Neoliberal policy as racism in secondary education England and Germany: whiteness as capital in racial capitalism

This paper provides an analysis of the relationship between neoliberal reform in secondary education in England and Germany and the reproduction of racial inequality. We fill a gap in the understanding of how neoliberal mechanisms interact with racial structures in secondary education to fuel race inequality. The paper reviews existing literature on neoliberal policies in secondary education. We employ insights from theories of racial capitalism (Gerrard et al. 2022) and innovatively combine these with an understanding of whiteness as symbolic racial capital (Reiter, 2020). The paper identifies common neoliberal mechanisms in secondary education in both countries: school choice, institutional autonomy, and responsibilisation of the individual. We demonstrate that neoliberal mechanisms function to create racialised divisions in both education systems by fuelling:
• ethnic segregation,
• the exclusion of minority groups from mainstream educational spaces,
• and cultural ‘othering’.
Our analysis shows that these divisions are achieved by the education systems enabling the extraction and realisation of value via the fuelling of the prestige and desirability of whiteness, and practices of racialised enclosure and dispossession. We argue that in the secondary education market, whiteness functions as capital and marketisation further enhances its status and value, thus fuelling racial inequality.