Mothering and the Racialised Production of School and Property Value in New York City

Abstract

This article explores middle-class mothers' labours associated with relocating for a "good school" in NYC as they navigated the material and ideological structures of scarcity related to its highly unequal school system. Based on ethnographic research with a diverse group of women in a middle-class area, I document the multiple ongoing labours associated with this "choice", and trace how the neoliberal education complex (that includes testing and real estate industries, and school rating websites) compels women to perform them. Through the lenses of Marxist feminism and racial capitalism, I demonstrate how these labours produce school and property value that reinscribe race onto space. While middle-class women are disciplined and their labours coerced, their labours are routed to dispossess working-class communities of colour, and reproduce the racial hierarchy of human-ness on which capital depends. This article underscores the role of gender and race-making in middle-class reproduction, and their linkage to elite accumulation and working-class dispossession.

Holding hope: Financial coaching and the depoliticisation of poverty

“…So while Kathy may earnestly believe that the current economic system can and will work for her client, someday, Bonds' writing on the role of white women in ‘nurturing’ a racialised economy and society can help us understand the institutional role of financial coaches, and how they normalise poverty as they individualise their clients' hardships. Indeed, through close attention to the seemingly benevolent practices of non‐profit professionals, the marshalling of hope can be understood as a mundane interaction that is part of the imperceivable conditions that constitute and maintain broader systems of exploitation, oppression, and violence, even – or perhaps especially – within a context of feminised care (Kromidas, 2021; Pallister‐Wilkins, 2021; Woodward, 2021). Coach and client are thus inextricably bound – not through the promise of hope that seems to orient the relationship, but rather through the function of hope in normalising the material conditions of impoverishment and encouraging participation in and allegiance to the contemporary economy.…”

Schooling in the University Town: The Racial Capitalist Foundations of Education

“…Liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill saw education as a crucial pathway for individuals to participate in liberal society as “competent agents” (Lowe 2015:112). Scholars focusing on education have demonstrated how schooling and education reforms can facilitate the necessary conditions for anti‐Black racial capitalist restructuring of communities (Ewing 2018; Huff 2015; Kromidas 2022; Lipman 2011; Shange 2019). Du Bois theorised racial capitalism and schooling as “caste education” and the public education system as “one of the most important sites of caste reconstruction necessary for producing racial and economic competition between the White and non‐White worlds” (Pierce 2017:24).…”

Social Reproduction

“…Elite women, for instance, also devote unrecognised, unwaged labour to their families. But the goal of this labour is to ensure that their children get into the best schools and preserve their privileges (Glucksberg 2018;Kromidas 2021). Factory working men, in turn, must negotiate shift work to assume some of the unwaged reproductive labour that their working wives cannot undertake (Sabaté 2016).…”