Segregation, the "Black Spatial Imagination," and Radical Social Transformation

Abstract

This response discusses the complexity of racial segregation in U.S. cities today and an emerging education movement for equity and racial justice. Racial segregation has been and continues to be a potent, and contested, strategy of containment, subordination, and exploitation, but African Americans have also, out of necessity, turned racial segregation into collective survival, radical solidarity, resistance, and counter-hegemonic economic and social relations. New geographies of racial containment, exclusion, and incorporation in the neoliberal, postindustrial city have spawned a new antiracist, antineoliberal education movement. While people of color have the right to live and attend school anywhere, African American and other parents and students of color are concretely fighting against racist school closings and for equitable public schools in their neighborhoods as part of the battle against displacement and dispossession. I argue that the campaign for sustainable community schools and the program of transformative policy reforms in the Platform of the Movement for Black Lives exemplify a move toward an anticapitalist, antiracist vision of radical economic and political democracy and self-determination.