Pitch Black: How design entrepreneurs are rethinking race in post‐Katrina schools

Abstract

Putting anthropologists of design in conversation with Black studies, this article demonstrates how a group of repentant education entrepreneurs in post‐Katrina New Orleans mobilized racialized affective and narrative surplus within an information economy based on design rituals and protocols. I examine how this splinter group of education reformers established design communities through ritualized “pitches” and show how the egalitarian aspirations of designers rely on forms of empathetic erasure rooted in narratives of spectacular violence and universalist assumptions about the motivations, behaviors, and capacities of so‐called users and so‐called designers. While it is easy to laud the “empathy principles” of design thinking for taking seriously the agency and intellectual capacity of its racialized “users,” this article shares anti‐Blackness theorists’ skepticism of liberal humanization projects and is concerned with the burdens that the relationship between designers and users entails. What is the human at the center of design? Humanity here is not a shared essence, nor an egalitarian relation, but in this instance marks a process through which surplus affect and the spectacle of Blackness is instrumentalized and transmuted into racial capital.