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239 s e v e n RACIAL PROFILING, IDENTITY, AND SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT Lessons from Power Conflicts in Diverse Contexts Racial profiling has been attacked as the most blatant example of the racial divide in the United States today. African American and Latina/o communities in particular have protested the informal policy that makes DWB (driving while black/brown) an offense in many areas. These protests are a response to the greater frequency with which black and brown drivers are pulled over by the police than are other drivers. In California, the San José Police Department (SJPD) monitored the ethnicity of drivers who were pulled over during a six-month period in 2000 and found that this frequency difference was indeed the case. The reason given by the officials in the SJPD was that the black and brown drivers were concentrated in communities where the police force was required to have increased officer presence because of higher crime rates. Within a few months, however, a scandal broke out in one division of the SJPD when officers were told to pull over anyone who was black after the next bank robbery attempt in the area. The debate over racial profiling is complex and often convoluted. The point of introducing the concept here is not to enter into this debate. Instead , I want to use this popular concept to help frame the students’ analyses and to emphasize the impact of racial profiling on youth. In Chapter 1, Diego described how racial profiling can affect youth. After he was pulled over for, as the police officers explained, driving while brown (in the wrong community), he had to deal with this with regard to his own sense of self and identity. Many Chicana/o youth live and go to school in areas in which they can be physically or psychologically attacked simply because of the color of their skin. When they drive in or out of their communities, when they walk in their neighborhoods, when they go to the mall, when they 07-T3261 3/22/05 1:22 PM Page 239 t r a n s f o r m i n g s c h o o l l i v e s apply for jobs, and when they go to school, people are profiling them. This is not always a conscious process on the part of employers, police officers, and teachers, but it certainly happens. The students’ stories in the previous six chapters have made this clear. The ways in which Chicanas/os are profiled in schools are multiple. They are profiled according to skin color, dress, linguistic abilities or patterns , test scores, specific behaviors, friendship groups, socioeconomic status, parental involvement, or, most often, some combination of these characteristics. The result of this profiling is typically the same: Chicanas /os are expected to perform in certain ways because of characteristics that often have nothing to do with their intellectual abilities. In fact, schooling itself is based on profiling to a large extent. In order to make their jobs doable, teachers often feel obligated to categorize their students and shape the learning environment to meet the different needs of these categories of students. Profiling occurs every day in schools around any number of student characteristics. Although most teachers admit to knowing how students will perform in class based on what are often very quick assessments of their students, few teachers believe that these assessments are based on race. My own work as a teacher and with other teachers since leaving elementary teaching suggests that few teachers consciously sort students on the basis of race. Yet these same experiences have made it clear, as the students themselves have shown throughout this book, that teachers unconsciously categorize students on the basis of race in ways quite similar to the racial profiling that occurs in law enforcement. These processes are significant because teachers represent both authority figures and the gatekeepers into the realm of knowledge and success . When these authority figures base their actions on stereotypes, the impact of those actions is overwhelming for many students. Just as the police often use racial profiles to determine who are potential criminals and who does not need to be pulled over, teachers use racial profiles to determine who will and will not benefit from opportunities to excel in school. Again, it must be emphasized that this...

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