Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities

7. Schools as Race-Making Institutions

188 Foresthills, West City, and Metro2 were very different educational institutions. They had different demographics, dynamics, and cultures. Yet, in each place, racial processes were at work. Each was what Thompson (1975) and Wacquant (2002) have labeled a “race-making institution.” As Wacquant elucidates , “They do not simply process an ethnoracial division that would somehow exist outside of and independently from them. Rather each produces (or co-produces ) this division (anew) out of inherited demarcations and disparities of group power” (54). Schools play a role in the production of race as a social category both through implicit and explicit lessons and through school practices. Children at Foresthills, West City, and Metro2 learned what it meant to be white, black, Asian, or Latino within the contexts of those institutions. They were becoming what teachers assumed they already were—racial subjects. Race is not merely a fixed characteristic of children that they bring to school and then take away intact but something they learn about through school lessons and through interactions with peers and teachers. Moreover, schools do not merely produce children as racial subjects—they produce racial disparities in life outcomes. Children were not only learning racial lessons but were receiving different educational opportunities. Racial inequalities then are, at least in part, products of racialized institutional and interactional practices within the education system. Educational research that ignores these racialization processes and that treats race simply as a variable reifies racial categories and misses the role schools play in the production and reproduction of race, racial identities, and racial inequality. Race is never a finished product; it functions as a dynamic, artiSeven Schools as Race-Making Institutions Schools as Race-Making Institutions 189 ficial, and powerful category that applies to us—and that we react to—in new and old ways on a daily basis. Racial ascriptions, racial identities, and even racial categories are, as outlined in Chapter 5, continually constructed, reconstructed , struggled over, and resisted. Racial identities and racial categories, then, are less stable than much of our sociological discussion and analysis implies. I have heeded Almaguer and Jung’s exhortation to study “how racial lines . . . are being re-drawn contemporarily” (1999: 213). However, as I have tried to emphasize throughout this book, that same drawing and redrawing involves not merely ideas and identities but also power and resources. The color line is unstable, but its power to shape life chances is not abating. Long histories of racial oppression leave us with unequal resources; continuing discrimination and institutional racism perpetuate and exacerbate these old racial hierarchies and help create new ones. Too often schools, which might ameliorate some of these inequities, instead reinforce them. This work is not only about educational systems but also about dominant understandings of race. If we take seriously the fact that race is a social construction , we must pay attention to how racialization processes work—that is, how race is produced and perpetuated on an everyday basis. Building on the theoretical literature (Omi and Winant 1994; Bonilla-Silva 1997), I describe empirically what racial-formation processes look like, including the daily racialization of our bodies and the daily renegotiation of racial boundaries. Methodologically, this work demonstrates that it is important to study not only what people say about race and racial issues but also what they do in particular contexts. Historically, survey research has been useful for charting transformations in racial attitudes. It has not, however, been as useful for understanding the meaning of race in people’s experiences. What do they think about their own racial subjectivities? How does race shape their daily lives? In the post–civil rights era, as racial ideas have undergone transformation, qualitative and ethnographic work has become even more important. Although survey research shows a growing liberalization in racial attitudes, interview research and particularly this kind of ethnographic research has shown that such attitudes are more complex than can be captured in closed-ended survey items (Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000). For example, as demonstrated in Chapter 2, whites who might agree in a survey with abstract principles such as the legality of interracial marriage offer quite different and contradictory responses in interviews about the suitability of intermarriage for their own children. Indepth research in specific local settings can enrich our knowledge about people’s racial understandings and the ways these perceptions get put to use in daily life. This work is meant as a story of hope as well as pain. It illuminates many [3.138.114.94...