ABSTRACT
In one of the author's most memorable sessions with Shaun, he passionately expressed his dreams of traveling the world and studying in Italy to become a “world renowned chef.” Public shaming is as much a part of the school culture at POWER middle school as bells and uniforms. The policing structures that inform POWER middle school’s policies also inform Shaun’s consciousness as it relates to what he understands as acceptable communal realities. Shaun’s community pays what researchers call a poverty tax, where resources like gasoline, groceries, and even parking meters are priced significantly higher than in nearby white communities. POWER’s schooling processes reflect a larger neoliberal culture that reproduce the community’s disenfranchisement; it engages the language of “hard work,” “grit” and “delayed gratification” in order to explain away legacies of discriminatory and excluding legislation, gang-injunctions, poverty taxes, and other forms of state sanctioned violence.
