Introduction

The Introduction opens with the stories of a Black parent and a Black student who were victims of the school-to-prison pipeline and their journeys to racial justice organizing. These experiences and these stories ground the emergence of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The Introduction then recounts the author’s own journey to awareness of the school-to-prison pipeline and describes the development of the community engaged research project upon which the book is based. It recounts the author’s traumatic experiences in the field witnessing the abusive treatment of students and parents of color, and it discusses the challenges faced addressing the author’s privileges and positionality as a white, male professor partnering with and studying organizers and leaders of color based in low-income communities. It ends with an overview of the book and its chapters.

Deurbanization and the Struggle to Sustain a Black Teaching Corps: Evidence From Michigan

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Black teachers in Michigan dropped by 48%, substantially exceeding declines in the corresponding K–12 Black student population. These teacher losses are an acute phenomenon within a broader national context of deurbanization of K–12 student populations away from those districts with the largest and most established faculties of color. Districts receiving large numbers of incoming Black students hired few Black teachers over the period, leading to marked declines in Black student exposure to Black educators, and Black employment gains since 2016 have generally been in areas where Black teachers were already employed. We discuss the historical conditions under which Michigan’s Black faculties were established and multiple forward-looking challenges to building and sustaining Black faculties in geographically diffuse populations.

Adapting an HBCU-inspired framework for Black student success in U.S. LIS education

This perspective essay explores Gasman & Arroyo’s (2014) HBCU-inspired framework for Black student success as a prism for re-envisioning LIS education. In response to calls for anti-hegemonic LIS education, the authors discuss a potential tool for Black student success and suggest its benefits to LIS education. The framework can introduce non-white, anti-racist educational practices to the work of educating the U.S. library workforce; it is relevant in light of ongoing racial and political strife in U.S. society.

Racial Capitalism and the Black Student Loan Debt Crisis

Background/Context Student loans reflect a larger shift in U.S. society in which people are forced to go into debt for basic needs. Student loan debt in the United States has been recognized as a political economic crisis that disproportionately devastates Black people. Scholars have statistically reported on racialized and gendered stratification in student loan outcomes and several name the racial wealth gap as the main contributing factor to the Black student debt crisis. Yet minimal attention has been dedicated to examining, let alone theorizing, the logics and systemic forces that racialize debt in higher education. Purpose Drawing on a theory of racial capitalism, this article fills analytic and theoretical gaps in the study of the Black student debt crisis by detailing how the crisis has been arranged as well as how it functions to constrain, dispossess, and exploit Black people. Research Design This article offers a corrective history, systematic analysis, and theoretical explanation of the Black student debt crisis. Findings/Results The paper draws on racial capitalism to account for how student loans as a policy has relied on anti-Black racial logics and systemic forces. The authors address how Black educational desires are co-opted, the government configures inclusion according to predatory terms, and the student loan industry forms a debt trap that exploits repayment struggles. While the majority of Black people who enroll in higher education never secure the promise of college as always “worth it,” the arrangement continues to be worthwhile for student loan profiteers. Student loans are perfect for racial capitalism because they answer demands for social access and inclusion (which are already reduced to mean credentialism) and reproduce both the disposability and dispossession of Black people's everyday lives. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors call for the full cancellation of student loan debt. This call forms part of a larger mobilization to abolish the racist logics, processes, and policies that make the Black student debt crisis and Black precarity possible in the first place.