As mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013, New Jersey senator Cory Booker led one of the nation’s most aggressive campaigns to privatize public schools. With the support of a dizzying array of powerful political figures, business and foundation leaders, and media moguls from across the political spectrum, Booker attempted to institute a regime of charter schools across the city. On his side were the Barack Obama White House, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, and media mogul Oprah Winfrey; against him stood teachers’ unions and large sections of the city’s working-class inhabitants.

Teachers, students, families, and community activists came together and successfully halted Booker’s privatization agenda. Booker’s successor, Ras Baraka — son of the communist poet Amiri Baraka — rode this powerful movement to the top of Newark City Hall in 2014. Once elected mayor, however, Baraka skillfully neutralized and co-opted the once militant movement for public education, securing tacit consent for school charterization among its erstwhile opponents.

The 2023 book Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark documents the rise and fall of this remarkable movement. Its author, John Arena, is a longtime labor and community organizer who was an active participant in these struggles. From this vantage point, he offers an incisive insider account of the intense, yearslong battle for public education in Newark and its ultimate defeat.

But the book’s relevance stretches far beyond Newark, and even beyond struggles for public education. Arena astutely uses this case study “to shed light on the mechanisms that reproduce, deepen, and manage inequality within the context of post–civil rights black and urban politics.” Newark is a prime site for such an investigation. The city is among the poorest in the United States, and its population is nearly 90 percent African American and Latino. In addition, the movement in defense of public education both emerged and unraveled under black mayorships and a black-majority city council and school board. Given these dynamics, Expelling Public Schools offers essential insights into much broader struggles to create a more just society.

When Booker took office in 2006, a veritable who’s who of local, state, and national elites poured millions of dollars and incalculable political capital into the effort to privatize Newark’s public schools. This charterization project largely failed, however, as it came face-to-face with tenacious and well-organized community resistance. Students, equipped with political education and support from district teachers — many of whom were involved in the Newark Education Workers Caucus insurgency within the Newark Teachers Union — took the lead in the battle. They formed the Newark Students Union (NSU) and, alongside their teachers, galvanized the support of families and a wide range of local organizations and churches, some of whom had initially supported the privatization efforts.

Organizing within and across schools, the NSU orchestrated mass school walkouts, street marches and protests, and mobilizations and speeches at school board meetings. At its height, the movement even organized occupations of the district’s offices. In short, the movement succeeded in forging a broad-based campaign in which “militant particularisms across social and spatial boundaries” coalesced “around a generalized challenge to the dominant forces.” By 2013, the beleaguered Booker had resigned as mayor to assume a vacated seat in the US Senate.

Eyeing a run for mayor himself, Baraka, a public high school principal, city councilor, and longtime community activist, jumped into the fray. The son of Black Power luminary and Newark native Amiri Baraka, the younger Baraka levied spirited, relentless critiques at the state’s receivership of Newark Public Schools and the governor-appointed superintendent as agents of “neocolonialism” committing attacks on the “self-determination” of “Black and Brown communities.” Baraka supported the NSU’s protests and painted himself as an insurgent grassroots candidate. The strategy proved highly successful, as the public education movement played a key role in electing Baraka Newark’s mayor in 2014 and defeating Shavar Jeffries, his opponent and a staunch charter school supporter.

Throughout the course of his campaign and first term in office, however, Baraka managed to successfully redirect the focus of the education movement from opposing privatization and charter school proliferation to simply demanding a return to “local control” of district governance. In fact, despite his radical posturing and militant rhetoric, Baraka had never actually opposed school privatization; indeed, much like his predecessor, Booker, he was a steadfast champion of the downtown redevelopment project of which public school charterization was a cornerstone.

Borrowing from the political scientist Preston H. Smith II’s work, Arena describes Baraka’s politics as rooted in “racial democracy,” an ideology that presumes an organic “Black community” without meaningful “class divisions, interests, [or] ideological diversity.” The politics that flows from this ideology is a version of anti-racism whose ultimate goal is “equal treatment in the marketplace,” resulting in “an equal distribution of the ‘goods and the bads’ of capitalism” among society’s various putative racial and ethnic groups.

Within the politics of racial democracy, political projects like public school privatization and rent-intensifying urban development are judged primarily by the participation, leadership, and contractor opportunities they might afford to a racial group’s elites. The interests of such elites are then presented as synonymous with those of their working-class counterparts, even when the former run directly counter to the latter. Thus, in Newark, Baraka’s demand of “local control” amounted to a demand that he and his fellow African American elites control — or, at the very least, function as presumptive racial brokers in — the process of school charterization.

Baraka’s skillful deployment of anti-racism blurred and ultimately shifted the political fault line in the struggle for public schools in Newark. The primary effect was the disorienting, immobilizing, and fragmenting of the city’s once-formidable movement from below. The movement’s initial defense of “social democracy,” a “state-guaranteed right for all to quality [education],” and other basic needs was eclipsed by the politics of racial democracy — a politics that, by privatizing and commodifying public education and other public goods, would harm the very working-class black and Latino constituencies whose interests it claimed to advance.

Perhaps the key takeaway from Arena’s study is that “antiracism” — like “Black Lives Matter” and its forerunner “Black Power” — is a slogan and an abstraction that can be wielded to advance divergent, even contradictory, political projects. Although the chattering classes frame the matter as support for or opposition to anti-racism, the more relevant question for anyone outside the alt-right is which version of anti-racism one supports.

The real challenges that confront those of us committed to building popular leftist politics remain the matter of how to build majoritarian support for a program of expanded public goods and services and how to build the institutional vehicles through which such demands might be advanced. Arena sketches out one potential version of such an undertaking via the creation of “community-worker popular assemblies to establish a program and plan of struggle,” including laying the groundwork for organizing mass strikes capable of altering the local balance of class power.

The title of the conclusion to Expelling Public Schools is a maxim borrowed from Marxist anti-colonial revolutionary Amílcar Cabral: “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” Indeed, Arena’s incisive study makes clear that there are no shortcuts in this work. After all, as Arena demonstrates, anti-racism can just as easily be deployed to consolidate ruling-class power as to challenge it; radical posturing and militant rhetoric can just as easily mask the nature of conservative political projects as advance truly progressive ones. The lesson from the battle for public education in Newark is clear: beware the wolves in anti-racist clothing.