Content area
Full Text
GHOSTS IN THE SCHOOLYARD: RACISM AND SCHOOL CLOSINGS ON CHICAGO'S SOUTH SIDE by Eve L. Ewing Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 240 pp. $22.50 (cloth).
Within sociology, ethnographers are sometimes considered foot soldiers of the discipline. The trained ethnographer enters a community, often one that is not their own, in an effort to expand our knowledge of the social world through an in-depth study of culture. A good ethnography offers a revealing glimpse into a social system, an understanding of everyday actors and insights into how everyday actions, interactions, and events are patterned by culture and structure. A great ethnography goes beyond this by advancing theory and uncovering hidden truths about the social world. Author Eve L. Ewing's Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side surpasses both of these measures, elevating the ethnographic project to the status of art, even as the polymathic author may shy away from identifying with any one methodological tradition. Within the first few pages, readers are not only intellectually rooted in the events surrounding school closures on Chicago's South Side, but are fully immersed in the scenes of a strange paradoxical world where it is the year 2013 in one of the richest countries in the world, and the only way to improve a school is to close it. Writing with equal parts intellectual rigor, élan, and moral clarity, Ewing offers a forceful reexamination of the prevailing logic that governs school closings in majority black neighborhoods while also inviting the reader to consider a "dueling reality," another version of events as seen from the perspectives of those most impacted by Chicago's school closures.
Debates on public school closures are unfolding in urban school districts across the United States, where proposed closures disproportionately affect communities of color. Ghosts in the Schoolyard, even though it's set in a single neighborhood in Chicago, adds a timely new perspective to an ongoing national debate. In the first few pages, readers are swept into the dominant narrative...