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39 West City is a fairly small elementary school within an urban school district. It was neither one of the best nor one of the worst schools in the city, though few students from the surrounding white, middle-class neighborhood attended. It was at times a warm, tense, lively, disorganized, sad, and joyful place. As one teacher put it, “It is as fine as a dysfunctional family can be . . . but isn’t that the only kind of family?” Like most families, it had within it an abundance of genuine love and care. However, despite the best intentions of many, it did not serve all its students equitably and well. If it was a family, it was one that some felt more a part of than others. Large numbers of low-income Latino and African American students entered as eager five-year-olds and left as sometimes engaged, often disenchanted , and generally underperforming and undereducated ten- and elevenyear olds. How this happened was not a story that began and ended at the school door; however, school culture and school practices played a key part. As I will describe, at West City the physical and social geography was racially coded, racial tensions were present, and racial understandings played a role in daily life. Yet it was also a place where race was seldom discussed. Whether people did not recognize race as an issue, did not know how to talk about it, or did not want to talk about it are questions I address below. The Setting West City was in many ways a traditional urban school community. Almost 90 percent of its almost 250 students were children of color. Latino and African Americans students made up almost 75 percent of the school, with Three Struggling with Dangerous Subjects Race at West City Elementary 40 Race in the Schoolyard white, Chinese, and “other nonwhite” far behind.1 The school had recently been renamed and undergone a partial personnel change. Even with the turnover in personnel, the school’s teachers and administrators remained over 80 percent white. The classified staff—including the secretary, custodian, student advisors, and classroom aides—was more diverse. However both race and status interacted to produce tension, particularly between the mostly white teaching staff and the three high-profile people on the lower-status classified staff who had daily contact with the students (Ruby Fellows, the secretary, who was African American, and Jennifer Guzman and Marcus Jordan, the student advisors, who were Latina and African American, respectively). The school was located in an almost-all-white neighborhood within a diverse metropolis (it was one of a few neighborhoods in the city that were over 80 percent white). The neighborhood was becoming more and more financially exclusive (e.g., a two-bedroom house purchased for $75,000 in the late 1970s sold in the late 1990s for close to half a million dollars; rents also skyrocketed, with twobedroom units costing well over $1,500 a month). Despite these figures, the neighborhood was not fancy; aside from the high cost of housing (in a city where the general vacancy rate was very low), it had few signs of wealth (e.g., fancy cars, expensive restaurants). Few West City students lived in the surrounding neighborhood, and nearly all those who did were white. Almost without exception, students of color were conveyed to and from school on the yellow buses that traversed the city every morning and afternoon. The buses themselves were racially distinct—African American and Latino students arrived from different neighborhoods and therefore rode on different buses. Almost all African American students were bused in from either the Barnsworth public-housing development across town or from the large Lancaster Valley area in the far corner of the city, which contained a number of public-housing developments and other low-cost housing. Citywide, African Americans were concentrated primarily within a few neighborhoods. For example, in a city that had a black population of less than 10 percent, Lancaster Valley was over 70 percent black. It was also the only area of the city where census tracts contained 40 percent or more of the families living in poverty. Barnsworth was also primarily African American and had high poverty levels. However, the area adjacent to Barnsworth was undergoing major gentri fication, and housing prices had risen exponentially over the previous decade. Though Latinos were more widely dispersed throughout the city, the neighborhood West City drew on had the highest concentration of them...

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