John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s book Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Cory Booker and Ras Baraka and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black politics. Here, Arena is joined in conversation with David Forrest.
"Expelling Public Schools offers a fascinating look into the racial politics of corporate school reform in Newark Public Schools. John Arena takes a long view—just over two decades—and examines the reform movements and countermovements in the district from the top down and the bottom up. In assessing corporate school reform efforts under mayors Cory Booker and Ras Baraka, this deeply researched book illuminates the mechanisms that maintain educational inequality." —Rand Quinn, author of Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools
"It is rare to encounter a work that treats actually existing Black life, an approach best articulated by Cedric Johnson, to critically address contemporary Black urban regimes. Thoughtful, careful, and incisive, Expelling Public Schools does just that. In this moment when antiracism (and surface critiques of antiracism) is rife, John Arena’s work provides a wonderful tonic." —Lester Spence, author of Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics
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John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s book Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Cory Booker and Ras Baraka and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black politics. Here, Arena is joined in conversation with David Forrest.
"Expelling Public Schools offers a fascinating look into the racial politics of corporate school reform in Newark Public Schools. John Arena takes a long view—just over two decades—and examines the reform movements and countermovements in the district from the top down and the bottom up. In assessing corporate school reform efforts under mayors Cory Booker and Ras Baraka, this deeply researched book illuminates the mechanisms that maintain educational inequality." —Rand Quinn, author of Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools
"It is rare to encounter a work that treats actually existing Black life, an approach best articulated by Cedric Johnson, to critically address contemporary Black urban regimes. Thoughtful, careful, and incisive, Expelling Public Schools does just that. In this moment when antiracism (and surface critiques of antiracism) is rife, John Arena’s work provides a wonderful tonic." —Lester Spence, author of Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics
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John (Jay) Arena:
This is a huge pot of money. This is the major source of state spending. I do think the whole fight around public education and how that is deeply connected to urban economic restructuring makes the Newark case speak to, struggles more broadly.
David Forrest:
Okay. Let's get started. Hi. I'm, David Forrest. I'm an associate professor of politics at Oberlin College in Northeast Ohio, and I'm, very excited, to be here to speak with Jay Arena about his new book with the University of Minnesota Press.
David Forrest:
It is called Expelling Public Schools, How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark. Jay is someone whose work I have sort of long admired from afar. I have always found that his writing really challenges me and my students to think more carefully about inequality, why it persists, and, you know, what it would take to really address it. And in many ways, I actually wish, this book had been already published before I published my own book, A Voice But No Power, organizing for social justice in Minneapolis, which is also with University of Minnesota Press because, know, while my writing isn't strictly about public education per se, a lot of the organizing I studied, you know, was centered around that. That was kind of one of my cases.
David Forrest:
And a lot of stuff for me, I think, was clarified by Jay's book that I hopefully will get into here in a little bit. Bit. But, just super excited to have this conversation.
John (Jay) Arena:
Well well, David, it's great to be here with you. I guess we have a mutual admiration society going on here because, I I think you're really appropriate to do this interview because we both our our work is around trying to find out how do we develop an alternative to this neoliberal capitalist monster that's been dominating American in in global society. We're coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, which was a real turning point on the whole global neoliberal turn. So, in many ways, it's really appropriate that we're getting together for this, for this conversation. Yeah.
John (Jay) Arena:
I go by Jay. My official name is John. That's on the book. It can be confusing to people. That's another long family story, but I yeah.
John (Jay) Arena:
Most people call me Jay. But I'm currently, an associate professor of sociology at the City University of New York, New York's College of Staten Island, campus where I've been there since o eight. But for many years, I worked, as a labor and community organizer in New Orleans, beginning in the mid eighties. I'm originally from Upstate New York and, actually worked with, initially with Acorn, Wade Rafiki, who interviewed you recently on your important book. I arrived there in the mid eighties.
John (Jay) Arena:
It was the end of the first administration of the second term of the first black mayor, Ernest Dutch Morial, whose, son is the head of the, National Urban League, Mark Morial. So that was kind of the context of my organizing and involved in work with the union, you organizing public employees, public authority, housing employees in New Orleans, and a number of other struggles. And, a lot of the time we were coming up, all the time, we were coming up against the local black political leadership, who ruled kind of an alliance with the corporate elite. And so when I went to to graduate school, it was to think a little bit more deeply of some of the struggles, that I had been involved in. I was also in Latin America, and I think that also influenced this analysis of what was going on because I could see a a lot of parallels with the neoliberal agenda in Latin America.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so I eventually began to work around public housing, the privatization of public housing in New Orleans, and that was my first work. And it one of the kind of the questions I had is why were these former activists, public housing residents, their allies who I'd worked with over a number of years, how are they ending up kinda in bed with the developers to push through, consensually, the privatization of this one particular development, but which was part of the broader privatization in the city, which then, of course, went on steroids, after hurricane Katrina two thousand five. Well, now we're coming up on that anniversary. I'm getting old. You know?
John (Jay) Arena:
Fifty years since Chile, Twenty Years since hurricane Katrina. And so that was the the the focus of the first book, and I looked at the role of kind of the nonprofits and helping kinda consensually introduce the privatization agenda. And so the work of Adolf Reed as well of other works around that whole nonprofit complex, both in Latin America and in The US context, were really important. So my work has always been about, you know, looking at struggles, but then why don't they go very far? Why are the how are they captured, and what are the lessons that we can take from defeat?
John (Jay) Arena:
Because it can be kinda depressing being involved in the in these struggles. So that was the impetus, and I've always tried to link, my activism and my research. And then, luckily, I went on the market in 02/2008, and the position opened up at a full time position. Right? We have 70% of the positions at CUNY are adjunct, a contingent labor.
John (Jay) Arena:
But I was lucky enough to get a full time position at, the College of Staten it was kind of interesting too. I grew up in Upstate New York, and people ask, where are you from? New York, and and you automatically think, the city, but this was the first time that I was able to live and work in, you know, what most people assume as New York. Although, I ended up living in New Jersey. So I arrived there in o eight right there as the great recession hit, which is the focus of your book, kind of the struggles in the wake of the great recession in Minneapolis.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so I immersed myself in the New Jersey and New York area in a number of different struggles. Hopefully, you know, the greatest downturn in global capitalism since the nineteen thirties, clearly in The US. It took a while. I mean, there was the the Occupy Movement, which I did participate in. I wrote some works on that on kind of the limits of what kind of blocked it the advancement.
John (Jay) Arena:
I think there was a lot of potential there, but I think they had absorbed a lot of the neoliberal anti statist ideas, which was an obstacle to advancing that movement. But then fell into my lap, this huge movement against the privatization, the sell off of public schools in Newark where I had moved to the largest city, in New Jersey. In Staten Island, you might wonder why you live in there. Well, actually, Staten Island is kinda used to belong to New Jersey, and it's actually easier to get to Staten Island from New Jersey than it is from the other certainly from Manhattan, which is just a ferry, and then from Brooklyn from Verrazano. So I was there, and this movement really fell in my lap.
John (Jay) Arena:
And in the aftermath of the great recession, it looked like there was gonna be a a move away from the neoliberal agenda. But, actually, Obama, after the first few years, David Katz in his book on neoliberalism and the social structure accumulation does say there was a move briefly away from neoliberalism, and then they really stepped on the gas. And that was most clearly seen around public education. The Obama administration I mean, they were staffed with the privatizers, with Arnie Duncan. And that whole Department of Education had been colonized basically by what I consider these movement activists from the advocates for privatization to public education, which they consider a progressive agenda.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so this huge movement breaks out under the Cory Booker administration. And a friend of mine said, look. You've gotta work on this. This is like a great opportunity. It fell in my lap.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so beginning around thirteen, after finishing my first book with University of Minnesota on New Orleans, I kinda began immersing myself in this movement. And, you know, it was a real puzzle because it was a huge movement that basically drives out Cory Booker. He always wanted to go to higher office and, of course, eventually, to the presidency. Also, Obama beat him to the punch. But, the governor's office was considered a better jumping off point compared to the senate, but he couldn't wait that long, and so he jumps to the senate.
John (Jay) Arena:
And then Ras Baraka, the son of the famed activist, poet, leader of the Black Power movement, Amiri Baraka, rises to power. And so it's very, you know, very interesting context, but that was the puzzle. He rides the movement to power against the privatization, against the sell off, but then it's kind of anticlimactic because he gets to power, and then there's no real move against the charters. They continue their expansion, and he begins to politically conciliate and eventually ally with him. And so that was kind of the puzzle.
John (Jay) Arena:
What is going on here? How do we explain this? It was a huge movement stronger than the ones I had studied in New Orleans, but then were contained eventually, and that's kind of the focus trying to draw out those lessons from that.
David Forrest:
Yeah. Excellent. Thanks. That was a great introduction. You know, a couple I I I just wanted to say I've always been somewhat I don't know if the word is, jealous or admiring towards people who came into the social sciences from organizing backgrounds because folks like you always seem to have stuck a much stronger and sharper idea of, like, what the problems are you're concerned with that you bring.
David Forrest:
Whereas I I I kind of came in not from that kind of background straight from undergrad and felt like I floundered around for several years before I even understood what my concerns were. So it's really great to engage with people from those backgrounds. And I can totally identify, you know, with this thing that happened under Obama where, you know, public schools became central to the neoliberal agenda. I have very distinct memories of reading an article in the New York Times around when he was elected when they were talking to these, you know, teachers union leaders and saying, you know, well, how do you feel about what's going on here with Obama, the people he's bringing in? And they were just seem to be in complete denial.
David Forrest:
Like, it's okay. Obama's got our backs or whatever. Like, it felt, weird. Yeah. But in any case, I I actually kinda just wanna jump into the book where you just left off, which is you open with this great story, which you kind of just summarized about these two mayoral administrations, Booker, Baraka, the movement that kind of upended Booker's efforts to push corporate school reform and how Baraka wound up succeeding where Booker failed and getting the movement into a place where there was acquiescence.
David Forrest:
So your sort of wager to start the book is that even if you're not sort of intrinsically interested in Newark, which is a kind of intrinsically interesting place, and these characters you're, you know, in the story are intrinsically interesting. But even if someone's not intrinsically interested in Newark, this case or this story, figuring it out, figuring out what happened, provides a window into these sort of much broader questions about, as you say, the mechanisms that reproduce, deepen, and manage inequality within the context of post civil rights black and urban politics. So I just wanna just, as a starting point, ask you to say a little bit more about why you think this story is of such, like, broad interest. Like, why is it before we get into, like, your particular argument, your you know, the particulars of the narrative, what makes this such an interesting story? Like, what makes it something that allows it to kind of shed light on these broader themes?
John (Jay) Arena:
If we look at particularly since the great recession, the major struggles have been around public education, which we could put more broadly around social reproduction. That's where the action has been. And preceding that, if we look in a lot of cities, the imposition of the neoliberal agenda, it's kinda gone in stages. And in the nineties, you saw the big focus under the Clinton administration demolishing public housing. That was kinda really critical to the makeover of many cities.
John (Jay) Arena:
New York was kind of a holdout, and now it looks like under Biden and this character Adams, they're gonna be moving there. But most other cities, including Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, it was kind of in the nineties. And then we see in the the late nineties going into the twenty first century, the move is around public education, and that's really connected to the to the real estate piece as well. I mean, that's a central argument. And then we begin to see some fightbacks beginning in the, you know, with the red state revolts and then in Chicago, New Orleans, Philly.
John (Jay) Arena:
And and with the pandemic, that's become even more central as well. So I do think the whole fight around public education and how that is deeply connected to economic restructuring, urban economic restructuring, makes the Newark case speak to to, struggles more broadly.
David Forrest:
So then let's dive a little more into the actual details of the Newark story. Basically, what I wanna do here is just walk through, you know, this puzzle of how corporate school reform won out under Baraka. But I think moving into that, I wanna ask you to say a little bit about why the privatization of public education became such a high priority issue for a lot of political and economic elites in and around Newark. And I the reason I wanna just hear you say a little bit about that, you mentioned, like, the connection to real estate. I think for a lot of people with an issue like public housing, that connection's pretty obvious.
David Forrest:
Right? Like, they want the land clear the way. With public education, it's a little more it can be a little more murky for people. So what is the basic sort of, like, what's, you know, materially at stake for a lot of these elites with pushing privatization of public education? Why did it become so crucial to them?
David Forrest:
Why did this issue emerge as such a high priority issue when it did?
John (Jay) Arena:
Right. There are various levels. I mean, one is this is a huge pot of money. This is the major source of dollars. It's of state spending.
John (Jay) Arena:
That's the biggest biggest chunk of money. And we did see the real slashing of that in 02/2008 at the university level. There's a great article by the New York Times about the decline in college enrollment, and making the link to the cuts and increase in tuition, but also at the k through 12 level. There's the EDU business sector that that wants to get a piece of that action. That's part of the efforts to privatize.
John (Jay) Arena:
But, also, yeah, there's the real estate angle is which I thought was particularly important in Newark and is not as dressed as much in other studies of of privatization. And so one angle is when you are attracting upper income gentrifiers to the city, you want to give them options. There's a good study on Hoboken, New Jersey, which has become very upscale over the last several decades. It's a professor. I can't recall her name, but she teaches at CUNY as well as the Guttman, school.
John (Jay) Arena:
The charter school there has basically been colonized by the new upper income gentry that has come into the city, and just to have those amenities is an important good to attract the upper income residents that these gentrifying cities are are looking after. But in addition, in the newer case, I saw that the location of the charters, where they were placing them, was central to the, regeneration of the downtown neighborhood, which was a major focus. And particularly, they're moving from office buildings to twenty four hour living downtown, and so we have a major focus of the book, where I actually live for a time, is the, the Teacher's Village, which combines street level retail, upscale housing, and, charter schools altogether and massively subsidized. And so, you know, I think that kind of the EDU business sector, but as well as the real estate piece are really important as a driving force for the privatization of public education along with the ideological commitment of the philanthropic capitalists, I call them, that have been funding the movement.
David Forrest:
Yeah. So you've got this push, this, you know, privatization of public education becomes this important issue for all these reasons you discussed. Enter Cory Booker as the kind of guy who's gonna lead the charge. You know, he's working with Chris Christie. They're on Oprah.
David Forrest:
He's getting money from Zuckerberg. There's a lot of resources and weight being put behind this effort to accomplish corporate school reform in Newark. So why then, you know, was Booker's administration ultimately not fully successful, in achieving that? You know, what, what went wrong for them?
John (Jay) Arena:
So on one level, it was very successful in this building, this movement from above. Even before he was elected in 02/2006, he was clearly identified with the privatization movement, first kind of in vouchers and then moving toward charter schools. His, coming out, so to speak, was, an address to the Manhattan Institute. That was even in the late nineties or early I think in the early two thousands. He arrives in in Newark in, like, '97, '90 '8 after he finishes at Yale.
John (Jay) Arena:
And, so he was clearly identified with those that wanted to open up a public education, and majority black cities were clearly a target. I consider them kind of the weak link in the whole Keynesian public school, network. And so he comes into office, and he has some major financial backers, behind him. And it's right after 02/2006. It's right after hurricane Katrina two thousand five.
John (Jay) Arena:
And many of the major philanthropies, Walton, Gates, the wife of the Apple founder, they get together and target three cities to really push forward where they think there's possibilities for growth, and they're all majority black cities, Newark, Washington, DC, and, New Orleans. And Booker plays an important part in attracting them to Newark, and they're able to bring in and this is one of the things I found problematic with a lot of the studies of privatization is that the kind of theoretical models that were used, kind of the racial justice framework. I know this can kinda be controversial criticizing critical race theory, but there can be kind of a left critique of critical race theory and racial capitalism. In that, they use what Cedric Johnson calls black organicism. They don't really see real differences among the black community, and you've gotta have a real class analysis to understand what's going on in these struggles.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so Booker was really successful in developing, bringing in new layers of what Adolph Reed calls the black professional managerial class, the BPMC. Booker himself is a is a is a central part of that layer. And so he was able to bring a number of those players from Newark into the movement to privatize public education while also kinda moving out some of the old guard, the old what I call the old BPMC, who were kind of benefited and tied to some of the public school model. So he was successful in doing that. And then the turning point in the movement was when Christie was elected in 02/2009, and they cut a deal, basically.
John (Jay) Arena:
Because also, the local school district since the mid nineties had been under state control, which was part of pushing through privatization, but they wanted to really push it forward. And so there you had an alliance, bipartisan alliance between the pugnacious Chris Christie, who's originally from Newark. I go over that in historical section, so some people might find that of interest. And Booker to basically put through a shock therapy, New Orleans style, mass privatization of the school system. And then, of course, on top of the philanthropic earlier money, they get the Zuckerberg money in '20, 2010 that's unveiled at the Oprah Winfrey Show, which put the national spotlight on Newark, on Booker, Christie.
John (Jay) Arena:
And that, of course, was praised by Oprah, you know, another billionaire about, you know, bipartisan cooperation to put through what they consider a renaissance of education. Well, I guess they do. Yeah. They call the charters public schools, and that's a, you know, that's a intermovement struggle around that. So he was very successful in mobilizing this elite movement from above, but he floundered in his attempts to get buy in, popular buy in, which they attempted.
John (Jay) Arena:
The head of BAO, Black Alliance for Educational Opportunities, Howard Fuller, former black nationals, he was really important in attempting to generate popular support. They did get a lot of the ministers, black ministers in support. And, and there was attempts. They brought in one of these consultants that Tusk, that was very close from the Bloomberg administration. I mean, a lot of the personnel for the privatization were brought over across the river from the administration, and Bloomberg was a big supporter opening up his wallet for Booker's ascent and Booker's program.
John (Jay) Arena:
But that really floundered. They were never able to generate that popular support. And so by 2012, that's when you begin seeing even a little bit earlier well, around 2012 between the insurgent oh, and let me backtrack. We we'd have to throw in the union leadership. That was a success in getting them on board also in going along with this.
John (Jay) Arena:
They were very cooperative. But then you begin to see the emergence of a rank and file reform movement within the New York teachers union, new the Newark Education Workers, and then most dramatically, the Newark students union, who begin a grassroots struggle against the the privatization, the cuts, and the privatization agenda.
David Forrest:
So question actually that just came up for me when I was listening to this is a lot of what you're describing in terms of the things the Booker administration tried to do I might be wrong about this, so correct me if I'm wrong. It feels like these are a lot of things that maybe used to work in terms of if not building a strong, you know, mass base of support for your your agenda, maybe, you know, making sure a mass base of opposition doesn't emerge, you know, bringing in the ministers, maybe getting some union leaders on board, you know, getting something you talk a lot about in the previous book, getting, you know, a lot of nonprofit support around you. And these things sort of didn't work, which seems to, you know, indicate, I think you you talk about this in the book, a kind of different stage in the the sort of development of black urban regimes in The United States and kind of in terms of how the the contradictions they face have evolved, the kinds of strategies they need to use to address them. Is that kind of what's going on there?
John (Jay) Arena:
Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to go after public housing, which they did in Newark. The James regime, James was the preceding mayor to, Sharp James, to Booker, and he oversaw mass demolition. But with the schools, he wasn't ready to go there, and I think that's one reason the powers that be wanted to kinda move him out. He had been there for five terms.
John (Jay) Arena:
But, also, public education, I don't think, had been demonized to the same extent. It it wasn't. It to to the same extent of public housing. It covered a much broader swath of the population. It it was a bigger challenge for the ruling class to go after public education as opposed to public housing.
John (Jay) Arena:
So I think that also had effect. And I I think there's a beginning, as you document, in Minneapolis and we saw in other places. I think in the wake of the great recession, a weakening of the neoliberal agenda, and we're beginning to see some fightbacks. And, Newark was not, you know, an outlier in that respect. You know, the same toolbox, they went to it, the same one they use, and many other neoliberal reforms, it was not successful this time around, at least for a time.
David Forrest:
Yeah. Right. Reminds me a lot of part of a book you draw on a lot actually, Frances Fox Piven's Challenging Authority. She talks in there about sort of this lag between shifts in conditions and the repertoire of contention, a movement's gonna use and how there's you know, it takes some time to kind of work those things out, and that sort of seems like what you're seeing here. A sort of sub question to the one I just asked and, you know, one you spend a lot of time talking about, How did this movement that ultimately put a block in front of some of the Booker administration's plans, how did it emerge?
David Forrest:
You mentioned some of the key actors, but who was really the lead of this movement? Who did a lot of the work to get it going?
John (Jay) Arena:
Yeah. And going back to your last point about from Piven, it takes a while. So it did take a while. I mean, a movement emerged, but Booker's beginning in o six. The second wave is kinda October.
John (Jay) Arena:
So it's really by 2012, a few years after he's begun this push, that kind of resistance emerges. And so one is within the union. So Booker gets the money from Zuckerberg in 2010, and the first thing he wants is he wants a superintendent, a CEO superintendent. Right? That's and so these new philanthropists, different from the earlier kinda turn of the century robber barons, that had a little bit more of a idea of serving the public.
John (Jay) Arena:
They wanna keep us tight control over their investments. Right? That's not grants. They're investments, and they wanna see outcomes. And one of them was to put through a CEO superintendent that's gonna transform radically the district, particularly around teachers and the teacher contract.
John (Jay) Arena:
So they do get, again, drawing from the Bloomberg regime, Cammie Anderson, who's a real militant. I mean, she was a real true believer. She came out of Teach for America, and she really saw this effort to privatize public education as a real anti racist mission, that teachers were a real problem. And so they name her in the spring of twenty eleven, and she moves with the state education head of the the secretary of education at the state level, Chris Cerf, another movement militant that Christie put in to renegotiate the, teacher union contract to put in a lot of neoliberal reforms, to be able to close schools more easily, to be able to fire ineffective teachers, to reward successful teachers measured by the test scores. She came in and, with the assistance of Randy Weingarten, the head of the AFT, CERF basically told her, you know, either you sign this contract and agree to these reforms or we're gonna do a New Orleans on you.
John (Jay) Arena:
You know, we're gonna charterize the whole district, fire all the teachers. And typical of what the union bureaucracy has done over the neoliberal period, they are realistic, and so they go to the table and consensually introduce these neoliberal reforms. So with Randy Weingarten at the the national level, and who knew Cerf who had been also in the Bloomberg Bloomberg administration, and his, neoliberal reforms of the of the system there, the expansion of charters. And so they put through kind of a treasure chest of what the the movement from above, the charter movement wanted. And in the midst of this, a rank and file movement, the Newark Education Workers who were influenced by the core reform group that took over the Chicago Union, and then some of the efforts in in LA emerged, and they had a vote no campaign, an educational campaign, on the contract.
John (Jay) Arena:
They didn't defeat the contract, but they garnered quite a bit of support. And so out of that fight against the contract emerges this, union caucus reform group, the new. It had kind of a social movement understanding of unions that it's about defending the teachers and their interests, but also fighting for the students and the broader community. And this gets back to your earlier question about the importance of these struggles around education. Although they don't have the same power as auto workers or the rail workers who are most pro labor president in decades, blocked from striking or the longshoremen, longshore workers.
John (Jay) Arena:
We gotta get rid of that gendered language. They don't have that kind of power, but they do have what Jane McAlevey talks about that interdependent relationship. And McAlevey studied with with Piven, so it makes not surprised that she draws from her ideas that interdependent relationships with their students. That's a real source of power. But to be able to activate that, you have to be able to raise common demands and common struggles.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so that was part of the vision of the new labor insurgency, which was diametrically opposed, distinct from the the existing leadership in the teachers union. And so that begins to emerge as an important force. Following that, in the fall of twenty twelve was the Newark Students Union, and they emerged with the help of radical teachers that were involved in the the Newark Education Workers. And so there was that symbiotic relationship. And they were influential.
John (Jay) Arena:
There was also a debate team that also had played an important part in cultivating critical consciousness among the students and developing new leaders. Let me backtrack a little bit. In in 2010, there had been kind of a popcorn, what Patrick Bond calls popcorn protest. When Christie first came in, he slashed the education budget. It was almost 1 to $1 for the tax cuts he gave to the rich and the cuts to public education, which is the biggest chunk of state budgets.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so that sparked a big protest, mass walkouts across the state. Newark was one of the largest ones. It did not sustain itself, but out of that, some of the students had participated as freshmen in their later years become important leaders of this Newark Students Union. They are combined with the successor to Acorn, after the implosion of Acorn. When would that was kinda right after Katrina, what, 2010 around there.
John (Jay) Arena:
And there was a a a new group that that emerges to kinda fill the the market that Acorn had. They were aligned with the unions as well. And one of their organizers who passed away recently, his relationship with the Newark Student Union were important. He played a positive role in helping mobilize opposition to the cuts into the privatization. And so on a disruptive level so that's one of the anchoring concepts along with this idea of racial democracy, which we'll get to.
John (Jay) Arena:
But what, Francis Fox Piven talks about is disruptive power, the ability to withdraw cooperation from interdependent relationships. So the one between the students and the school district. And, they carried out a number of walkouts, mass walkouts, occupations of the school board meetings, and street protests, street blockage, sometimes with some of the dissident teachers. But the students were the major force of disruptive protest along with some community activist allies. So those are kind of the three prongs of the movement from below.
John (Jay) Arena:
The students, their student union, the dissident faction of the teachers union, and then assorted community activists. And, school board meetings were kind of a key terrain. The the walkouts, but also school board meetings.
David Forrest:
Excellent. So this brings us to Ras Baraka, who in some ways amplifies some of the claims of the movement and then really, like, rides into the mayor's office on the back of this movement from below and is proclaimed as a radical mayor. I can't remember if he actually called himself a radical mayor. He did. Yes.
David Forrest:
Okay. And he certainly advertised that way in different kinds of media. And yet, this is kind of the core puzzle here, he didn't really pursue the movement's most aspirational goals. I mean, that's putting it mildly. He didn't really he went against a lot of the movement's most aspirational goals, which were, you know, stopping the rollout of charter schools and, you know, increasing support for public schools.
David Forrest:
So this kind of leaves us with two questions. One is why, despite his connections to the movement from below, didn't Baraka try to push harder in an anti neoliberal direction? I mean, was he always just kind of the way he was when he went into office? Did he pull the wool over people's eyes, or did something happen when he got elected? What what sort of explains that?
David Forrest:
And then, also, ultimately, like, how and this is the kind of question that gets to the crux of your argument. How did he ultimately succeed where Booker didn't? Again, if not succeeding in building a fully supportive mass base, he at least succeeded in making sure a fully oppositional mass base didn't keep going against him.
John (Jay) Arena:
Well, yeah, let's give a little background on on Ras Barak, who's a very capable, fascinating political official. He is about the same age as Cory Booker, but a different trajectory. Cory grew up in an affluent suburb in the New Jersey suburbs, not far from Newark, about twenty, thirty minutes, and he had some connections with Newark growing up. I think his dentist was there, and I think the Baptist church his family attended. His parents worked as executives for Xerox in New York.
John (Jay) Arena:
Was it IBM or Xerox? One of those big big companies. And they were beneficiaries of the gains of the civil rights movement, being able to buy a house despite discrimination they faced in in the suburbs in a it was a very affluent Harrington Park and then being able to work in in in corporate America. Whereas Ras Baraka, he grew up in Newark. His father was the famed activist Amiri Baraka, and he was kinda brought up in the movement.
John (Jay) Arena:
He went goes to, Howard University, which his father attended. He was an activist there. They led sit ins against Lee Atwater, who was on the board of trustees of Howard, who constructed the whole racist, the Willie Horton ads for the old man George Bush and his campaign. And I think he did have to they forced him out from the board of trustees. And he came back to his hometown, was involved in anti police brutality protests, and while working as a teacher and working his way up, eventually becoming a principal at Central High.
John (Jay) Arena:
And he tried, but he was eventually brought into the James administration after he ran for mayor himself as a young man, and then did win a seat in the predominantly black, South Ward of Newark in 2010. Kinda as Barack is consolidating his power and when, he makes this agreement with Christie to put through this shock therapy privatization agenda, He had lost the number of races. And then as this movement builds, kind of his career advances. And then as Booker's program collapses by 2012, '20 '13, and he jumps to the US senate, then you see Ras Baraka throws his hat in the ring. And it's clearly the issue is of the mayoral race in 2014.
John (Jay) Arena:
It's a clear battle around public education. It's the movement from above and the movement from below. His opponent is Shavar Jeffries, who comes from humble background in Newark, went to private school, then to Columbia do Columbia University. Not as prestigious as Booker, but but up there. And although Booker doesn't openly back him, he is the all but anointed successor of Cory Booker and the privatization agenda.
John (Jay) Arena:
He comes out of the movement. He's with Team Academy with the KIPP charter chain. He's on the school board where he advocates for for charters, and he gets huge amounts of money. He outspends Baraka by dramatic proportions. I mean, Baraka's money basically came from organized labor, from the labor unions.
John (Jay) Arena:
And Baraka aligns with the movement, so he does help advance it. He gets in there. He's pushing forward the protest. Although he always emphasizes it's not against charters. He does emphasize that.
John (Jay) Arena:
I'm not against charters, but against the state control and against the reforms that, Cammie Anderson, who I mentioned earlier, the the movement superintendent, the CEO superintendent, who is ramming those through. And he does have a real base. And so unlike Booker, who is not able to generate that popular support, because he didn't have the same trajectory, the same legacy. And he was always trying to shake off that image of the outsider, the opportunist. And there is a wariness in Newark of the outsider.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so I don't think he could shake that. On contrast, Baraka had deep roots in the community, had real legitimacy. His father dies in the midst of the campaign, and and sister Solja, who speaks at Amiri Baraka's funeral, said this was his last political intervention to die in the middle of the campaign, which they turned into as the New York Times said, a campaign event. And so he had some real authority, real organic connections. He came out of the school district, and he did portray this as a real struggle against the opportunistic forces that were using our movement.
John (Jay) Arena:
Right? Because they call Booker to legitimate it. Right? Call it the civil rights movement of our day. That is the movement ideology from above.
John (Jay) Arena:
This is a progressive to deal with the racial learning gap, the achievement gap, a racialized achievement gap. The charters were about to to address that, and these uncaring teacher unions were an obstacle. So Baraka does ride that, and he does consider himself a radical mayor. He used those terret words in his inauguration in 2014. So he rides that movement.
John (Jay) Arena:
But at the same time, and this was the contradictions reflected during his campaign, He's giving these radical speeches aligned with this movement from below. He's running with their funds, at least from organized labor. But at the same time, he's meeting with the corporate interest to reassure them that he's someone that they can play with, that they can play ball with. And there's a really telling meeting. I I open up chapter, I think, six with that, where he meets with the you know, it's like the business roundtable of the Newark region.
John (Jay) Arena:
And he says, look. You know, I got this image. You know? You hear the Barakas, radical, and all that goes along with that. You have this image, but look.
John (Jay) Arena:
I'm not going to shut down all the charter schools. I'm not gonna run out all the business from Newark. I'm someone that you can deal with. And so we kinda had to play that game of reassuring that he's someone that they could deal with, that he supported the redevelopment, which there's a a lot of money coming in under Booker, and it goes even farther under Barack. I mean, it should come down to just in the ten years that I've been in Newark, there's been this massive makeover of the down I just came back.
John (Jay) Arena:
I had been away, and there's this huge couple new high rises sprouting up in downtown. And the charter schools, as I've mentioned there, and I have a nice map in the book, shows that they clustered in this downtown area. So there was a real connection between the rent intensification agenda and the charter schools, and so he couldn't go after them. But at the same time, he's tied to this movement that is opposed to the charter schools and the privatization. How does he thread that needle?
John (Jay) Arena:
You have to be very talented. I you know, he's and that's what I think the the changes. We're gonna need more Barakas as the movement strengthen. And I do see with my politics, I guess you always have gonna be what did Gramsci say? A pessimism of the intellect, I I always forgot that one.
John (Jay) Arena:
But you you think the the the movement is gonna kinda be right around the corner. But there are real positive signs, and I think you're gonna need more people like Baraka that can kinda ride these tigers. And so what Baraka does is increasingly after he's elected and they drive out the superintendent, Cammie Anderson, a year after him taking power and a mass walkout, the largest of the three to four year insurgency. Twenty fifteen massive walkout, and she is pushed out. And then they put in another character, Chris Serfoy, mentioned earlier, who's also a leading movement militant as the superintendent.
John (Jay) Arena:
But there's a commitment from Christie. He's launching a new presidential candidacy. Well, he was doing that in 2016, '20 '15, '20 '16. It didn't go very far. It crashed and burned in New Hampshire.
John (Jay) Arena:
Christie needed to solve things. He need to quiet Newark for him to launch his campaign, and so they cut a deal to get out Anderson and put in this new character, but have a road map. There's a road map to local control. And so this becomes the overwhelming focus that we need to get self determination. This black and brown city who is put in this neocolonial situation since the mid nineteen nineties when the state took over control of the local district, right, an anti democratic move, a fascist move, he called that, that we are gonna get back local control.
John (Jay) Arena:
But he separated that. So that's a racial democratic agenda. We wanna have equal distribution of the goods and bads. It's kind of an anti disparitarian as it played out in schools. The suburbs get to control their district.
John (Jay) Arena:
We should as well. So the focus became self determination, but separated from the issue of privatization. And so he turned a blind eye for the most part. He would make some noises about the further expansion, which was resided with the state. The state had power over approving new charters in the city.
John (Jay) Arena:
But the city had a lot of control. He could use his office as a bully pulpit against it, but also they had other controls, zoning controls. And so what we see after the removal of Anderson that Baraka would make some speeches, criticisms of the expansions, but then do things concretely that he had control over, like zoning rules that allowed these new schools to emerge. And some of his allies called him out on that. Some of the nonprofit, the unions, and this Acorn successor and the NAACP, they started calling out, you're double dealing.
John (Jay) Arena:
You know, what happened to this radical mayor that we put in office, and then you're allowing these schools to go up. You're making it a political alliance with the charter movement to run candidates. So we want to have unity. Right? That's all about unity after the election.
John (Jay) Arena:
We don't want this conflict. We wanna make Newark governable again as I titled the the penultimate chapter, and he increasingly conciliates. And there is some opposition, but he's got the influence. He's got the unions that are allied with him, and they're not gonna buck him. And the new had weakened, you know, so that assisted him.
John (Jay) Arena:
There's his powers and the influence of that racial democratic ideology that a lot of the left buys into. And so he was able to use that authority, and then the weakening of the union opposition movement, kind of the exhaustion, they were defeated in an election to defeat the incumbent administration, the incumbent regime. And then the students, you know, that can be kind of ephemeral too. They leave. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
And it's like you've gotta create a new generation of activist, and they were not kinda successful in doing that. And then I kinda end that I mean, we can get into those questions. Well, what are the lessons in for building the movement that can succeed?
David Forrest:
So something we should just mention briefly, you're using these terms, racial democracy, social democracy. These are concepts you are pulling actually from another University of Minnesota press book by Preston Smith is Racial Democracy in the Black Metropolis, which actually, you know, in a lot of ways dovetails quite nicely with Jay's book. So, yeah, Jay, I wanna, you know, go on where you left off and shift us into thinking some more about, you know, some broad implications here about, you know, what you found in Newark. I wanna start by asking a couple questions about kind of the central concept here, the thing that comes out in a lot of your discussion of Baraka, which is anti racism. The subtitle of the book is how anti racist politics enable school privatization in Newark.
David Forrest:
The first thing I wanna ask you about is just I think it's fair to say that, on balance, a lot of scholarship about urban social movements and such engage in some of these similar questions feels a little bit more positively about anti racism and anti racist politics than comes out in this book. And I just wanna know more about kind of what you think, in general, this scholarship is missing that comes out of the newer case study. You know, I think a lot of these scholars who maybe see a kind of more positive role for anti racist politics to play might, like, grant you the analysis of kind of your case, but then, you know, they would try to point to their own sort of counterexamples where they think by prioritizing anti racism, they have examples where that's helped a, you know, redistributive or economic justice struggle to expand its base of support by, for example, providing a vehicle for connecting with various sorts of community organizations that might have thought about themselves in terms of pursuing racial justice and didn't previously maybe see a connection between racial justice and this, you know, redistributive struggle over here.
David Forrest:
Or maybe they would point to cases where centering anti racism has encouraged leaders of certain redistributive struggles to give more attention to kind of the full range of challenges facing poor and working class people in a particular city. And I'm thinking here of books like you know, there was a book published several years ago also by University of Minnesota Press called Workplace Justice by Sharon Kurtz, where she she's talking about organizing among Columbia clerical workers. And, you know, I think she kind of is someone who, you know, pushed a little bit more of this kind of positive spin. Or more recently yeah. Another example of this kind of book I would think of is, Justice at Work.
David Forrest:
I recently listened to, the, actually, University of Minnesota podcast interview with the authors, and I think they seem to kind of embrace some of these kinds of arguments about the potential benefits of centering anti racism and economic justice or redistributive struggles. So my question is, you know, from your perspective as someone who engaged in this activism and studied this case in Newark, what are some of these more positive appraisals, you know, maybe overlooking? What what are they not paying enough attention to in their analyses? And I know you maybe can't speak to those specific ones I just raised, but just in in general, what are you finding that's missing sometimes in other kinds of scholarship that offers a more positive appraisal of anti racist politics and urban politics?
John (Jay) Arena:
Right. So I gotta begin with the newer case, and the reality that I was seeing on the ground was this powerful movement, very powerful forces, right, backing this privatization agenda led by this very talented mayor, Cory Booker. And then there's another counter movement that emerges. But then we see what happens. This privatization continues.
John (Jay) Arena:
Right? That was what the movement was about. So what is going on? And then you've gotta go to theory. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
So what explains what can provide some direction to find out what's actually happening on the ground? And that's where I found some of the work like Christian Buress who wrote on New Orleans. You know, it was the black community. They were just kind of spectators to all this. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
There was no real and I see this in a number of other works looking around particularly in education, but other issues. It's looking at the black community. What we gotta as Adolph Reed talked about in another collection of his essays in another University of Minnesota press, I encourage you to go out there and get it, stirrings in the jug. Right? He said you gotta bust open the jug to see what's really going on.
John (Jay) Arena:
And so that moved me to the work of Preston Smith, you know, Adolph Reed I had drawn from. But it's the I call it the law I think it's a school. It's really the materialist school of post civil rights black politics. So I drew from Reid, Cedric Johnson, Torre Reid, and maybe the anchoring concept in book was Preston Smith's Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis. And so there, he's looking at struggles around housing in the thirties and then particularly in the post World War two era, where the Jim Crow has not been, you know, killed.
John (Jay) Arena:
But there's still you gotta have a class analysis to understand what was going on, and ever more so in the post civil rights period and in the context of these black urban regimes. And so I saw that you had to have this real class analysis, and I thought this dichotomy between racial democracy, this fight for the equal distribution or equal opportunity and more and in a radical form, you know, the radical edge and anti disparitarian framework where you want an equal distribution of the goods and bads. If there's African Americans are 13% of the population, they should be 13% of the billionaires, thirteen percent of those living in poverty, 13% of those living next to toxic waste facilities. Right? We don't wanna get rid of that stuff.
John (Jay) Arena:
We wanna equal distribution. That's kind of the idea. We could call that the ideal of justice under neoliberalism. Right? You don't wanna get rid of inequality, just an equal distribution along axes of race, gender, but not class, of course.
John (Jay) Arena:
And then there's the other ideal of social democracy where there's an equal access to the necessities of life regardless of class. And sometimes as I'm not saying, obviously, there's racism. I'm not arguing that. And and we wanna have the racial demark but when and this is what Smith emphasized. This is what Reid emphasized, Johnson, Tory Reid.
John (Jay) Arena:
Sometimes they run together. Right? And and Preston Smith talks about that. They can there's kind of a tension, but they can kinda run together. But what we increasingly see is a fracturing between the two.
John (Jay) Arena:
So, yes, they should get local control, but at the expense of or ignoring the other piece. And in fact, when you don't end the privatization, it's an empty prize to say self determination, because what are you determining over? The place has been privatized. You know, those charter schools, they're totally anti democratic. The city doesn't have it.
John (Jay) Arena:
The school board doesn't have any real substantive control over that. So when you you're not really getting self determination. But if you're tied to a development agenda in which charters are central to the revitalization of the city, you do have to separate the two. Ras Baraka does. And that's why you gotta have a class analysis.
John (Jay) Arena:
You have to understand the role of the black professional managerial class and their relationship to the corporate elite, and that's where those other frameworks are blind to that. Whereas the materialist school of post civil rights black politics, the scholars that I mentioned, open up and shed light on the real dynamics that are going on in black politics, which I'm focused on. And we see this more broadly with the rise of Sanders, and I'll have a critique of the Democratic party that's in there. But the point is he did put in a strong social democratic agenda on the the mainstream political agenda, decommodifying health care, education, and a number of areas of American right to a job, and he was attacked. So at one point, they're kinda separate.
John (Jay) Arena:
Right? They're just focusing on racial democracy to the exclusion of social democracy. Now what we saw with the Sanders campaign that racial democracy was used as a weapon to attack the demands for social democracy. The contradictions became particularly sharp. I'm saying, no.
John (Jay) Arena:
You gotta have both. But in this case, they're using the racial democracy, the political elite, and those who lied to them to accommodate the neoliberal agenda, and our movements have to be cognizant of that. I mean, we can look in Atlanta right now with Cop City. They're using a lot of that, some of those type of politics to go after the the Cop City opponents. So, again, I think we've gotta break open the jug of black politics.
John (Jay) Arena:
Smith is writing about in the '4 thirties, forties, and fifties, it was important, you know, but ever more so in this period where the class divisions among African Americans are even more marked than the runaway inequality, which we see in The United States political economy as a whole. So it's really important. If you if you don't have that class analysis, you're lost.
David Forrest:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it's one thing to be anti racist, and, of course, any left you would place a positive label on or I would would be one that is anti racist. It's quite another to substitute anti racism for a class analysis or substitute an anti racist analysis for a class analysis. And it's hard because where that substitution is gonna end up, I think, isn't always clear at the beginning. So, you know, you're in a meeting.
David Forrest:
Someone says, I'm sick of all these charter schools. This is colonialism. This is this colonial relationship we have with the state. It can feel like, yeah, okay. You know, you're kind of with your friends or whatever.
David Forrest:
People are arguing like we're all on the same side. But then as things sort of evolve, this argument that is operating as a sort of substitute for, you know, looking at some of the sort of class elements that underlie charterization. You're all of a sudden creating a potential tool that someone in the sort of movement above can use to split your movement, fragment it, potentially divert it into just focusing, in this case, on local control and all of a sudden not paying attention to some of this other stuff. Is that a fair
John (Jay) Arena:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean and then when you do separate the two, like Reid says, the the the race line, the anti racism becomes a class line. I mean, that's what I was that what they were projecting as anti racism was really about protecting the class agenda of the movement from above. Our movements, they have to be anti racist.
John (Jay) Arena:
Right? If they are not, that's how those in power can exploit them. And so, for example, the bookers, this is the civil rights movement of our day. I mean, they did tap into something real. The teacher unions didn't have a social movement agenda.
John (Jay) Arena:
It was a very narrow agenda, and we saw that in new work, And I get into that in the historical piece around the struggles, the public sector movement of the the late nineteen sixties going into the nineteen seventies, where where they first won in strikes in nineteen seventy and seventy one, collective bargaining rights, collective bargaining contract. I mean, there were different tendencies, but the dominant one was kind of this narrow bread and butter unionism that saw the teachers in conflict with the students and their families, which in the Newark case had a really racialized dynamic. And we saw the Brownsville struggle in New York City under the reactionary AFT, UFT leadership of Schenker, Albert Schenker. There was a kernel of good sense in that critique of the narrowness of the teachers union. So, yeah, we have to be anti racist, but when you separate and sometimes to frame it as this racial justice struggle undermines the effort to fight really fight the racial in inequities.
John (Jay) Arena:
I mean, I have a critique of the reparations movement, which is kind of a class agenda. You you've gotta fight races, but you're not gonna be able to do that when you hive it off from a class agenda, and that's what we're increasingly seeing the way in which anti racism is used as a tool to beat back those social democratic, socialist demands and and platform.
David Forrest:
So I wanna shift gears now a little bit to discussion of social movements. As you say in the book, spelling public schools is very much a book about competing social movements. But it just sort of struck me that the way you kind of conceptualize and study social movements is actually somewhat distinct from what you find in sort of traditional social movement scholarship. You know, I think in a lot of traditional social movement work I have encountered in my life, in my sort of studying, social movements are kind of approached as a discrete object of analysis. There's a group of activists in a room, you're studying them.
David Forrest:
The way you seem to approach it, a social movement or to talk about social movements is almost like, instead of being like an instead of being like an object analysis, it's almost like a a frame of analysis, the way something like game theory is a frame of analysis. So for you, studying social movements isn't just about examining groups of activists. It's about seeing politics and society, first and foremost, as a site of struggle, and then thinking about all actors in terms of how they're positioned vis a vis different parts of that struggle. I guess I just wanted to ask, you know, if you could say a little bit more about how you approach the study of social movements, what makes that approach somewhat distinct? Do you call it a Marxist approach?
David Forrest:
And, you know, what do we gain from making that shift with you?
John (Jay) Arena:
You know, when I came into graduate school, I kinda had two different stages. I was in Latin American studies in the nineties or the early nineties, and then sociology began in the late nineties. But I was always gravitated to social movement stuff, but I found it problematic in the way they kinda separated. It was contrasted with experiences I had on the ground between class issues and social movements. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
And that's where US social movement theory is kind of a reaction that, you know, there's the labor movement and then that these other movements. That class analysis can't kinda really understand the civil rights movement, women's movement, environmental movement, nonmaterialist supposedly. And I think that's really problematic, and it doesn't capture what's going on in the ground. And so I really, found the work of Alf Nilsen and Lawrence Cox, who are not US based social scientists in Ireland and Norway. But they have a great book, edited book with a couple other authors.
John (Jay) Arena:
But then Nilsen and Cox have another work on their own, but it's a Marxist analysis. So it's bringing back class and Marx into social movements. And I just found that their work, kind of this processual understanding of social movements, the potential development from the micro to societal transformation is really helpful. It's not automatic. It's a potential.
John (Jay) Arena:
And if you're interested where which I am, and how do we bring about a real radical restructuring of American and global society, political economy. That's the type of theory we need, and so that spoke to, you know, my political interest and political agenda. There's a connection between the our values, our politics, the theories, the methodologies we use, they're all interconnected. If we wanna really develop a movement, those are the type of theories that can get movements moving again. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
And then they talk about that. And the work of Rosa Luxemburg and her theory of the mass strike, which I think more people need to read because it speaks to the conjuncture that we're in, that we're seeing mass strikes. There was a recent article by Chris Maisono. He's on Jacobin, but it was basically about they don't use the language. And that's probably we don't have that theory, but they're pointing to this phenomena of these mass mobilizations that we've seen.
John (Jay) Arena:
They're basically mass strike process, kind of the spontaneous somewhat spontaneous, but they haven't been able to move forward. You know? And I think in drawing from the newer case and and engaging with Nielsen and Cox and Luxembourg, the key to this is agreeing on a common program, a common alternative program that moves society forward and agreeing on those common demands of political and economic demands, they're connected to your immediate struggle, but they go beyond that. That is really crucial to pushing our movements forward and particularly advancing when these mass strike movements emerge, which you can't predict. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
You can't but they we are in a period of mass strike. That is the reality. And I think this theory and this idea of developing common demands, democratic organization is key to advancing our movement. And we could see in the Newark case, there wasn't clear demands of what the movement wanted, and I think that was part of one factor, an important factor, in Baraka's ability to kinda take it in that racial democracy direction and eventually contain the movement. So, yeah, I don't think a lot of that other theory, the dominant resource mobilization and even where some people have taken political process model.
John (Jay) Arena:
Although McAdams' work, which is seminal for social movement, does have a lot of political economy, but that eventually becomes jettisoned in the eighties and nineties and into the February. I think it's very fruitful to turning to this kinda critical approach to social movements represented by Nielsen and Cox works and and Luxembourg.
David Forrest:
Let me jump in there. You know, first of all, thank you for mentioning, Rosa Luxemburg. One of the things I was gonna ask you about is to sort of just give a plug for her work because it's so clearly influential for you, and it's something that you just don't see discussed a lot, at least in kind of academic discussions of social movements in The US. And I have this memory of, at one point, you were a peer reviewer for a journal article I was having reviewed, and you gave the plug there. You very much pushed me to read her.
David Forrest:
And that's actually when I first read Rosa Luxemburg. And you were right. She was really helpful. And reading her essay on the mass strike in particular was a really beneficial thing for me. But building off of what you were just saying, and you talk about how is it Nielsen and Cox layout different potential sort of stages of movements and how there's this goal.
David Forrest:
Generally, the the goal is to go from kind of more defensive and particular to more aspirational in general. You know, my sense is that at least a certain kind of person on on the left or left academics, left organizers see the key mechanism needed to kind of make that jump, make that shift is to achieve a kind of independent presence in the party system. That the movements need to have a political party for which they are the anchor, and that's what helps to create that generalization. And sort of the elephant in the room for the left movements in The US, certainly in Newark, is that such a party does not exist and, you know, isn't really likely to emerge. That this is sort of precisely or at least partly why things like Baraka's neoliberal anti racism or the nonprofit sector, which you discussed more in Driven from New Orleans, can exert such a strong pull.
David Forrest:
It's because there isn't a party to sort of channel everything in a different direction. So I guess the question I wanted to ask for you, it comes up a little bit in the book, but I wanted you to speak more about it is, you know, what are your thoughts on how movements from below, like the one you studied in Newark, can sort of deal with this? And it's clear, you know, there's this moment in the book where you talk about this exchange you had with Karen Lewis, who who is the former president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about running for mayor in Chicago on the Democratic ballot. It's clear you don't like this idea of trying to sort of infiltrate and realign the Democratic party. That's not the sort of workaround for you.
David Forrest:
So the question is, what's the alternative here? And one thing you mentioned in the book that might be a a vehicle for talking about this is this idea of the popular assembly. And, you know, you go into some about that, but is that a partial answer to this problem about how we had make this step in the presence of a party system where there isn't a, you know, strong labor left party? And it again, it doesn't really seem like there's going to be one anytime in the near future.
John (Jay) Arena:
I mean, I think the newer case and the Baraka case is a testament of the old adage that social movements go to die in the Democratic Party. That was just another further example of that. I'm arguing, and this is a contentious issue within social movements. Right? The whole issue of the relationship with the Democratic Party.
John (Jay) Arena:
I mean, the reality is in places like Newark, in many urban centers, they are one party regime. They're one party states. Right? There is no Republican Party. I mean, I actually did run for office, and I tried to contact the republic.
John (Jay) Arena:
They're, like, nonexistent. Now in Newark's case, there was, like, factions of the Democratic party. There were supposedly nonpartisan races, but Jeffries was a Democrat, so was Baraka. But Jeffries was aligned with the county Democratic Party, the county boss, Joseph Di Vincenzo, who was very much connected to the charter movement. So there was this split in the Democratic Party.
John (Jay) Arena:
But once Baraka gets in power, he allies with them. They consolidate, and he moves toward their agenda, accommodates to that agenda. I think the only leverage that we have is if if we do have some independent politics but that are democratically controlled and not separated from the movement. So I think I talk about that movement politics. Right?
John (Jay) Arena:
Movement candidates. And so we have to have one democratic control. I mean, we're seeing that with the DSA. That's a huge issue. You got these their candidates.
John (Jay) Arena:
They do what the hell they want in total contradiction to the platforms, to the democratically arrived platforms. That's what we've gotta have is real democratic control and some kind of sanctions when they break. Now Baraka was a prime example of that. He was the movement standard bearer. He was out there, got their endorsements.
John (Jay) Arena:
I'm with you. He talked about when I come to power, we come to power. Right? Use this kind of populist grassroots democratic language. I'm a radical mayor.
John (Jay) Arena:
He does what the hell he wants once he gets in power. There is no exercise of control. The real power is in disruptive power, disruptive protest. You gotta have a movement in the streets, but it will be strengthened with a democratically controlled electoral arm. And where movements come together, it's not gonna be this vanguard party.
John (Jay) Arena:
Luxembourg was very critical, Lenin. But how movements can come together, what Les Leopold in his work, Runaway and Equality, adviser to the CWA, who have some problems with. But he talks about our need to get out of these silos. I mean, we've got all these different separate issues, single issue groups that are doing some good work, but you're not really gonna change the power dynamics unless you can come together. And there was some movements toward that in Newark when I talk about the popular assembly we had in 2013, The anti war groups, health care, education, the environment, you know, we can go down the line, prison, policing.
John (Jay) Arena:
If we can come together with common demands, running our own candidates, but also coming together to fight in our different terrains, but also coming back with what we want. And that's the only way you get any concessions is if you fight for what you want, and then you begin to get those. If not, you basically, you know, set the terms for retreat, for the terms of defeat. I think the example historically and what we are seeing in the contemporary context is that the movements we do have to have but democratically controlled on electoral arm. Not like the Greens just run a candidate, but there's really no connection to the movements in the streets or, you know, the Vanguard party that runs their get behind us.
John (Jay) Arena:
I think the alternative approach of movements coming together on common programs, and that's what Luxembourg talked about to lay the groundwork. You can't call a mass strike, but you can agree on common demand. So when these movement merges, they can go farther. I think that is the lessons that I draw from the newer case for, you know, pushing our movement forward, and we are in a dangerous period. Clearly, the neoliberal project, some people call it zombie neoliberalism, you know, it keeps going on, but it has lost what base of popular support of cons consent that it had obtained in the previous decades.
John (Jay) Arena:
You know? And we're seeing these ugly forces on the right, And unless we can can kinda fill a vacuum, which the Democrats can't, we've got a real ugly future ahead of us. And I point to the Greek tragedy of Syriza, which is really coming forward. The people were ready to fight. They had the referendum in 2015 to reject austerity to fight, and they betrayed it because there was no just like Newark.
John (Jay) Arena:
We didn't control when he cut the deal with Christie. We had no control just like the movement had no control over Cyprus. You know, from my perspective, from that engagement with Newark and my other experiences in in engaging theory, that's the lesson I take from Newark. And, hopefully, as Kenneth Gibson said, wherever the country's going, Newark will get there first. Well, hopefully, we got there first to learn the lessons, and others will take those lessons in the in the movements that are emerging and will emerge in the coming years and decades.
David Forrest:
Final very particular question. Has anything changed in Newark since the conclusion of this book, Baraka still mayor? Have any of those dynamics shifted? Are there any new openings for the movement from below to have a resurgence, or are we still sort of in the same spot?
John (Jay) Arena:
Well, first of all, this has been a great interview. This has really just flowed nicely. You're a great interviewer. What's happening? You know, I was just talking with Al Musab, who's one of the major protagonists of the book.
John (Jay) Arena:
He's was one of the teachers and one of the founders of the Newark Education Workers. And we were commenting that things were hopping in Newark in the teens and into the under Trump because we had the big school movement. And then this is it takes a while after one project as you probably well know, but I'd like to begin a study of the successful movement in New Jersey and in Newark to close all the ICE detention centers. There were four. Three run by the deep blue Democratic counties in Northern New Jersey, including Essex where Newark is Newark is the county seat.
John (Jay) Arena:
And then there's one private one, which is on the ropes, but the Biden administration just came to the rescue and, sided with the for profit prison operation CoreCivic to keep it open even though the state had passed legislation to close all the ICE camps. So another betrayal on the the Biden administration, another argument for our need for our own political arm. Another betrayal. He said he was gonna close all the private prisons. He's doing the exact opposite in New Jersey and then across the country.
John (Jay) Arena:
But, there was a real strong movement under Trump. Although these camps had existed under Obama, it took off under Trump. It was a really strong movement. But now things have kinda and and Baraka was put on the defensive in that struggle as well because he was aligned with the county that was maintaining these. But at the same time, he said Newark was a a sanctuary city, and and yet they had one of the biggest ICE concentration camps in the country.
John (Jay) Arena:
Kind of big contradiction. So he had to come out and distance himself a bit from the county executive Joseph DiVincenzo. And I do try to put my theories into practice. I a part of the movement did run me. I'll I have to, I guess, put that out there that I did run as an independent candidate.
John (Jay) Arena:
But that was trying to put the theory into practice that the movements have to have their own democratically controlled candidates, and I think it did help push the movement forward a bit. But things have basically quieted down. There was also a struggle around the water system that had lead in the water, and that was also an arm of the, Newark Education Workers that took up that struggle. So those were kind of the three major struggles. But at this point, things are quieted.
John (Jay) Arena:
The rent intensification agenda is moving pretty aggressively forward. The charters have increased. Yes. It was not the same rate as under under Booker, but they have continued and consolidated. And it seems like the mom and pop, some of those are going by the wayside.
John (Jay) Arena:
But the big corporate KIPP, NorthStar, those are kinda pretty solidly, established in Newark. They're not going anywhere, especially with this movement having been contained. And now it looks like Baraka might be throwing his hat into the ring for the governor's office, but that's not clear. So movements ebb and flow. When I see these defeats, which have been in many over several decades, I've been in struggles, what can you do?
John (Jay) Arena:
You can study them and take out the lessons for strengthening them in the future, and we're gonna have some major battles going forward. But there's a lot of bright spots in, you know, Staten Island. Who would have thought? The first successful vote was in Staten Island, and one of my students was one of the organizers. Now they've run into problems as well connected to democracy, democratic organization.
John (Jay) Arena:
So it bedevils our movements in many different fields. So the lessons from Newark extend beyond the city and the issue of of education.
David Forrest:
Well, I think that is a great place to close-up. Thank you so much, Jay, for chatting. Really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed hearing your thoughts about all these issues. Again, the book is Expelling Public Schools, How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark.
David Forrest:
I hope everybody picks it up, and I'll just say agree or disagree. It will challenge you to think, study, and organize better.