Theorizing Race

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Title:Theorizing Race within the Politics of Culture: The Reconstitution of "Blackness" in StudentDiscourses

Author:

Sung, Kenzo, University of California, Berkeley

Publication Date:

08-28-2008

Series:

ISSI Fellows Wor king Papers

Permalink:http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sw8v9bf

Keywords:

bilingual education, race, racial formation, immigrant students, education policy, tracking, schoolstructures, California, High Point, racial binary

Abstract:

This paper critiques the claim that shifting demographics since the 1960’s have transcended the American racial binary of blackness and whiteness. The study focuses on urban middle schoolstudents’ perceptions of a shift in tracking from a bilingual language model to a monolingual literacymodel. Based on interviews with students, this analysis examines the value students assigned tolinguistic, racial and academic ‘diversity’ as they tried to rationalize changing school structures.

The study found that students reconstituted the racial stigma of ‘blackness’ as academicallyinferior. Drawing from the theory of racial formation to frame the effects of educational policy onstudent ‘racial logics,’ the paper suggests that shifting racializations do not fundamentally changethe racial binary. Actively contested political/racial projects by both local actors and institutions of the state, rather than simple demographic shifts, explain the evolution of racial ideology.

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ISSC WORKING PAPER SERIES 2006-2007.30

Theorizing Race within the Politics of Culture: The

Reconstitution of "Blackness" in Student Discourse

by Kenzo Sung

Graduate School of EducationUniversity of California, Berkeley

8/27/08


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Kenzo Sung

Graduate School of Education

University of California, Berkeley

[email protected]

This paper critiques the claim that shifting demographics since the 1960’s have transcended theAmerican racial binary of blackness and whiteness. The study focuses on urban middle schoolstudents’ perceptions of a shift in tracking from a bilingual language model to a monolingual

literacy model. Based on interviews with students, this analysis examines the value students

assigned to linguistic, racial and academic ‘diversity’ as they tried to rationalize changing schoolstructures. The study found that students reconstituted the racial stigma of ‘blackness’ as

academically inferior. Drawing from the theory of racial formation to frame the effects of

educational policy on student ‘racial logics,’ the paper suggests that shifting racializations do notfundamentally change the racial binary. Actively contested political/racial projects by both local

actors and institutions of the state, rather than simple demographic shifts, explain the evolution

of racial ideology.

The Institute for the Study of Social Change (ISSC) is an Organized Research Unit of the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley. The views expressed in working papers are those of the author(s) and do notnecessarily represent those of the ISSC or the Regents of the University of California.

i


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Introduction

Since the ‘birth’ of the United States, the social construction of race and its violent effects

have defined American history (Fredrickson 2002, Davis 1981, Takaki 1993, Omi and Winant

[1986] 1994). In particular, the racial binary of blackness and whiteness has been the

fundamental social division and a rationale for institutionalized and legally sanctioned violence

in American society. But there have been brief moments in history, such as the Reconstruction

era in the South after the Civil War, when progress for African Americans took place. Likewise,

during World War II the increased need for both soldiers and workers in the coastal urban

centers provided new opportunities for African Americans to escape the racial caste system of

the Jim Crow South. However, this window was short lived. The post War economic boom

created a newly suburbanized ‘white middle class’ (Bonilla-Silva 2001), thereby geographically

repositioning the focus on the ‘Negro problem’ of urban ghettoes as a pressing issue for

progressive policy makers of the time.

Meanwhile, other racial groups have traditionally argued for their national rights within

the black-white binary –struggling against oppression by fighting to be conceived as white.

Examples include the Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923) Supreme Court cases in which Asian

ethnic groups sought to be recognized as racially white (Takaki 1993). Similarly, the Mendez

(1946) case, a precursor to the Brown (1954) desegregation decision, was fought by Latinos who

were considered legally ‘white’ but still lived in segregated communities alongside other

racialized people (Aguirre 2005).


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Beginning in the 1960’s the black/white binary appeared to be weakening. The

concurrent struggles of various oppressed groups were invigorated by the Civil Rights

Movement (Deloria [1973] 2002, Davis 1981) while the Immigration Act of 1965 reversed what

is now considered the most exclusionary period in American history (Ngai 2004). The change in

immigration laws facilitated the rapid influx of people from Latin America and Asia,

transforming the demographics of American society. The effect of the shifting composition on

the racial binary is not clear. Many academic and popular media intellectuals from different

political perspectives claim that since the 1960’s shifting demographics in the United States have

led to a new racial formation that transcends the racial binary and consists of a multiplicity of

‘racial geographies’ (Kim 1999, Huntington 2004, Barlow 2003, Hayes-Bautista 2004, Katz and

Stern 2006).

In order to examine the continued significance of the racial binary, this paper analyzes

student perceptions of the shifting compositions of their diverse classrooms. Drawing upon Omi

and Winant’s thesis of ‘racial formation’ (Omi & Winant [1986] 1994) to frame the analysis, this

paper shows how shifting school structures reconstitute the fundamental categories of blackness

and whiteness through the tropes of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ students. I argue that the

shifting racial formation 1) does not fundamentally change the racial binary, and 2) is not a

product of demographic changes, though this may be a contributing variable, but rather is based

on political/racial projects that are actively constructed and contested by the institutions of the

state and through negotiations by local actors within such institutions. Demographic changes

may thus contribute to this shifting racial formation but do not determine it.

In recent years much of traditional educational research has been critiqued for not being

able to theorize how socio-historical structures and state policies influence the classrooms that


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are being researched (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995, Anyon 1997, Chomsky 2002, Noguera

2003). This paper draws from a two year qualitative study of students’ perceptions of their

changing classrooms within a broader analysis of ‘race-neutral’ policies, such as how language

and literacy tracking policies affect the racial composition of students in classes. Shifts from

tracking by language support to tracking by perceived literacy ability created opportunities for

students to reinterpret understandings of ‘racial integration’ and ‘blackness’ that seemed positive

and anti-racist in orientation. However, such reinterpretation was ultimately unsustainable due to

structures within the broader school and national discourse, leading the students to reconstitute

the racial binary.

Context for the Study

During the 1980-90’s, the most common method of tracking students in California’s

urban elementary and middle schools was by differing language needs and support (Garcia 1999,

Tse 2001). This pattern in the lower grades of tracking by primary language spoken is largely

due to the recent wave of immigrants from Asia and Latin America since the 1970’s. While this

pattern of channeling students by language is not discussed by the majority of the tracking

literature, it often serves the same function of sorting students racially within schools (Oakes

1985, Mahiri 1998, Lucas 1999). This paper will analyze the change at one middle school from

tracking by perceived language needs to tracking by perceived reading ability.


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Shifting Demographics of Bancroft Middle School

Bancroft Middle School, built in 1907 in a residential East Elmwood neighborhood in

Northern California, began as an all ‘white’ school.1 Throughout the 1920-30’s Elmwood was

largely composed of European immigrants and their descendents, with small pockets of ‘colored

people’ in segregated neighborhoods.2 This changed during World War II when the shortage of

white workers provided opportunities for many African Americans to move from the rural South

to urban cities across the West Coast (Self 2005). The number of African Americans working

and living in Elmwood, a major port city in California, grew disproportionately to the existing

white population.

The end of the war led to a subsequent economic boom and racialized appropriations of

state help, such as the GI bill for housing and education assistance (Lipsitz 1998). The changing

political economy in the 1950’s led to a new hardening of the color-line as whites were provided

state support to flee en masse from the racially ‘darkening’ cities to the newly created suburbs

(Bonilla-Silva 2001). This ‘white flight’ from central cities was compounded by the media’s

portrayal of the 1980’s crack epidemic and rise of street gangs that ravaged both the lives in

inner-city neighborhoods and fears of white America. Despite the legal battles for desegregation

and equal civil rights, de-facto segregation and ghettoization of blacks in many cities, including

Elmwood, continued to create economic disparities based on race (Bonilla-Silva 2001, Duster et

al 2003, Wacquant 1997). Like many schools in central cities across the West Coast, by 1972

Bancroft shifted from being an all white middle school to one that was 98% African American.

However, the internal migrations of whites and blacks into and out of the urban

metropoles in the United States throughout the century follow alongside another migration

1 All names, including names of individual people (both students and adults) as well as names of the school,

neighborhood and city have been changed to assure confidentiality.2 The term ‘colored people’ refers to racialized communities and was common during this historical period.


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globally to the United States. Since the 1965 change in federal immigration policy and a

restructuring of the global political economy, there has been a sharp influx of new immigrants to

the United States from Latin America and Asia (Reimers 1992, Sassen 1998, Grosfoguel 2003).

A majority of these new immigrants, like many of the immigrants to the United States in the

past, have settled into the urban cities across America (Davis 1990, Portes and Stepick 1993,

Kwong 1997). In the 1990’s, Bancroft’s student body remained nearly 100% non-white and

largely ‘underclass’ in relation to the state (as opposed to ‘working class,’ see Wilson [1978]

1980, Massey and Denton 1993), but African Americans made up only one quarter of the total

student population. One quarter of the students at the school were now Latino and over half were

Asian Americans; almost all were first or second generation immigrants with little cultural,

linguistic or economic capital (Boudieu [1979] 1997, Zhou and Portes 1993, Lareau and

Weininger 2003). Indicative of the types of recent immigrants repopulating California inner-

cities, the Elmwood neighborhood is home to a large Southeast Asian population who came to

the United States as refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (Ong 2003). Over half of the

Asian American students are ethnic Mien, a mountain tribe from Laos, with the remaining

students being Cambodian, Vietnamese and Chinese.

Shifting Educational Policies

As school populations shifted so did educational policies. In the last few decades of the

20th

century, the needs of immigrant children were mainly framed as an issue of language

support, reflecting the relatively high number of students who did not speak English as their first

language. However, the focus on language concealed the more complex issues for immigrant

children who are classified and sorted racially as non-white ‘Latinos’ or ‘Asians’ upon arrival to


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the United States (Zhou and Portes 1993, Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 2002). With the

passage of Title VII in 1968 and the landmark Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court case (1974), these

students were now supposed to be placed in various programs generally recognized within an

umbrella label of ‘bilingual education’ (Tse 2001). Most recent bilingual education research has

focused on the intra-classroom aspects regarding linguistic and cultural affects of the presence or

absence of such programs on immigrant students. However, one of the most pronounced, and

least discussed, unintended effects of implementing bilingual education programs was the

segregation of immigrant students from their white, or more likely black, peers across

classrooms in increasingly diverse schools nation-wide.

Debate on the purpose and value of bilingual education programs for immigrant students

mounted throughout the 1980-90’s with the various ‘English only’ initiatives and climaxed

statewide in the passage of California Proposition 227 in 1997. Its passage required the

dismantling of existing bilingual education programs throughout the state starting in 1998

(Gutierrez et al. 2000).3 Alongside this state level change, in 2001 the No Child Left Behind Act

(NCLB) tied federal funding to a series of high stakes accountability measures of student

3 In the 1990’s in California, traditionally seen as the ‘bellwether state’ for national policy trends, a series of state

propositions began drawing national attention to what role, if any, government should have in addressing/alleviating

social disparities. In 1994 Proposition 187 passed in California (though promptly overturned by a federal court)which severely limited the type of public assistance undocumented immigrants could receive, with explicit inclusion

of public schools and immigrant children as one of the cornerstones in the debate opponent State Senator Art Torres

referred to as, “the last gasp of white America in California” (1/14/95 in public address at UC Riverside regarding

Proposition 187). However, the ‘last gasp’ was a false read as more propositions aimed at curtailing rights of

already marginalized citizens, many racialized immigrant groups, continued to reach the ballot and pass in

California and nationwide. In 1996 Proposition 209 dismantled affirmative action programs for all government-

funded institutions, including all public schools and universities. A third strike came in 1998 when Proposition 227

passed, effectively requiring the dismantling of all programs traditionally labeled ‘bilingual education’ in public

schools in favor of those that only used English as the official language of instruction.


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performance in math and English literacy.4 These two changes in policy led to a fundamental

shift at Bancroft Middle School from a bilingual education model, based on a theory of differing

language needs, to a monolingual English literacy model, based on a theory of differing literacy

ability in English. The tracking, or division of students between classes, shifted accordingly.

The renewed focus on English literacy and testing, based on the NCLB federal mandates,

moved California to standardize its reading programs. Open Court Reading is a widely

recognized reading program at the elementary school level. A similar program for secondary

schools is called High Point Reading. Dubbed by teachers at Bancroft and elsewhere as a

‘scripted curriculum’ or ‘teacher proof’ curriculum,

5

High Point focused on standardizing the

input variables to teaching, including three main factors: 1) the curriculum, 2) the instruction,

and 3) the composition of the students in the class. Most studies of comprehensive curricular

programs such as Open Court Reading and High Point focus on the first two elements – the

curriculum and the instruction (NRP 2002, RAND 2002, Dutro and Moran 2003) with little focus

4 As a brief overview in relation to my framing, the origins of NCLB came in large part due to a broader neoliberal

shift in public policy towards increasing accountability of outputs, in this case student performance, while creatingmechanisms by which inputs can be decentralized and often privatized with the goal of creating a ‘market’ by which

people can ‘choose.’ This is evidenced in the years prior to 2001 both in general government policy (reduction and

privatization debates on health care, social security, welfare, and other various government services/goods) and in

education (dual strategy of decentralizing regulation of inputs through charter schools and simultaneous push for

accountability in outputs, which were measured in student performance on standardized tests). Again, such policies

first began taking shape in California during the 1990’s when then Governor Gray Davis pushed for the Public

Schools Accountability Act (PSAA), which was the precursor to President Bush’s national No Child Left Behind

(NCLB) revision during the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The

difference between NCLB and prior Title 1 program requirements for schools and districts to receive federal

assistance was the high stakes accountability mandates of performance on standardized tests in math and literacy

and under-funded expectations of schools, including potential reconstitution and privatization of under-performing

schools.5

The moniker of a ‘scripted curriculum’ is based on the expectation that teachers will follow the comprehensiveteacher guides that scripted the way that teachers introduced a lesson, discussed texts, and even responded to student

questions. This educational reform, based on the assumption that standardizing teacher instruction will create a

more effective teaching environment, is a cyclic reform effort – like many reforms that cycle as we continue to try to

‘tinker’ with education for a variety of purposes (Tyack and Cuban 1995). The past iteration of this concept is the

1970-80’s basal readers and supplementary teacher texts. An older interesting example would be the 1920’s

pushbutton automatons which removed the teacher out of the equation entirely as students were supposed to receive

fully standardized instruction based on pressing buttons and getting responses (Sealander 2003). As a cycle, the

pushbutton automatons are reminiscent of our contemporary focus on use of technology in education, such as

computers, as a way to minimize the variable of the teacher from the learning equation.


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on student tracking (Oakes 1985, Lucas 1999). At Bancroft Middle School the variable of class

composition, the programming of students’ classes, seemed to be the most recognizable school-

wide effect of the implementation of High Point.

During the period of the study from 2003-2005, both teachers and students pointed out in

interviews that there were changes in student placement. But they described these changes in

terms of racial redistributions rather than the linguistic or academic terms with which the

Proposition 227 rhetoric was debated. For the local actors at Bancroft Middle, the shift from a

bilingual education model to a monolingual literacy model had the effect of desegregating

African American students from their Latino and Asian American peers. The tracking system

went from one based on difference in primary language to one based on reading performance in

English. Whether English was the student’s primary language [‘English Only’ (EO) students,

who were overwhelmingly African American] or spoke English as a second language [‘English

as a Second Language’ (ESL) students, who were exclusively Latino and Asian American at

Bancroft Middle] they were all assessed the same way and assigned to classes based on reading

test scores. This study examined the evolving student perceptions of this changing composition.

As I will explore in more detail, they developed from the celebration of racial integration/liberal

multiculturalism to a reconstitution of the prior racialization of ‘blackness’ as stigmatizing

despite the desegregation of the classrooms.

Thesis of Racial Formation

Too often education of immigrant students is confined to the sole frame of language and

language policy. The only educational labels used to classify immigrant students stem from their

lack of ability to speak English proficiently. Within this one-dimensional perspective immigrant


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students are identified through a deficit model as being an ‘English Language Learner.’

Likewise, educational research on immigrant students emphasizes individual agency to ‘choose’

identities based on language and language learning in terms of ‘participation’ metaphors

(Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000), commodification and change value (Rutherford 1990), and focus

on choice of ‘investment’ in education as tied to social factors (Pierce 1995). Building on

theories on social identities (Tajfel 1974), this paper argues that broader social and political

factors, including race, are critical to immigrant student socialization (Bourdieu 1991, Zentella

1997).

Since much of the recent educational research on immigrant students in schools

emphasizes language, culture and choice, my goal is to tie such frames to a broader structural

analysis of schools and race. Arguments regarding the role of schools in reproducing social

disparities and oppression have been made by social reproduction theorists of various scholarly

camps including Critical Race Theorists (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995, Solorzano and Yosso

2002), structural neo-Marxists (Bowles and Gintis 1976), Cultural Studies scholars (Willis

1977), and Critical Pedagogy scholars (Freire 1998, Giroux 2001, Apple 1996, McLaren 2005).

For this paper I draw upon Omi and Winant’s theory of ‘racial formation,’ which has been

considered a seminal work among scholars of race and social reproduction theory in the social

sciences (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994). Racial formation theory focuses on social context and

process while not marginalizing the structure of these dynamics and allows analysis of how race

is perpetuated in a broad set of social contexts, including those at Bancroft Middle School. I will

outline racial formation theory by rearticulating Omi and Winant’s definitions for 1) race, 2)

racial formation, and 3) racial project. Racial formation theory can inform educational research


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on race by treating school structures as active agents in racialization rather than passive settings

within which local actors negotiate race.

Racial Formation Theory

Omi and Winant state that views of race as either fully objective/essential (real, fixed) or

subjective/illusory (ideological construct) reconstitute a false binary. They instead argue that race

is socially constructed in relation to power but becomes reified as it is institutionalized and

experienced in society. “Race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and

interests by referring to different types of human bodies…Thus we should think of race as an

element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a

dimension of human representation rather than an illusion” (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994, 55).

The argument that race is both socially constructed as a primary element in society and has real

consequences has critical methodological implications for researching race. Race cannot be

simply used as an ‘independent’ variable for analysis or choice of subjects, nor can race be

simply left in the realm of identities that are symbolically ‘chosen.’ Instead, racial formation

theory necessitates a methodological shift towards the study of race as a study of the process of

racialization, or what Omi and Winant term the process of ‘racial formation.’

Racial formation is defined by Omi and Winant as a web of “racial projects [that]

mediate between the discursive or representational means in which race is identified and

signified on one hand, and the institutional and organizational forms in which it is routinized and

standardized on the other” (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994, 60). Racial formations are continually

changing and contested due to competing interests of the ‘racial state’ and political struggles of

various people over how race will be defined. The core of racial formation theory is the ‘racial


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project.’ According to racial formation theory, a racial project is simultaneously “an

interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics (meaning), and an effort to

reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines (organization)” (Omi and

Winant [1986] 1994, 56). For Omi and Winant, racial projects do the ‘ideological work’ of

making the links between conceptualizing race as both social structure and interpretation of

meaning. The terminology of a ‘project’ emphasizes racial formation as an active, politically

contested process at the level of both ideology and material reality.

An example of such racial formation as an active, historically contingent process is how

the categories of blackness and whiteness draw from historical antecedents that have become

‘commonsensical.’ Yet both racial categories ultimately signify relations to power that are

flexible in their shifting attention from different racialized groups based on changing racial

projects.6 According to this definition, blackness becomes a racial signifier for an ultimate

‘otherness’ to power, which is identified as ‘whiteness.’ The structure of race can then be

understood as a system designed to manufacture consent through coalition building by elites

(‘whites’) to monopolize and maintain hegemonic power.

6 An example of this shifting nature of racial formation in California can be found in Thomas Almaguer’s Racial

Fault Lines which chronicles the particular racial formation of California between around the middle of the last

century. In his book, he cites that the 1848 US Treaty of Hidalgo-Guadalupe with Mexico granted any Mexicans

who wished to stay in California after its annexation to the US legal ‘white’ status. At the same time, the Chinese

laborers being brought into California to work on the railroads were almost immediately racialized as

Negroes/Blacks. This racialized ‘blackening’ of Chinese became a point of popular discussion, including discussion

of new ‘slaves’ in the Chinese coolie trade to the Americas, bringing of Chinese to the post-bellum South to do the

work of the prior black slaves, and the legal segregation, ghettoization, and lack of legal protection including beingineligible for citizenship.

I argue that though both groups continue to be racialized, the different historical trajectories over the last 150 years

have flipped the racializations of both groups. The loss of power of the Mexican elite ranchero class in California

and the shift in site of struggle of Mexicans in California from land to labor issues, as well as the heavy increase of

Chinese immigrants though ‘professional’ immigration preferences have served to racialize Chinese/Asian

Americans as ‘honorary whites’ and Mexicans/Latinos as ‘border (black) brothers.’ In both instances, the

racialization is a reflection of the shifting relation to power for the two groups. But I argue that in no way during this

transfiguration has the racial binary been fundamentally altered. It has instead simply been reconstituted through the

creation of new racial logics to ‘naturalize/essentialize’ the incorporation of different groups.


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Omi and Winant use Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ in their explanation of this

process of manufacturing consent among different groups of people to the ultimate benefit of the

dominant group. “In order to consolidate their hegemony, ruling groups must elaborate and

maintain a popular system of ideas and practices – through education, the media, religion, folk

wisdom, etc. – which [Gramsci] called ‘common sense.’ It is through its production and

adherence to this ideology of ‘common sense’ that a society gives its consent to the way in which

it is ruled.” (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994, 67) State schools are theorized by Gramsci as being a

key institution in maintaining consent to a particular ‘logic’ or discourse of the state through a

process of reifying the logic as ‘common sense’ so it is seen as natural and not noticed or

questioned (Gramsci 2000).7

Thus, racial formation is defined through a web of ‘racial projects,’ which are actively

contested by the state and different sectors of civil society. These struggles ultimately shape how

race is understood in the United States through a process of signification (race is ‘socially

marked’ or identified) and institutionalization (structural organizing of resources/power which

reifies racial identifications as ‘common sense’ in its social demarcation). This thesis critiques

the ideology of ‘demographics as destiny,’ which assumes a much more uncontested process of

shifting demographics inevitably leading to fundamentally different racial formations. This

reframing challenges the belief that changing demographics will ‘naturally’ transcend the racial

binary (Huntington 2004) or even race itself in the discourse of ‘colorblindness’ (Brown et al

2003). I argue that changing demographics have led to a reconstitution that maps newly

racialized groups into the existing racial formation.

7 This argument has a parallel to Critical Race Theory’s concept of ‘interest convergence’ that also claims that the historic anti-

racist movements in the United States, such as the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, were successful because of the

relatively higher gains to be made by whites, the dominant racial group, from the social changes in spite of the perception ofincreasing racial equality (Bell 1980, Taylor 2000).


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Racial Formation and its Potential Contribution to Educational Literature

Racial formation provides two critical contributions to mainstream educational research.

First, racial formation theory reframes race as fundamentally anchored in political processes that

go beyond static variables, micro-cultures and individual relationships. Such a frame calls for

educational research that both incorporates and goes beyond the individual negotiations of local

actors. For example, simply studying home culture cannot explain how immigrant youth are

socialized in relation to public institutional structures such as schools, government social service

agencies and popular media (Olsen 1997, Valenzuela 1999, Bettie 2003). Instead, we have to

also study how government policies and state institutions like schools create structures, such as

student tracking systems, which children are then forced to negotiate. This study explores how

students are tracked in schools in ways that reify the racial ‘common-sense’ understandings of

race, language and citizenship, ultimately stigmatizing African American students by

constructing blackness as undeserving of special support.

Second, the thesis of racial formation contends that schools are simultaneously 1)

institutions that actively racialize, versus providing a setting in which race is contested, and 2)

political projects/apparatus of the racial state to create and maintain consent for such ‘common

sense’ understandings of race (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994).8 Beyond the local actors housed in

8

Though not part of the scope of this paper, there is a range of literature that studies the institutions of schooling inrelation to the role of the state. Within this literature is the broader understanding of the state’s monopoly on the use

of violence and the role of schools in creating what Gramsci calls a ‘hegemonic’ authority between the power elites

and the state that is controlled through both coercion and consent (Gramsci 2000). Althusser outlines further the

role of schools as the ‘ideological apparatus of the state’ in his critique of the type of structural oppression and

exploitation that schools perpetuate (Althusser 1971). In the 1970’s, educational researchers Bowles and Gintis

(1976) continue in this lineage by arguing a structurally deterministic ‘correspondence principle,’ in which the main

goal of schools is to manufacture consent among the working class to their exploited class position in the capitalist

system . Cultural studies theorist Paul Willis further complexifies the argument in his book Learning to Labor

(1977), stating that as students try to negotiate school structures, ultimately even the consciousness and active


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schools, the actual institution of school is now granted agency in the process of racial formation.

Schools manufacture, whether advertently or inadvertently, a particular ‘racial logic’ through

institutional structures, such as choice of curriculum, tracking of students, discipline policies, and

governance structures. For example, student perceptions of their class placements at Bancroft

Middle School are set within a particular ‘racial logic’ that both celebrates racial desegregation

through a discourse of multiculturalism/diversity and reconstructs ‘blackness as bad’ in the

newly integrated class setting.

This study of bilingual education programs through the lens of racial projects and

racialization, rather than a focus on language or culture, analyzes how a discourse based on

language/cultural diversity continues to be embedded in constructions of race and citizenship.

Drawing from the same discourse as the Ebonics debate that gained national attention in the

1990’s, a recurring undercurrent in urban cities like Elmwood is why these recent immigrants

who are ‘foreigners’ get extra services in terms of bilingual education programs while blacks do

not receive such support (Perry 1998). Underpinning the arguments in the debate was the

construction of a trope of African Americans as racialized into ‘undeserving’ of additional

educational support as opposed to the linguistic and cultural differences of recent immigrants

whose different language and culture ‘deserved’ the attention and funding. I argue that this trope,

reflected in the findings of this study, also is in conversation with a broader racialized discourse

that argues the declining significance of race in the construction of a new black underclass that

mainstream America feels is undeserving of public resources (Wilson 1987, Katz 1989).

resistance to the tracking/sorting function of schools produce an identity among marginalized students that continues

to reproduce symbolic marginalization and labor exploitation once outside of school.

Within this genealogy of literature, schools are utilized as one of the two main apparatus of the state (the other being

the police and legal system to create coercive control when consent cannot be manufactured), with the state being

seen as having an almost total monopoly over both the creation and perpetuation of violence.


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Methodology

This paper analyses selected findings from a qualitative case study of a seventh grade

High Point classroom in Bancroft Middle School. Primary data collection methods for this paper

are the student interviews and classroom observation from 2003-2005, the two years after the

implementation of High Point. Other data for the study included 1) observation of other High

Point and non-High Point mainstream English classes at Bancroft, 2) student demographic and

academic performance data, and 3) historical and demographic data of the school and

neighborhood. In addition, various adults working with students at Bancroft were interviewed

including the High Point classroom teachers, math/science teachers, and site administrators.

Semi-structured student interviews were conducted over a two year period with four

students in the first year and six students in the second year. While not generalizable based on

the small number of interviews, the racial, academic and gendered variety of the ten case study

students provides a range of student views. Each student was interviewed once formally, with

informal follow-up interview questions being asked after class during the subsequent months of

classroom observation. Student interview questions covered three themes: 1) what changes they

have noticed, if any, in the past year regarding any aspect of their schooling experience, 2) what

explanations they have for the changes they noticed, and 3) the ways these changes have affected

them, if any. A student interview guide was developed based on initial interviews with the

teachers and site administrators who responded that students were very aware of the changes in

their classes since High Point was implemented.

During analysis of the student interviews, two main topics emerged: 1) how the students

negotiate ideas of language and race as part of their identities, and 2) how the constructions of

identity at school are reinforced or contested by peer and/or home culture. These topics relate


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back to the theoretical framing of the study, which focuses on the role of race and language in

the incorporation into school structures as well as negotiated identities for students within such

structures.

In addition, classroom observations were conducted two to three times a week in a

seventh grade High Point class. This observation period lasted three months in the spring of each

year for two school years. Additional observations on a biweekly basis followed the student

cohort from their High Point class to their math/science classes and occasionally continued with

various student groups to after-school activities.

I was perceived by all of my interviewees as an ‘insider’ of the school and the community

in this study because I was a teacher at Bancroft for four years prior to my beginning this

research. Before teaching at Bancroft I was also a program coordinator for two years with the

Millmont Youth Center, which works with immigrant Asian American and Latino youth and

parents in the same East Elmwood neighborhood, and spent time as a youth in the Millmont area

of Elmwood among childhood friends who lived in the neighborhood and went to the

neighborhood schools such as Bancroft.

Bancroft Middle School

Bancroft Middle School is a large, diverse inner-city school with low test scores in both

reading and math. Since 2001 the school has consistently been rated a one or two in student

performance on a scale of 10 (10 being the highest) in state evaluations. Like a majority of other

middle schools in the city of Elmwood, the seventh grade class at Bancroft reads at a fourth/fifth

grade level.


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The current student population at Bancroft Middle School is 900+ students even though

the school was built in 1907 to house a maximum of 650 students. 69% of the students are

officially enrolled for free or reduced price lunches, a standard indicator in educational research

of low socio-economic status. According to school administrators the number of students eligible

for free/reduced lunch is actually much higher (estimated at around 80-90%), but disseminating

information regarding eligibility is difficult as parents often cannot read in English or their

primary language.9

The composition of the student body has shifted from a majority of African American

students to a minority of African Americans in a period of 20 years. This is in large part due to a

massive influx of working class immigrants and refugees to the East Elmwood neighborhood

from Southeast Asia and Mexico. The student body of Bancroft Middle School is 52% Asian

American (mainly Southeast Asian refugees)10

; 27% Latino (overwhelmingly Mexican

American); and 20% African American. 72% of the students at Bancroft are labeled as ELL

students who have a variety of home languages including Spanish, Mien, Vietnamese,

Cantonese, and Khmer.

Racial tensions among the students at Bancroft Middle School always seem to be

smoldering. Daily to weekly incidents occur ranging from verbal harassment to racialized gang-

attributed violence. Incidents usually pattern along perceived ‘racial lines’ of Asian American,

Latino and African American student groups – while intra-racial tensions among various

ethnicities of Asian American students and inter-generational conflict between first and second

generation Latinos happen more infrequently.

9 In the case of Mien students, who constitute the largest single ethnic/racial group in the school, the Mien language

is an oral language only and many have no ability to read or write at all.10 The four largest Asian ethnic groups at Bancroft Middle School are Mien, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian.

Over half of the total Asian American student body is Mien, a tribe from the Laos region who mainly came over as

refugees from the Vietnam War.


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Year 0: Bilingual Education Tracking Pre-High Point

In the decade prior to the school wide implementation of High Point, the most visible

tracking structure at Bancroft Middle School was between the mainstream track (English

Only/EO) and the second language learners’ track (English Language Development/ELD –

known previously as English as a Second Language/ESL). Approximately three quarters of the

students at Bancroft studied English as a second language and an overwhelming majority of the

students in the mainstream/English Only tracks were African American. 85-90% of the students

in mainstream classes were African American, compared to around 20% of the total school

population. As such, the most apparent characteristic of the tracking structure for the students

was the racial segregation of African Americans in mainstream classes and Latino/Asian

American students in the ELD classes.

During this period, teachers at Bancroft Middle School voiced concerns about the

school’s master schedule. Only the most academically successful ELD students who were able

to read at or above grade level (and significantly above the mean of the school regardless of

language designation) were placed in mainstream English classes. The mainstream classes were

overwhelmingly dominated by African American students, most of whom were about three grade

levels behind in reading. The remaining students in these classes were high achieving immigrant

students who were able to be reclassified. Many teachers felt this pattern reinforced student

stereotypes of blacks being academically inferior, as the vast majority of the African American

students were not as successful as the top leveled ELD students in the ‘English Only’ classes. In

reality, there was a range of ELD students at varying achievement levels in the school, just not in

the mainstream classrooms. For the mainstream English classes, teachers described a particular


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racialization among the students of ‘black as bad’ developing as a ‘racial logic’ regarding

educational attainment in class. For all racial groups in the school, measured academic ability is

low. However for Asian American and Latino students, low level students were almost

exclusively in ELL tracks, while only the highest achieving ELL students were able to be

redesignated as ‘fluent English proficient’ (FEP).11

When these reclassified students were moved

to mainstream classes they were at 7th

grade reading level in a class where the average reading

level was 4-5th

grade.

The teachers noted that for a majority of these re-designated students the ‘racial logic’

relating language, race and citizenship seemed to provide an explanation why the rest of the

students in the mainstream class were failing. This ‘racial logic’ is based on the assumption that

the black students are the ‘real Americans’ and the ‘real English speakers’ who ‘only speak

English.’ Since they are American and English speaking, the explanation of their lack of

academic success is based on race: the reason why they are failing is because they are black.

Likewise, the black students seemed to construct the same narrative, based on the fact that the

only students who they interacted with in their classes who were not black seemed to

consistently do better than their black counterparts. Since the African American students

believed that the newly transferred students did not even ‘really speak English,’ an alternative

narrative became constructed based on the other social marker that is so explicitly signified in

the school: race.

Thus, the structures themselves created a disparity that became racialized among the

students. In student interviews and observations, there seemed to be an implication of

11 In order to be redesignated, ELL students meet a series of criteria (though there is no standard rubric) including a

combination of testing at or above grade level in standardized tests, consistently achieving strong class grades, and

being recommended by their teachers. It is no small feat to be redesignated at Bancroft, and only the most

successful students in the ELL tracks move into the mainstream English track.


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‘deserving’ in terms of who ‘deserved’ to not do well and who ‘deserved’ help and support based

on primary language. As such, ELL students who could not succeed in English had a ‘legitimate’

excuse, that they speak another language, while Blacks were ‘undeserving,’ since the assumption

was that they already speak English. The second ‘deserving’ argument draws from notions of

citizenship/national body politic rather than language in terms of who is perceived as a

‘foreigner’ and who is ‘American’ in the discourse of the students.

Many teachers feel that this system created a perception for all the students in the

mainstream classes that the African American students were just not as smart as the (top leveled

ELD) non-black students in their classes. In reality the process of reclassifying ELD students to

mainstream classes is based on strict requirements regarding ability to read in English at grade-

level. The tracking of student based on ELD or mainstream classification also separated students

for all classes except Physical Education, since Math and Science classes for ELL students were

taught by ELD certified teachers. The lack of interaction between students during the school day

created tensions between the African American and non-African American students in the

school. This school-structured separation was then compounded further by self-segregation in the

ELD tracks as students (and their families) sometimes chose, due to stereotypes of the EO

classes, to remain in the ELD classes even after the students had officially been ‘re-designated.’

Thus, explicit tracking by language had the unintended consequence of racially segregating and

racializing classes and students.

Year 1: Initial School-wide Implementation of High Point

In 2003, Bancroft Middle School administration, in conjunction with the district

recommendations, decided that all students scoring below ‘Proficient’ in reading on the


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California Standards Test or below 37% in the California Achievement Test (CAT-6) would be

enrolled into High Point for the school year.12

This recommendation included all students who

were still classified as ELD and any redesignated or mainstream EO student who was below the

two test benchmarks. The rationale that the administration gave was that all students should be

able to benefit from High Point regardless of their reason for reading below grade level. This

argument was based on the High Point curriculum being state approved for both ELL students

and other ‘struggling readers.’

The change in the tracking structure in the 2003-04 school year was tremendous as

students from both the ELD/High Point and mainstream tracks were combined. Since the main

neighborhood elementary school had also been segregated by ‘language needs,’ and thus also by

race, this was the first time for most of the ELD students that African American students were in

their classes. Likewise, for most African American students this was the first time they were in

classes where a majority of the students were non-native English speaking and non-African

American. Also, the students were now combined by ‘High Point level’ for all their classes,

including math and science.

This shift in tracking led to changes in the relative heterogeneity, or ‘diversity,’ in three

categories: 1) academic, 2) linguistic, and 3) racial (See Table One). In Year 0, the year prior to

the implementation of High Point school-wide, the academic diversity was more mixed in the

tracks, with low achieving students in both the EO and ELL tracks. This is different than either

the racial or linguistic diversity; tracking based on language created almost entirely segregated

tracks between the ‘English Only’ African American students and their ELL non-African

American counterparts.

12 California Standards Test (CST) is the test used by the state of California to compile school accountability

performance records. The California Achievement Test (CAT-6) is used to compile national accountability data for

NCLB measures.


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The shift between Year 0 and Year 1 was based on the tracking of academic ‘ability,’

such that all students who read below grade level are placed in High Point classes based on

literacy level. This created both racial and linguistic diversity in the classrooms as High Point

students now come from both the ELL and EO tracks. This structure continued in Year Two of

my study though with very different student understandings. I will discuss teacher and student

understandings of this shift in school structure and programming between Years 0 and 1 as well

as between Years 1 and 2.

Tracking Structure ELL/EO HP/English HP/English

Year 0 Year 1 Year 2

Academic Mixed Tracked Tracked

Linguistic Tracked Mixed Mixed

Racial Tracked Mixed Mixed

Table One: Tracking Structure and Academic, Linguistic, and Racial Diversity

The change in tracking structure stems from a shifting assumption. In Year 0 the school is

tracked based on a pedagogical assumption that ELL students require a curriculum based on a

‘cultural difference’ discourse that legitimates the linguistic needs of the immigrant students. By

Year 1 the new tracking system claims that a single curriculum can meet all of the students’

needs regardless of difference in primary language spoken. This new ‘cultural deficit’ discourse

converts ELL students’ linguistic differences into simply a deficit in English literacy ability,

thereby lumping the immigrant students into the same category as African American students.


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Student Responses to High Point

Year 1 Student Responses: The Value of Racial Diversity

Easy As Achievement

In the 2003-2004 student interviews, the four interviewed students could not say why

they were placed in the High Point program. Unlike the teachers, who were very aware that the

students were being tracked into a full daily schedule of classes based on their perceived reading

ability, the students did not know how or why they were in High Point nor did they seem aware

of their classification as ‘struggling readers.’ The lack of value-attachment to being in a certain

class because of a ‘deficit’ rather than just ‘difference’ created an interesting set of responses by

the students which ran counter to much of the recent research on tracking (Oakes 1985, Mahiri

1998).

All four students who were interviewed stated that they ‘liked’ High Point because it was

‘easy.’ This claim of ‘easiness’ seemed to be a positive aspect of the program for the four

students. One possible explanation could be that students felt that the standardized High Point

curriculum allowed for more transparency in both expectations and structure of assignments and

assessments. Such an explanation would be a possible positive effect for ‘struggling’ students

who perhaps felt they had no understanding or control of their success since expectations seemed

arbitrarily determined by teacher and other social factors rather than the curriculum (Ferguson

2000). However, the sense of ‘easiness’ that the students described did not seem to correlate with

either their grades or the grades of their High Point peers.

Hai, one of the four students interviewed, explained he liked High Point “cuz it’s easy,”

but when asked what grades he was getting he stated “mostly C’s and some B’s.” Likewise,

another student explained she liked High Point because it is her easiest subject and she thought


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all the students were doing well, but when asked about whether students understand the High

Point curriculum she states, “no, not really. I can tell sometimes when my neighbors or just

people who I’m looking at when I’m done are just like staring at their papers and like ‘what I

going to do,’ and I feel kinda bad for those people… and then they’ll be stuck on that same

subject for a long time.” For both of the above students, as well as the other two interviewed,

there seemed to be no link between ‘easiness’ and academic success. The inability to

contextualize the ‘easiness’ of High Point for the students seems to relate to the general lack of

consciousness regarding their classifications or placements in general. So how did students

explain their placements if they did not recognize it as being based on their academic

performance?

Multiculturalism Matters

The four students seemed largely oblivious to the segregation based on perceived English

literacy ability. Moreover, none of the students seemed to attach any value to language diversity

in their classrooms. None of the three students who are classified as having English as their

‘second language’ stated that they spoke anything but English when directly questioned. Rather

than defining themselves as bilingual, or having proficiency in a language other than English,

they all identified themselves as only English speakers. Upon further questioning regarding what

languages they spoke in different social contexts, it was revealed that they did possess clear

conversational proficiency in languages other than English (Vietnamese, Spanish, etc.),

particularly when speaking in the home or assisting parents in translation. However, they chose

not to recognize this capacity as any kind of language ability – a belief that seemed to be

sustained and emphasized by their tracking placements and curriculum at Bancroft. In a post-


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bilingual education era, languages other than English do not seem to count. So what did ‘count’

as an explanation for the changing classroom composition?

Three of the four students focused on the increased racial and cultural diversity of their

peers at Bancroft Middle as the primary difference between their classes in Year 0 and 1. A

young Latina, Maria, was the most explicit in stating that she liked Bancroft because at “my

school in Gilroy [California] there were mainly Mexican kids there. So when I came here, I was

like, wow, there are so many different faces and it was so cool.” She especially noted that having

African American friends and teachers was a new and positive experience for her, “Yeah, that

was tight, ‘cuz all my other teachers were Vietnamese, Asian, white, that’s it. So it was really

cool having an African American teacher this [year]... and my cousins, they aren’t used to being

around all these different races either, so when they come to visit me, it’s really different when I

introduce them to all my different friends... they didn’t really know I had all these different race

friends.” She goes on to explain how at her birthday party she was so proud of the fact that she

could invite both African American and Asian American friends instead of only her Mexican

friends.

Having ‘different race friends’ is a positive experience for Maria, showing how

increasing such ‘racial’ diversity could be understood to be an intended choice of the school,

much like it was for Maria in making friends once she got to Bancroft. For Maria the racial

diversity of the school, and especially the presence of Black teachers and Black students in her

group of friends, is a ‘positive’ diversity that she appreciates despite the racial tensions in the

school. Similarly, when asked about an explanation of why students were placed in High Point,

she used the importance of appreciating racial ‘diversity’ as the reason for the class shift.


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Increasing racial diversity seemed to her a plausible explanation since it led to an outcome of her

and her friends having more ‘different race friends.’

Darnell, an African American boy in the High Point class, also noted the racial/cultural

diversity of his friends, most of who came from his High Point student class. Darnell explained

that he had friends in class who were of other ‘cultures’ and that this was not a problem for him,

unlike many of his African American friends. For Darnell, the point of having friends from

different ‘cultures’ was what he came back to when asked about what he thought were any

differences between his current class and that from the prior year.

The ‘Hidden’ Curriculum of High Point

A possible explanation for the focus on ‘racial’ diversity among the students is as a

reaction to another layer of school policy. Racial tensions, often boiling into violence among

students, are an ingrained part of student life at Bancroft, as is the school’s public effort to

relieve such tension in marginal spaces of the school such as assemblies and homeroom. Mr.

Durant, the teacher of the observed High Point class, noted that the school was making an effort

to celebrate ‘diversity’ to address the recent racially-charged incidents: “we have assemblies

almost every marking period [six weeks] and they’re pretty positive. Whether the children get

the message as clearly I’m not so certain of. There’s a curriculum developed that teachers try to

implement [in homeroom] to address some of these needs, but I don’t know how well it’s

implemented across every class.” In addition, Mr. Durant explains that all teachers are expected

to try to ease racial tensions in the classroom through techniques such as disciplining of

inappropriate comments and purposeful grouping for class activities. Regardless of the

effectiveness of the message to stem racial violence in the school, Mr. Durant’s students seem to

conceive this message of racial diversity as the school’s primary purpose for High Point.


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Mr. Durant recognizes this aspect of the High Point curriculum too and goes on to

explain that, “the Latino kids play with the Latino kids, the African-American children hang out

together [outside class]. The racial dynamic is just there… but I do know that the children get

along; at least in the four walls of the classroom, they’re working together. It’s a start.” The

focus on the ‘hidden’ curriculum of trying to get students to work together across racial and

cultural lines seems to have become the ‘explicit’ curriculum for these students. The segregation

and tracking of students as well as the ‘remedial’ curriculum and classification seemed to be

‘hidden’ from those who were most affected by it, at least in Year 1.

Year 2 Student Responses: Reconstructing Black as Bad

Student Rationales for Tracking, Changing the ‘Diversity’ Narrative

In the second year of school-wide implementation, I interviewed six additional High

Point seventh graders and their teachers. There was a significant difference in student perception

of High Point although the implementation of High Point did not change between Years 1 and 2.

The biggest change according to teachers was how students attached importance to academic

‘diversity,’ or lack of it, in their ‘struggling reader’ High Point classrooms. Students interviewed

in Year 2 constructed a different significance regarding ‘racial’ and ‘linguistic’ diversity than the

first set of student interviews. The conceptions of the students in Year 2 seemed to reconstitute

much of the racializations, particularly regarding blackness, of the prior bilingual education era.

The four students in Year 1 all seemed oblivious to the lack of academic diversity, and

when asked why they thought the classes were restructured that year, the most popular answer

was to ‘increase racial diversity’ in their classes. By Year 2 the importance of ‘racial diversity’

as a positive shifted to a negative for many of the students. In the two African American student

interviews language was racialized. Both students said they were not supposed to be in the High


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Point class with ‘immigrants’ and complained that some Asian American and Latino students

‘who barely spoke English’ were in the mainstream English class. Likewise, for the ELL

students, there was a total devaluation of the increased ‘racial diversity’ compared to their prior

ELD classes and an increasing racialization of black students as not ‘deserving’ of being in the

High Point classes since they ‘spoke English.’

Stigma of High Point

By Year 2 the students were much more conscious of the school’s rationale for

placement. All the students still stated that High Point was ‘easy,’ but students denigrated this

‘easiness’ versus the ‘real’ English class that they wanted to be in. ‘Easiness’ now had a negative

connotation rather than a positive one, and all but one student wanted to move out of High Point.

One student, Ken, explained his feelings: “High Point is easier words, and I guess they give us

High Point because they think we’ll get reading, but it’s not helping. Giving us easier words for

us to read is making it worse ‘cause when we get to chapter books there’s gonna be way bigger

words that we not gonna know. So it’s not really helping us. They might as well put everybody

in English.”

With his comment, Ken made an explicit connection to both the reason why they were

placed in High Point and the importance of trying to get out. This issue of individual upward

mobility for the students to leave the High Point class and get into the mainstream English class

became the main point of concern for these students, which led to a very different perception of

their classmates from the Year 1 students. Unlike the Year 1 students, who did not mention

anything negative associated with being in a High Point class, all but one of the Year 2 students

interviewed perceived their High Point placement as being a stigma and spoke of efforts to move

out of High Point. Carlos was the only student who expressed positive reactions to High Point,


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but he also could not readily explain the placement system (paralleling all the students

interviewed in Year 1).

One student was aware that parent intervention could lead to a placement change;

however, when he and his parents attempted to change his placement to the mainstream track,

they were told there was “no room.” Despite the fact that a majority of students spoke of not

wanting to be in the High Point track, none of them objected to the existence of the tracked

system itself or the criteria by which students were sorted into the tracks. They all accepted that

certain students would end up in the “low” track—they just did not want to be those students.

Though all students believed that they could move into the “regular” classes if they worked hard

enough, there was also a general student understanding in the High Point class that the African

American students should be in the regular classes.

Language Matters

It was not clear exactly how the students became aware of the intended reason, and

attached stigma, of being placed in High Point. The interviewed students definitely recognized

both the lack of academic diversity (homogeneous class of ‘struggling readers’) and the

intersection of language and race in identity as they tried to come to terms with why the class

composition was structured this way. As school structures, such as student programming and

class curriculum, shape the language practices taking place in the classroom, they also shape the

understandings of when and how language matters. In the case of High Point , the students

interviewed generally understood it as an appropriate or ‘deserved’ placement for students who

needed to learn English. As Gavin, an African American student, articulated, “If a new student

[in reference to an immigrant student who is ‘new’ to the United States] doesn’t understand

English well, you might just put them in a class where you can fail easily and you might have to


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flunk and do all that over. If you put them in a High Point class where all the kids are all the

same, it’s easier for them.” However, it also was generally voiced by the students that this was

not a proper or ‘deserved’ placement for African American students – based on the

understanding that they already spoke ‘real English.’

Celia, another ‘true’ English speaker, openly questioned why one student she knew was

in the mainstream English class and not in High Point: “A guy in that class is a FOB [“Fresh off

the Boat,” a derogatory reference for recent Asian immigrants] but he’s in the Holt [the

mainstream English class, which uses textbooks published by Holt].” She also noted that the

student read very slowly, which seemed to be an indication, in her mind, that he did not deserve

to be in the mainstream English class. Both comments identify the importance of being an

English language learner as a proper reason for being in a High Point class and not a mainstream

one.

This intersection of race and language continued to crop up in interviews and classroom

observations. In one instance, when an African American student left the High Point class to

move with his family to another city, a student remarked, “Well, we only got five English

speakers left.” What was meant was that only five African American students were still

remaining in the class. But the conflation of African Americans as being the only ‘true’ English

speakers, though the whole class was conducted in English, translates into a particular logic for

the students as to which students deserve to be in High Point and for what reasons.

Reconstructing Black as Bad

This reconstruction of African Americans as the only ‘true’ English speakers, and

therefore undeserving of extra support for learning English, such as High Point, again becomes

racialized. In Year 1, ELD tracked students stated their appreciation for having an African


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American teacher and peers in their class. By Year 2 this appreciation turned sour and the

‘blackness as bad’ logic that the teachers lamented prior to High Point implementation seemed to

have been reconstituted. Though the students were not able to explain the difference, teachers

posited that the increased awareness seemed to have come from the students themselves, with the

higher achieving students leaving to mainstream English and those remaining in High Point

during the second year realizing what it meant to be left behind. The reconstruction thus was

based on the conscious stigmatization of being in a lower tracked class compared with others in

their grade and a rationalization that intersected language and race in its logic. This is somewhat

different than the factors under which the prior racialization of blackness occurred at Bancroft,

since then the students were racially segregated, yet the particular racial formation of Year 2 had

similar consequences of how African American students were racially represented and whether

they were ‘deserving’ of the resources that the school could provide.

Immigrant English language learner students ‘deserved’ to be in these classes based on a

‘legitimate’ reason for not performing well in English: they were learning English as a second

language. African American students in the class were not provided this ability to claim ‘special

language needs,’ since they were perceived by all the students as the ‘real English speakers.’

Thus, the racial project drew (as it often does) from a prior conceptual framework among the

students of using a racial representation that was already present inside and outside the school to

explain why African American students were in these classes. If African American students were

not in the High Point classes because of ‘legitimate’ language needs then the next ‘socially

significant’ and ‘common sense’ identifier for the students, including the African American

students, was race. Blackness, whether as linked to low ability or motivation to succeed, became

reconstructed as ‘bad.’


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Both Gavin and Celia displayed these conflicting feelings about their own placement in

High Point. During his interview, Gavin, who wanted to transfer to the mainstream English class,

explained that, “when I was doin’ the CAT test, I don’t really read the question and read the

answer. I just would mark anything. I used to always wanna hurry up and finish, that’s why.”

When asked about why other African American students were also in his class, he stated he was

not sure, then simply said, “dunno, maybe they aren’t smart, but I’m guessing they’re just lazy

too like me.” Similarly, Celia’s earlier comment about the boy she considered a “FOB” revealed

her own judgments about those who seemed like they should be in High Point, and also her own

frustration at being in it herself. However, when asked why she thought she was in the class, she

thought it was because she “didn’t talk enough in class.” Though they both report making efforts

to work hard to move out of the High Point track, Celia’s reluctance to verbally participate and

Gavin’s resistance to High Point materials may prevent them from actually doing so, regardless

of actual English literacy ability.

Discussion

This case study of Bancroft Middle School suggests that shifting school structures

towards racial integration can potentially create new spaces that diverge from the racialized

cultural representations and structural resources stemming from a project of racial segregation.

However, findings in the second year point out the often ephemeral nature of such spaces. In this

instance such an anti-racist project was not sustainable because the students came to recognize

the stigma of being of ‘low academic ability’ and its effects on upward mobility and expectations

of academic success.


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The positive counter-narrative among the Year 1 students to ‘increase racial

harmony/integration’ in the previously segregated English Only (mainly African American) and

English Language Learner (mainly Latino and Asian American) classes defied the claim that

these tracked academic placements automatically stigmatize students (Oakes 1985, Lucas 1999).

However, the production of such a seemingly positive ‘social good’ came at a cost that conflated

issues of differences in linguistic as well as other academic needs raising real questions regarding

race and school structures. Does the potential positive benefits of increasing ‘racial harmony’

outweigh the damage of tracking students into classes that do not provide realistic possibilities

for future academic success? How does the lack of value that the students seem to attach to

language ‘diversity’ and cultural maintenance, both ideas promoted by bilingual education

advocates, compare to the increased discourse of ‘racial harmony’ that such

desegregated/integrated classes created temporarily at Bancroft Middle School? Can either

discourse truly address and transcend the racialization of ‘blackness as bad?’

This study critiques the claim that shifting demographics will naturally transcend the

racial binary of whiteness and blackness. Though Bancroft had no white students, ‘whiteness’ is

still present in the ‘power structure,’ including in the bodies of the educational policy makers,

administrators, and teachers in the school. In addition, ‘whiteness’ as a racial formation moves

beyond people and into broader structures and projects in the state that glorify elements

associated with whiteness, such as the ability to speak ‘standard English,’ as self-evident and

‘natural’ (Delpit and Dowdy 2003). Likewise, the continual recreation of ‘blackness’ as the

‘other’ in this racial binary is also a racial project of the state, whether historically in the state’s

assistance in the simultaneous rise of the ‘white middle class’ and ‘black ghettoes’ in the 1940-


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50’s (Lipsitz 1999, Bonilla-Silva 2001) or the rise of the US black penal state system in recent

decades (Gilmore 2007).

I found that the school structures, not the changing compositions of the students in the

class, ultimately determined the racialization of the African American students at Bancroft. It did

not matter whether the African American students were in the high level ‘mainstream English’

class (bilingual language tracking of Year 0) or the low level ‘High Point’ class (English literacy

tracking of Year 2). In both placements the African American students were seen as ‘not

deserving’ of their placement based on a racialized representation. Even the unintended

consequence of racial desegregation of the classes did not ‘naturally’ change the racial

construction of ‘blackness’ in the eyes of the students. The school tracking structure ultimately

shaped the perception of value attached to English and perceived distribution of resources based

on this value. Though the teachers and students continued to try to create alternative discourses

about race in their classrooms, the way the classes were structured, not the changing composition

of bodies in the classrooms themselves, became the determining factor.

Conclusion

Drawing upon the thesis of racial formation to articulate how social structures and

institutions serve to racialize suggests an approach to question other ‘common sense’ racial

logics that have been shown to be prevalent among both teachers and students in urban public

schools, such as the supposed lack of ability or motivation among black students to succeed

(Fordham and Ogbu 1986, Ferguson 2000, Lewis 2003). The reification of racial representations

so often attributed to marginalized, racialized communities can then be theorized as

manifestations both responding to and reflecting structures of power in relation to those


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controlling the power within the racial state. By using the institutional structure of schools as a

lens, I argue that there are structures in schools that are inherently racialized. As in the work by

Ann Ferguson, whose book Bad Boys (2000) focuses on the racialized violence towards black

boys through the disciplinary structures of the schools, and Jeannie Oakes, whose book Keeping

Track (1985) studies the tracking system of large, comprehensive high schools, race is exhibited

in children’s identity, relationships and behaviors as reflections of their negotiation with the

more fundamental source, the structure of the school itself. The type of racialization described

goes beyond individual acts, behaviors and attitudes to a more institutional/structural violence

towards youth through school structures, such as tracking.

Analyzing schools as institutional structures that perpetuate and maintain the social

construction of race relates to broader questions theorizing the purpose of schools in what Omi

and Winant call the ‘racial state.’ Educational practices help manufacture racial formations of

control through tracked ‘failure,’ such as the reconstruction of ‘blackness’. In this case it was the

Latino and Asian American students who were used to reinforce the black-white binary as the

racial project of the school. The perception of ‘blackness’ as either unintelligent or unmotivated

to succeed seemed couched within a new racial project/logic that is ‘colorblind.’ By refusing to

recognize race, ‘colorblind ideology’ (Guinier and Torres 2002) simultaneously tries to

assimilate and commodify all other ‘cultural beings’ (namely immigrants, those who have

another ‘legitimate language/culture’) except African Americans. While race and racial

formations are not unchanging, particular racializations can continue to be reproduced in

different social contexts. In this case a reconstituted American racial binary continues to

construct ‘blackness’ as bad regardless of shifts in demographics or structural accommodations.


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Documents

Theorizing Race