Race and the Geographies of Education: Markets, White Tone, and Racial Neoliberalism

Geographical concepts have been widely and effectively employed to understand the imposition of market principles on schooling systems. This article brings this literature into tension with critical race theory and specifically David Goldberg’s analysis of “racial neoliberalism” that foregrounds the constitutive role of race in marketization. It begins by surveying and mapping 350 publications in the field of the “geographies of education.” Although rich and varied, and offering new insights into race, existing literature tends to develop theory from case studies located in the Global North rather than the Global South. The article then turns to South Africa, one of many postcolonies where a European minority established racially segregated schools and where private and semiprivate schools have a long history. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Gramsci, and considering the period from the 1950s to the present, it shows the shift from a modernist project of racial segregation to marketization and racial-cultural hierarchies it calls white tone. By outlining how schools’ competition for prestige leads to the valuing of “white” phenotypic traits and cultural practices, the article demonstrates the centrality of race to market formation and thereby helps to provincialize the concept of neoliberalism. Key Words: geographies of education, postcolonial, racial neoliberalism, South Africa.