A market for civil rights: whiteness as property, colorblindness, and the rhetoric of school choice

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I focus on the advocacy of Betsy DeVos as a prominent exemplar of a larger trend among U.S. pro-market education advocates asserting school choice as a contemporary stage of the nation’s long struggle for civil rights. I argue that as DeVos championed her cause, she repurposed this right from a civil right seeking justice and equality to a property right serving privilege and the protection of whiteness as property. Engaging the foundational work of Cheryl Harris on whiteness as property, I explicate whiteness as property as a critical resource for rhetorical scholarship that illuminates the mutually reinforcing dynamics of racial and economic inequality and privilege as they operate in public life to enable and constrain efficacious participation in various publics. Discourses of colorblindness render market-based action as fair and neutral by decontextualizing people and policy and obfuscating the dynamics of power. My analysis of DeVos’s advocacy focuses on four themes: how DeVos constitutes students as individual market actors; how she presents herself as the heir of civil rights activists; how her vision of education freedom operates as market freedom; and how DeVos represents public schools as coercive government institutions.