Reproducing Inequality: Racial Capitalism and the Cost of Public Education

American democracy is marked by an unwavering deployment of racialized economic modalities of fines, fees, and debt aimed at scaffolding hierarchies of white power and prescribing Black people as commodities, not human beings. Over the last two decades, an expanding praxis in the economic justice field has emerged, opposing and disrupting racialized economic logics within a national anti-fine, fee and cost movement. From scholarly discourse to legal interventions and reforms at city- and county-levels, the movement has sought to target interlocking material and ideological forces that comprise racial capitalist geographies across many criminal and civil systems. Despite this significant work, however, the distinctly racialized dispossessive and extractive economic realities of fines and fees regimes in other public state systems, namely K–12 public education, have escaped interrogation and advocacy. This Article serves to fill that gap at three levels—theoretical, analytic, and prescriptive—presenting an incisive critique of public education absent from the existing legal literature and highlighting explicating existing remedies available to civil rights education attorneys to protect Black students and families. In advancing racial capitalism as its constructive feature, this Article does not simply rely on a theoretical approach. Instead, it employs critical theory and social science methodologies, drawing on an original dataset of first-hand accounts of clients and analyses of more than seven hundred different published and publicly-available individual public school, charter school, cyber charter school, and district handbooks and codes of conduct. The data illuminates how public education functions across key dynamics of racial capitalism—accumulation, dispossession, debt, punishment, and containment. This work thus contributes richly to legal scholarship and legal practice by attending to an undertheorized yet formative area of critical theory, and exposing the operation of racial capitalism through a familiarly racially evasive modality that fundamentally undermines Black students’ access to their education.