Abstract: Studies in Critical Race Theory (CRT), especially in the United States, have vastly explored the multiplex roles that the state has in creating racial categories and meanings, and in producing policies that enforce racial exclusion. This state-sanctioned and institutionally sustained racism has led to the emergence of what David Theo Goldberg poignantly termed the “racial state” (1997). This study aims at exploring the complex ways in which schools have been implicated in and incorporated by the racial state in the context of historically marginalized identities, mainly African American, Latino and West Indian communities in the United States. Using critical insights from CRT, this study will document the development of diversity-related educational policies in the United States to illustrate how schools have become locations for reinforcing racial assumptions and for reproducing the racial hierarchies that structure the larger American society. I will argue that, contrary the American narrative of multicultural education, race has constantly interplayed with schooling, excluding communities of color from access to critical resources and increasing the likelihood of marginalized juveniles to enter the criminal justice system. The racial disparities experienced by minority students inside the walls of American schools which take the form of expulsions, differential achievement, curricular inequities, and underrepresentation in talented courses can be synchronized with the socio-economic, political and systemic discrepancies in the wider American society.
Keywords: Critical Race Theory, racial state, multicultural education, color-blindness, the school-to-prison pipeline.
Title: The Racial State: The School-to-Prison Pipeline and American Education in the Age of Color-Blindness
Author: Mohammed Agzar
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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