‘Then you just have to perform better’: parents’ strategies for countering racial othering in the context of neoliberal educational reforms in Germany

This article analyses the discourse on ‘good parenthood’ that has emerged in Germany in the context of neoliberal educational reforms in recent decades. The analysis shows that this discourse is structured mainly along the lines of race, class and gender. It also shapes the parents’ responses to racial othering that they and their children experience in school. Using a dispositive analytical approach and Judith Butler’s concept of subjectivation, the author identifies subtle strategies used by parents to challenge prevailing racist knowledge about them in their children’s schools. As the analysis shows, parents’ entanglement in racialized neoliberal discourse complicates their ability to resist responsibilisation as ‘active’ and ‘committed’ parents. The parents interviewed for this study mostly appeared to internalize the neoliberal premise that every parent is the architect of his/her child’s success, thus absolving education policy and the school of responsibility for educational inequalities and institutionalized forms of racial discrimination.