9/6/17, 10:14 AM : Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Resistance in Education Page 1 of 4 http://www.tcrecord.org/books/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=22108 Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Resistance in Education reviewed by Christine Clark & Rosnidar Arshad Title: Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Resistance in Education Author(s): Zachary A. Casey Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany ISBN: 1438463065, Pages: 236, Year: 2017 Search for book at Amazon.com As a white American male, Zachary Casey, an Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College and author of A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Resistance in Education (2016), begins this book by foregrounding his standpoint as individually and systemically highly privileged relative to the U.S. education system. He describes how his ancestors, immigrants from Ireland, “became White” (p. 6): his great grandfather moved from Boston to the West Coast “to kill Native Americans” (p. 5). At that time, the Irish, though European immigrants, occupied a social position akin to People of Color; thus, Casey’s great grandfather’s savagery enabled at least his immediate family to shed their Irish ethnicity, and thereby become raced as white. Casey argues that neoliberalism has driven the erosion of European Americans’ fidelity to their ethnic identity, as it is in their economic self-interest to do so. Having worked with pre- and in-service teachers for ten years, Casey contends that neoliberalism is also eroding the American education system for the very same purpose: to enable the transfer of public monies into private hands for profit, namely of people identified as white, at the expense of those not. Casey defines neoliberalism as the “applying [of] the logics of the ‘free market’ to all social spaces and goods, especially those historically considered ‘public’…distorting them into functioning with ‘private’ aims for efficiency” (p. 2). He then describes how neoliberalism operates in the U.S. education system through measurement of student learning achievement relative to knowledge bases and skill sets predetermined by pro-capitalist governments. He argues that this operation is never questioned, perhaps not even fully recognized, by in-service teachers, teacher educators, nor educational researchers. Because racism and capitalism are at the core of oppressive neoliberal practices in schools and society, Casey argues that PK-12 and higher education classroom pedagogy must become unilaterally aimed at dismantling this systemically normalized inequitable and inhumane educational and social order, both in the United States and around the world. He describes this pedagogy as a “discourse of anticapitalist antiracism, a form of antiracism” that reveals how “capitalist exploitation [is] at the center of white supremacy” (p. 10).