Resisting Gentrification as the New School Pushout: Placemaking Narratives of Black Women and Co-conspirators in a Gentrifying Carceral School State

We argue that gentrification is school pushout by a different name, displacing Black children and families through multiple modes of hypersurveillance, invisibility, criminalization, and disposability. We share vivid frontline experiences as Black women educators and a Jewish American woman educator while foregrounding the multiple ways in which we advocate for and as Black educational stakeholders to placemake through research, community engagement, and activism. Additionally, we posit the ways in which gentrification functions as a nuanced, complex carceral state that fuels neighborhood and school pushout in a historic Black Southwest Atlanta community by weaving how “turnaround” schools function as carceral spaces for Black students, teachers, and families through policies and practices. To accomplish this, we share narratives of our quotidian lives with housing and urban education reform practices outlining how an urban education reform agenda in a majority Black city intersects with urban renewal/negro removal, highlighting how profiteers conveniently misuse narratives of Black suffering and Black educational deficits. As both protectors of and penalized alongside Black children in a carceral school state—as residents and teachers—we are doubly impacted by gentrification and urban education reform and “marginalized by association.” yet we persist by affirming our commitment to a path of freedom in the midst of our beloved communities shifting and coddling social and material capital possessed by gentrifiers.