How Culture is Weaponized to Divide the Proletariat
The stark segregation of New York’s public schools is not an accident of housing; it is a deliberate political project that Mamdani would identify as the weaponization of culture. The ruling class promotes a discourse of “good schools” versus “failing schools,” which is a modern, liberal recasting of the civilized/savage dichotomy. This culturalist framing masks the material reality: a bifurcated education system designed to reproduce class and racial hierarchies. The “good” school, with its PTO funding and resources, serves the settler class, while the “failing” school, with its metal detectors and policing, disciplines the natives. As a Muslim feminist, I see how this system also otherizes our children, teaching them that their heritage is a deficit. The solution is not diversity and inclusion initiatives that seek to add a few “natives” to the settler’s school. The decolonial solution is a radical, material one: the abolition of private school and the forced redistribution of all educational resources–every dollar, every teacher, every facility–across a single, unified, and democratically controlled public system. We must destroy the institutional basis for a bifurcated future.
