Content area
Full Text
Based on a one-and-a-half-year ethnographic study of a desegregated urban middle school, this article investigates the ways in which administrators, students, and teachers multiply constructed race through a network of policies, pedagogies, and practices. Using a framework of cultural production theory and critical race theory, the article not only illustrates these constructions but also argues that the careful analysis of them for themes of power and equity can inform the school curriculum and professional programs for preservice and practicing teachers. [racialized constructions, social identities, power, urban schools]
Race, like most forms of social difference, is a construction. It is not a fixed or static construct, but one that is contested and mediated by experiences of gender, ethnicity, national origin, and socioeconomic status. People claim, adapt, and reject particular constructions, using them for a variety of purposes, from identity work to political action (Levinson et al. 1996). Yet people live out "raced" lives and must negotiate possibilities even as they are constrained or enabled by policies and practices, systems and structures (Guinier and Torres 2002; Ladson-Billings 1998). As such, individual and collective action still needs to be taken to address issues of racism, as well as the disparities and inequities that continue to be experienced along racially defined lines (Anyon 1997; Wilson 1999). Moses explains:
In 2004, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the controversies around "race" and racism are raging as brightly as ever. Whether we are talking about the future of affirmative action in elite universities, or what the next U.S. Census form will look like, or what the achievement rates of white males are versus underrepresented students of color, this conversation is by no means finished. [2004:146]
Indeed, this conversation about race and power is imperative, especially in arenas such as school curricula and teacher education programs.
Scholars have addressed the social construction of race in a variety of ways, carefully articulating its complexity and fluidity (e.g., Lewis 2003; Montagu 1997; Moses 2004; Mukhopadhyay and Henze 2003; Pollock 2004). Yet, as Lewis argues, "If we take seriously the fact that race is a social construction, we must pay attention to how racialization processes work-that is, how race is produced and perpetuated on an everyday basis" (2003:189). She cites these processes...