School Closures, Race, and the Urban Geography of Chicago

Keywords: Race, Gentrification, School Closures, Black Geography, Urban Geography
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Over the 14 years between 1999 and 2013, close to 24,000 public schools were shuttered in cities across the United States with many more seen in recent years (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Space and infrastructure of the city are essential to understanding school closures as "emblematic of a larger spatial and racial reimagining of U.S. cities that dispossess and displace communities of color" (Pearman & Greene, 2021, p.1).

Chicago’s spatial reorganization and public schools cannot be separated from the long history of state-sanctioned projects that slowly destabilized communities (Lipman, 2015; Ewing, 2018). Racialization requires the reproduction of political projects occurring at multiple levels within a state. The political aspect of school closures and their connection to State agendas to control space, life, and the disposability of select racialized ethnic groups demonstrate how these projects converge and align in their goal of domination.

This paper utilizes Stuart Hall’s Race as a Floating Signifier as a guiding conceptual lens for assessing school closures and gentrification within Chicago’s Bronzeville. Racialization served a necessary purpose in the displacement of residents, intentionally orchestrated blight, and the subsequent rebuilding of Bronzeville. Thus, school closure is inextricably intertwined with biopolitics, the maintenance of racial hierarchies, and the capitalist accumulation of a city as seen through racialization. This paper examines spatial arrangements conceived and imagined and narratives of racialization through various socio-political and historical periods to argue that school closures in Bronzeville were a State-sanctioned means to radically reorganize urban space for extraction.