An Unexpected Minority: White Kids in an Urban School (review)

Edward Morris' An Unexpected Minority is a well-written, theoretically informed and illuminating ethnographic study of how white privilege in schools may be simultaneously constructed and diminished when white students do not numerically or academically dominate students of color. Even more significantly, An Unexpected Minority illustrates how whiteness is fluid and malleable, and subject to contextual influences. In "Matthews Middle School," Morris finds a social space in which what Prudence Carter would call the "nondominant cultural capital" of blacks and Latinos prevails, and atypically egalitarian social relationships across race obtain.

Matthews is a working-class school located in a low-income area of a large Texas city. Black and Latino students dominate in numbers and cultural authority. White students comprise only three percent of the student body. Two-thirds of the school's teachers are black, the rest are white. Morris extensively and intensively observed, interviewed, and participated in this setting over the course of two academic years in the early 2000s. Based on his immersion in Matthews, Morris identified three domains worthy of close examination. These are teacher perceptions of students, disciplinary processes and informal student culture and modes of interaction.

Morris approaches his analysis with a strong focus on how racial, social class and gender dynamics inseparably condition one another, and account for the identities individuals enact and attribute to one another. He extends his analysis of whiteness beyond individual and group-level identities to the ways whiteness is entailed in everyday interactions, the discourses upon which school participants draw, and institutionally organized educational processes. Patterning his theoretical perspective on R.W. Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity, Morris adopts a model of hegemonic whiteness which stratifies not only across race, but within race, according to conformity to the normative ideal of whiteness. This model gives Morris good purchase on the distinctive dynamics within Matthews in which teachers tend to uphold hegemonic whiteness, while students depart from it.

Interestingly, Morris finds that white teachers viewed white students as deficient according to hegemonically white standards, seeing them as in some ways "trailer trash," while black teachers tended to perceive them as more middle-class and academically able. White privilege remained evident in the disproportionate anxiety black and Latino male students evoked, and in the application of white standards of femininity applied by teachers to female students.

At Matthews, Morris finds, "white chocolate" best describes the identities that many white students elaborate. Rather than aligning themselves with hegemonically middle-class white norms, white students not only embrace styles favored by black and Latino students. They participate in the school's social relationships from positions that recognize the centrality and normativity of students of color.

Despite the unusual meanings that being white hold for students at Matthews, Morris concludes that "the typical rewards of whiteness remained largely intact" and that "educational processes steeped in race, class, and gender assumptions continued to link being white with educational success." By this he means that in the views of teachers, particularly black teachers, white students were stereotypically perceived as being of higher status, more self-disciplined and more academically able. Consequently white students were less subject to discipline even when their behavior was indistinguishable from that of other students, and they were disproportionately placed in upper-level classes, though because of their small numbers, they did not predominate in these classes. Therefore, even advanced classes were populated largely by students of color.

My one frustration with An Unexpected Minority is that Morris seems to equivocate on the question of whether white privilege at Matthews has been substantially upheld. On the one hand, he explicitly claims that white students continue to enjoy the rewards of whiteness. On the other hand, he holds Matthews up as a possible model of future social relations in which white privilege is overcome. This is not altogether contradictory in that the former conclusion is rooted in Morris' findings concerning the teachers and their practices, and the latter is rooted in...