Abstract
This essay provides the first account and examination of caste education in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, I argue that caste education plays a central role in realizing the political and social goals of racial capitalist society for Du Bois. Using Du Bois’s caste analytic, I take up and articulate three biopolitical governing strategies of the racial capitalist state/industrial schooling regime. The final section ties Du Bois’s caste analytic to recent work in Afro-pessimist thought to look at the charter/choice debate. I argue here that Du Bois’s caste analysis, when paired with Afro-pessimist thought, shows how even critical scholarship on charter/choice policies fall short in their reliance on a model democracy and humanism based on antiblackness.
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