How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly details the African American experience. Yet the renowned sociologist was also an astute chronicler of white people, particularly their racism. As Unveiling the Color Line demonstrates, Du Bois’s trenchant analysis of whiteness and white supremacy began in his earliest work—his 1890 speech on Jefferson Davis—and continued in every major book he published in his more than sixty-year career, up to The Black Flame Trilogy.

Lisa J. McLeod traces the development of Du Bois’s conception of whiteness, and the racism inherent to it, as an all-encompassing problem, whether predicated on ignorance, moral failure, or the inability to recognize the humanity in other people. In clear, elegant prose, McLeod investigates Du Bois’s complex and nuanced thinking, putting his insights into dialogue with contemporary racial theorists to demonstrate his continuing value to present-day critical thought and activism.