonbeing are relegated to an abject status in both political and libidinal economies. Such a positioning makes possible the dispossession and attendant accumulations that result from it (Harvey, 2004; Henry, 2016; Lipman, 2011). More simply, capital accumulation and power solidification among Whites requires the parasitic feasting on Black people, a type of eating away of humanity—dehumanization (Henry, 2016; Woodard, 2014). ⁵ Ultimately, one can consider being socially located in the zone of nonbeing, with degraded, abjected humanity, as necessary for the racial capitalism of the neoliberal project.

With such a focus on the recalcitrance of degradation, abjection, and the zone of nonbeing, readers may be concerned with what all of this means in a “nice field like education” (Ladson-Billings, 1998). First, the voices of youth offer not only critiques of the current system, but ways forward in constructing our schools as humanizing sites. As Big Sister Love Rush reminds us, “Youth are the experts and we deserve to be treated like we are.” Second, I would caution readers to meditate on the longue durée of White supremacist capitalism, the economies of racism, that pervade almost every page of U.S. history, often foreclosing on and resisting efforts of redistribution and equity for Black people. In so doing, educators, administrators, policymakers, and researchers will have to grapple with what critical race theorists suggest is the permanence of racism and what others argue is the afterlife of slavery (Bell, 1992a; Hartman, 2007). This grappling would entail a fundamental skepticism toward the state and deep acknowledgment of anti-Blackness in policy, pedagogy, and markets. Moreover, such a grappling would suggest a need for more robust, transformative, coordinated efforts in the institution of education and other institutions. In addition, those committed, like Anyon, to understanding the political economy of education and capitalism’s reach must recall what Marx (1967) has aptly pointed out, that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black skin it is branded” (p. 329). The aforementioned, taken together, may engender new possibilities for education. Ultimately, I am reminded of the words of legal scholar Derrick Bell (1992b) who wrote, “We must realize, as our slave forebears, that the struggle for freedom is, at bottom, a manifestation of our humanity that survives and grows stronger through resistance to oppression, even if that oppression is never overcome” (p. 378).