Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of Neoliberalism

Quality education in the United States has been compromised via public discourses that reinstitute racism on a daily basis. In its current manifestation, racism survives through the guise of neoliberalism, a kind of repartee that imagines human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship and agency being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility. In this article, I examine briefly the changing nature of the new racism by analyzing how some of its central assumptions evade notions of race, racial justice, equity, and democracy altogether. My analysis focuses especially on the discourse of color blindness and neoliberal racism. I then address how the racism of denial and neoliberal racism were recently on prominent display in the controversies surrounding former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's praise for segregationist Strom Thurmond. The essay concludes by offering some suggestions about how the new racism, particularly its neoliberal version, can be addressed as both a pedagogical and a political issue.