A market for civil rights: whiteness as property, colorblindness, and the rhetoric of school choice

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I focus on the advocacy of Betsy DeVos as a prominent exemplar of a larger trend among U.S. pro-market education advocates asserting school choice as a contemporary stage of the nation’s long struggle for civil rights. I argue that as DeVos championed her cause, she repurposed this right from a civil right seeking justice and equality to a property right serving privilege and the protection of whiteness as property. Engaging the foundational work of Cheryl Harris on whiteness as property, I explicate whiteness as property as a critical resource for rhetorical scholarship that illuminates the mutually reinforcing dynamics of racial and economic inequality and privilege as they operate in public life to enable and constrain efficacious participation in various publics. Discourses of colorblindness render market-based action as fair and neutral by decontextualizing people and policy and obfuscating the dynamics of power. My analysis of DeVos’s advocacy focuses on four themes: how DeVos constitutes students as individual market actors; how she presents herself as the heir of civil rights activists; how her vision of education freedom operates as market freedom; and how DeVos represents public schools as coercive government institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• race
• education
• inequality
• DeVos

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Stacey Sowards and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and instructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Donald J. Trump, “Trump: Remarks on Signing an Executive Order on Safe Policing for Safe Communities,” The American Presidency Project, June 16, 2020, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-signing-executive-order-safe-policing-for-safe-communities.

2 Emma García, “Schools Are Still Segregated, and Black Children Are Paying a Price,” Economic Policy Institute, February 12, 2020, https://epi.org/185814; Stephen Menendian, Samir Gambhir, and Arthur Gailes, The Roots of Structural Racism Project: Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States, June 21, 2021, https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism/Belonging-roots-structural-racism-2021-06-30-1.pdf.

3 To envision a democratic reorienting of public education, we must resist unreflective, exclusive associations of “democracy” with governing institutions. Rather, we should imagine a more dynamic, flexible, and relational model of democracy as, in John Dewey’s terms, “a way of life.” John Dewey, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 14, 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 224–30. For example, noting that “the public schools we need are not the public schools we’ve historically had,” Sonya Douglass Horsford, Janelle Scott, and Gary Anderson draw on Dewey to articulate a vision of democratic education that includes meaningful community participation in educational decision-making, accounting for privilege and advancing a more equitable distribution of resources, and revitalizing public values, goods, and engagement. Sonya Douglass Horsford, Janelle T. Scott, and Gary L. Anderson, The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2019), 171.

4 DeVos adopted the theme of “education freedom” for her 2019 back-to-school tour. See Evie Blad, “DeVos Tests a Rhetorical Twist on ‘School Choice,’” Education Week, October 1, 2019, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/betsy-devos-tests-a-rhetorical-twist-on-school-choice/2019/10.

5 Betsy DeVos, “Competition, Creativity, and Choice in the Classroom,” American Federation for Children, March 11, 2015, http://www.federationforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Betsy-SXSWedu-speech-final-remarks.pdf.

6 Janelle T. Scott, “Rosa Parks Moment? School Choice and the Marketization of Civil Rights,” Critical Studies in Education 54, no. 1 (2013): 9.

7 Various participants in Black publics and counterpublics have resisted calls for rights-based movements for social change. Michael Dawson addresses leftist critiques of these movements, which have argued that rights-based discourse is too closely tied to exclusionary liberal traditions, as well as conservative critiques, which embrace the neoliberal association of private property and public participation. Michael C. Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic? Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 201–6.

8 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1778.

9 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1714.

10 Wendy Brown observes that neoliberal governing regimes transfigure core democratic values through an economic idiom: “inclusion inverts into competition, equality into inequality, freedom into deregulated marketplaces, and popular sovereignty is nowhere to be found.” Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 42. On shifting civil rights discourses, see Janelle Scott, “School Choice as a Civil Right: The Political Construction of a Claim and Its Implications for School Desegregation,” in Integrating Schools in a Changing Society, ed. Elizabeth DeBray and Erica Frankenberg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 33–52. On the centrality of education to the twentieth-century U.S. struggle for civil rights, see Candace Epps-Robertson, Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy, and Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

11 Robert Asen, School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy: How Market-Based Education Reform Fails Our Communities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 10–15.

12 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 301.

13 J. David Cisneros, “A Nation of Immigrants and a Nation of Laws: Race, Multiculturalism, and Neoliberal Exception in Barack Obama’s Immigration Discourse,” Communication, Culture & Critique 8, no. 3 (2015): 359. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano explains that market advocates dismiss race “as a legitimate topic or term of public discourse and public policy.” Darrel Wanzer-Serrano [published as Darrel Enck-Wanzer], “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 1 (2011): 24.

14 Casey Ryan Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 23, no. 2 (2020): 199.

15 Robert Asen, “Knowledge, Communication, and Anti-Critical Publicity: The Friedmans’ Market Public,” Communication Theory 31, no. 2 (2021): 169–89.

16 Blad, “DeVos Tests a Rhetorical Twist on ‘School Choice.’”

17 National Center for Education Statistics, “St. Marcus Lutheran School,” Private School Universe Survey, https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/privateschoolsearch/school_detail.asp?Search=1&SchoolID=01515212&ID=01515212 (accessed June 21, 2022); “About St. Marcus Lutheran School,” St. Marcus Lutheran School, https://www.stmarcus.org/school/about (accessed July 26, 2022).

18 Kelly Jensen, “Localized Ideographs in Education Rhetoric: Polly Williams and a Justice-Driven Ideology of Choice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 3 (2021): 305–27.

19 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1731–7. Harris explains that whiteness differs from other forms of property in that traditional notions of property emphasize its transferability through sale, inheritance, etc. while whiteness functions as an “inalienable property” (1732). Exclusion also bridges the personal and relational aspects of property. In this way, Harris invokes “exclusive use” as a function of whiteness for the property holder. Yet, as I discuss below, she also regards the exclusion of the other as constitutive of this right and central to white identity.

20 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1730.

21 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1731.

22 Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 293.

23 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1758.

24 Robert Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 340.

25 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1778.

26 Anjali Vats makes these connections in addressing the relationship of whiteness and intellectual property. Explicating the implications of her analysis, Vats writes that “race and economics are intertwined in ways that guarantee the valuation of particular kinds of ideas with particular kinds of owners.” For Vats, creating alternatives to existing legal approaches “requires answering fundamental and pressing questions about race and capitalism.” Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 207–8 (emphasis original).

27 Ujju Aggarwal, “The Ideological Architecture of Whiteness as Property in Educational Policy,” Educational Policy 30, no. 1 (2016): 128–52.

28 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1789.

29 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1736.

30 See, e.g., Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 50–2.

31 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1736.

32 Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 302. Maegan Parker Brooks refers to this dynamic as the “ruse” of whiteness, namely, “whiteness’s fundamentally constructed yet exclusionary nature.” Maegan Parker Brooks, “Countering White Conceit through the Commemoration of Keyes,” Howard Journal of Communications 28, no. 2 (2017): 194.

33 Matthew Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: The Case of Black Church Burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 280–1.

34 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1761.

35 Kelly, “Donald J. Trump,” 197.

36 Godfried Agyeman Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 485.

37 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1761–2. Addressing the implications of this position, George Lipsitz maintains that viewing public life only as the aggregation of individual experience means that only “individual manifestations of personal prejudice and hostility will be seen as racist. Systemic, collective, and coordinated behavior disappears from sight.” George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995): 381 (emphasis original).

38 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1768.

39 Osamudia R. James, “Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” Iowa Law Review 99 (2015): 1087.

40 Raka Shome, “Outing Whiteness,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 3 (2000): 367.

41 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward,” Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (2011): 1326.

42 Charles E. Morris III and Kendall R. Phillips, “Introduction: Situating the Conceit of Context,” in The Conceit of Context: Resituating Domains in Rhetorical Studies, ed. Charles E. Morris III and Kendall R. Phillips (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), 5.

43 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 5th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 44–50.

44 Gary Orfield and Danielle Jarvie, “Black Resegregation Matters: School Resegregation and Black Educational Opportunity,” UCLA Civil Rights Project, December 18, 2020, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/black-segregation-matters-school-resegregation-and-black-educational-opportunity/BLACK-SEGREGATION-MATTERS-final-121820.pdf.

45 García, “Schools Are Still Segregated.”

46 Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells write that “a growing body of research has documented a strong positive correlation between increasing racial/economic segregation in public schools and the growth in these popular so-called colorblind and more market-based school choice policies.” Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells, “School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide,” American Journal of Education 119, no. 2 (2013): 262.

47 Scott, “School Choice as a Civil Right,” 44.

48 Roda and Wells, “School Choice Policies,” 278, 279. Roda and Wells explain that the desire for a “critical mass of other white students” has been confirmed in numerous studies.

49 Roda and Wells, “School Choice Policies,” 282.

50 Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955).

51 Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

52 Harris observes that the Supreme Court recognized discrimination by government actors and by private actors like realtors and bankers, but it regarded these actions as “neutral” and thus “an inadequate predicate for intervention in an unfortunate but unrectifiable inequity.” Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1757.

53 Terrance L. Green and Mark A. Gooden, “The Shaping of Policy: Exploring the Context, Contradictions, and Contours of Privilege in Milliken v. Bradley, over 40 Years Later,” Teachers College Record 118, no. 3 (2016): 19, 20.

54 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007).

55 Jamel K. Donnor, “Education as the Property of Whites: African Americans’ Continued Quest for Good Schools,” in Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education, ed. Marvin Lynn and Adrienne D. Dixson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 197.

56 Vats, Color of Creatorship, 68–9.

57 Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 161, 162.

58 Nancy MacLean, “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper no. 161, September 1, 2021, https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp161, 20.

59 MacLean, “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy,” 4–5.

60 Scott, “School Choice as a Civil Right,” 39.

61 Quoted in Jensen, “Localized Ideographs in Education Rhetoric,” 319.

62 Jim Carl, Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 102–7.

63 Carl, Freedom of Choice, 181–82.

64 Quoted in Jensen, “Localized Ideographs in Education Rhetoric,” 321; quoted in Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education (New York: New Press, 2017), 136.

65 Jensen, “Localized Ideographs in Education Rhetoric,” 313–20.

66 Quoted in Blad, “DeVos Tests a Rhetorical Twist on ‘School Choice.’”

67 Betsy DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour Full Kickoff Speech,” U.S. Department of Education YouTube Channel, September 17, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoofLDbxr-8&t=31s (accessed July 19, 2021).

68 Betsy DeVos, “Prepared Remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to the 2017 ASU GSV Summit,” U.S. Department of Education, May 9, 2017, https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-us-secretary-education-betsy-devos-2017-asu-gsv-summit (accessed August 13, 2018).

69 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1768.

70 Betsy DeVos, “Secretary DeVos Remarks at Kennedy School of Government,” C-Span.org, September 29, 2017, https://www.c-span.org/video/?434821-1/education-secretary-betsy-devos-speaks-harvard (accessed August 13, 2018).

71 On Bethune, see Betsy DeVos, “Bethune-Cookman 2017 Commencement Address,” C-Span.org, May 10, 2017, https://www.c-span.org/video/?428006-2/betsy-devos-delivers-bethune-cookman-university-commencement-address (accessed August 13, 2018). On Merriweather, see, e.g., Betsy DeVos, “U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ Prepared Remarks at HBCU Congressional Luncheon in Washington, D.C.,” U.S. Department of Education, February 28, 2017, https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/us-secretary-education-betsy-devos-prepared-remarks-hbcu-congressional-luncheon-washington-dc (accessed August 13, 2018).

72 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

73 Kelly, “Donald J. Trump,” 215.

74 Lisa A. Flores, “Choosing to Consume: Race, Education, and the School Voucher Debate,” in The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege, ed. Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Bordo, and Charlotte Kroløkke (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 249.

75 Ersula J. Ore, “Black Death and the Limits of the Utopian Gesture,” in Morris and Phillips, The Conceit of Context, 104.

76 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

77 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

78 Jensen, “Localized Ideographs in Education Rhetoric,” 315–17.

79 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

80 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

81 This transformation exemplifies a particular iteration of what Wendy Brown identifies as neoliberalism’s “open hostility to the political.” Brown, Undoing the Demos, 42.

82 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

83 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 12.

84 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

85 Quoted in Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Tracy Jan, “DeVos Called HBCUs ‘Pioneers’ of ‘School Choice.’ It Didn’t Go over Well,” Washington Post, February 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/02/28/devos-called-hbcus-pioneers-of-school-choice-it-didnt-go-over-well/?utm_term=.e99ad96af807 (accessed August 29, 2018).

86 DeVos, “Bethune-Cookman 2017 Commencement Address.”

87 Betsy DeVos, “Prepared Remarks by Secretary DeVos at the Unveiling of the Education Freedom Scholarships Proposal,” U.S. Department of Education, February 28, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190228203747/https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-devos-unveiling-education-freedom-scholarships-proposal (accessed July 19, 2021).

88 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

89 Betsy DeVos, “Prepared Remarks by Secretary DeVos at the American Enterprise Institute,” U.S. Department of Education, October 1, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191003231607/https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-devos-american-enterprise-institute, July 19, 2021.

90 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1757.

91 Linn Posey-Maddox et al., “No Choice Is the ‘Right’ Choice: Black Parents’ Educational Decision-Making in Their Search for a ‘Good’ School,” Harvard Educational Review 91, no. 1 (2021): 38–61.

92 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

93 Harris maintains that “relative power and social relations” shape definitions of property and determine “which expectations are reasonable and merit the protection of the law as property.” Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1729.

94 Evie Blad, “‘Government Schools’ or Public Schools? Trump, DeVos, and the Language of School Choice,” Education Week, February 5, 2020, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/government-schools-or-public-schools-trump-devos-and-the-language-of-school-choice/2020/02 (accessed August 1, 2022).

95 Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 32.

96 Friedman and Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 117–18, 15.

97 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

98 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1756–8.

99 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos’ Education Freedom Tour.”

100 DeVos, “Prepared Remarks by Secretary DeVos at the American Enterprise Institute.”

101 Focusing on the pro-market education advocacy of Milton Friedman, Mark Hlavacik writes that “the bureaucrats, by definition, collectivize what should be decision-making driven by individual agents.” Mark Hlavacik, Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016), 34.

102 DeVos, “Secretary DeVos Remarks at Kennedy.”

103 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1768.