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The Politics of Choice and the Structuring of Citizenship post‐Brown v. Board of Education
Author(s) -
Aggarwal U.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
transforming anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.325
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 1548-7466
pISSN - 1051-0559
DOI - 10.1111/traa.12030
Subject(s) - citizenship , politics , articulation (sociology) , democracy , sociology , state (computer science) , situated , trace (psycholinguistics) , political science , narrative , law , law and economics , linguistics , philosophy , algorithm , artificial intelligence , computer science
The relationship between education, state‐sanctioned structuring of a differentially valued life, and democracy was supposed to be rectified by Brown v. Board of Education (1954) when universal rights to education were won. Yet how universal rights were structured (as individual choices) has been critical to understanding the ways that a tiered citizenship continues to be guaranteed post‐ Brown , and embedded within the state. In this article, I examine the articulation of this continuity in the contemporary period. I trace how choice‐based policies preclude the very equality of rights they promise as parents of diverse backgrounds make situated rights claims to the shared resource of public schools; and how the irony of the liberal freedom to choose, qualified by inequality, is redoubled as the structures of exclusion that result are obfuscated by narratives that invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights movement.