Berkeley Review of Education

The exploitation of labor has occupied a central role in historical analysis of race and racism. In considering schooling as a site of institutional racism, however, the exploitation of student labor is seldom considered seriously. This is all the more surprising given the extent to which school is organized around the efficient extraction of student work, and the amount of thought which goes into maximizing productivity, achievement, and success. Here, I discuss schooling in two ways: first, as an institution of racial control; second, as a structure of labor exploitation. I first discuss problems with dominant scholarship dealing with economic reproduction in schooling, and then highlight the historical dimensions of schooling as a site of racial labor exploitation. Next, I describe the utilities (corporate and social) of student labor in contemporary racial capitalism. Finally, I suggest that looking at schooling as a site of labor exploitation enables us to locate a ‘general strike’––that is, the ways in which students of color refuse and disrupt the daily operations of an oppressive structure. Such an analytic encourages teachers to reimagine classroom management in order to: (1) read student disruption as a radical and political move toward freedom; and (2) cede the means of production of schooling to the students themselves. This is necessary, I argue, in order to produce a truly transformational and liberatory educational space.