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

Notes

211 One Examining the Color Line in Schools 1. For examples, see Conley 1999 and Mickelson 1990. 2. Social-reproduction theorists examine the role of schools in maintaining inequalities and reproducing the current social order. People writing in this tradition have tended to fall into one of two categories: social-reproduction theorists (who are concerned with economic and cultural production) and social-production theorists (who are concerned primarily with cultural production) (Lubeck 1989; MacLeod 1995; DeMarrais and LeCompte 1995). Social-reproduction theorists, like Bowles and Gintis (1976), argue that social relations in schools are determined by the economic order and that schools train students for future work roles. Theorists of cultural production focus more closely on social processes as they take place in schools and outline how subordinated groups contest and resist their domination (Bernstein 1971; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Giroux 1983; MacLeod 1995; Rosen 1980; Willis 1977). Research on social reproduction in education has focused primarily on class reproduction, giving little attention to the reproduction of race or gender. There has been some limited work on race (Figueroa 1991; Troyna 1987; Troyna and Hatcher 1992) and some work that either is a gendered study of class (e.g., Valli 1986) or examines the production of gendered bodies in school settings (Mac an Ghaill 1994; Thorne 1993). Other work has looked at racial and gender inequalities in school achievement, in treatment in schools, or in the curriculum. These studies have generally paid attention to the impact of race and gender relations in schools and have contributed signi ficantly to understanding the role of schools in the creation of social hierarchies, but they have not investigated how schools themselves reproduce racial and gender categories . Although some British research has examined the impact of race on children ’s school experiences (Figueroa 1991; Gillborn 1990; Milner 1983; Sewell 1997; Stone 1981; Troyna and Hatcher 1992), fewer studies have looked at the role of schooling in the development of racial understanding. Other work in the United States has looked at the development of racial identities in schools (Davidson 1996; Notes 212 Notes to Pages 4–10 Olsen 1997; Peshkin 1991) but has focused exclusively on adolescents or narrowly on the impact of identity on school engagement (Davidson 1996; Flores-Gonzalez 1999; Pinderhughes 1997). With a few key exceptions (Ferguson 2000; Forman 2001a; Lacey 1970; McQuillan 1998; Perry 2002; Rosen 1980, 1977; Rosenfeld 1971; Van Ausdale and Feagin 2000), little existing research attempts to understand race as both a product of schooling and a part of the process of schooling. Moreover, little of this work examines both racial meaning and racial inequality or the interaction between racial ideologies and discourses and racial inequities more generally. In short, little research attempts to understand how race is reproduced through schooling processes and educational institutions. 3. For more on this concept, see Bourdieu 1977a, 1977b, 1986, and Bourdieu and Passeron 1990. 4. For more on schools as meritocratic institutions, see Apple 1982 and 1990. Meritocratic ideologies are also similar to what MacLeod (1995) refers to as the “achievement ideology.” 5. These identifications are assumed as well as imposed. Jenkins (1996) talks about this as a dialectical process between internal identification and external identification. 6. Ethnographic or participant-observation research involves entering a social setting and getting to know the people who move within it well by participating in the daily routines of that setting. This research strategy permits the study of relations as they happen and develop. This kind of research is crucial for capturing the complexities of racial matters, including the consistencies or inconsistencies between what people say and what they do (Dennis 1998). Ethnographic work allows for capturing social action in a form close to the way it is understood by the actors themselves and for studying social action in its most complete form. See the Appendix for more details about the research process. All names of localities, schools, and individuals in this book have been changed. Pseudonyms were assigned to protect confidentiality. In some cases additional details about individual respondents were changed in order to ensure their anonymity. 7. In this study, I build on existing theories of racialization and identification to understand processes of racial ascription and identification, the ways racial categorizations are understood and put to use, and how they affect access to educational opportunities and resources. The uniqueness of the cases under study is not significant because the interest is in deepening or extending our...