Educational abandonment under US capitalism: grassroots study of race and class in rural Metro Detroit

This article examines the question of race and class through an analysis of organized abandonment and more specifically, educational abandonment. Drawing from critical ethnic studies, Black geographies and Black protest thought in education, the abandonment of public education reveals how racialized geographies, rural and urban, become vulnerable to the violence of capital accumulation and sites of underdevelopment. Building from autoethnographic and archival research, the author turns to the organizing of a rural Black working-class community in Metropolitan Detroit, who during the post-Civil Rights era responded to the oppression of regional organized abandonment. Their grassroots approaches offer critical insights into how we understand history, political economy and social transformation. The author contends that under the conditions of the intensification of abandonment throughout society, it has become ever more necessary to move to a purpose of education that is rooted in collaborative study of ideology, power and the development vision of everyday people.