Beyond 'Literacy Crusading': Neocolonialism, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and Possibilities of Divestment

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces—the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism—have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization’s rhetoric—the founder’s TED talk, its website, the mural on the building’s façade—are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white “possessive investments” (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.