Race in the schoolyard: Reproducing the color line in school.

Too often our research treats race only as a variable, used partially to explain variance in a range of social outcomes but with too little regard for the actual racialization process. Sociologists and other academics have often reified racial collectivities, treating them as fixed entities that we can identify with precision, rather than studying how racial categories are produced and reproduced in everyday life. On the other hand, racial categories are not merely sociological abstractions; they are potent social categories around which people organize their identities and behavior and that influence their opportunities and outcomes. In this way, racial categories are socially real, with material consequences for people's lives, even as they are impermanent and potentially unstable. This dissertation examines the processes through which race and racial categories are reproduced. It is a study of the racialization of people and of institutions and also of institutions and people as racializing agents---as forces in the reproduction and transformation of race. It provides answers to a set of questions: how is it that race is reproduced in day-to-day life? How do we become socialized into the racial schema, knowing what these categories mean for us and for others? I have undertaken this study of the construction of the color line through ethnographic research in three school communities in California---two urban and one suburban. I show not only that the actual curriculum teaches many racial lessons, but schools (and school personnel) serve as a source of racial information, a location for interracial interaction, and a means of both affirming and challenging previous racial attitudes and understandings. While clearly not the only social institution concerned, schools are involved in framing ideas about race and in struggles around racial equity. They also are places where resources get distributed---both directly and indirectly. I demonstrate that race is not a fixed characteristic of individuals that they bring to school with them and then take away unchanged and intact. Race instead is at least in part a product of schooling, part of the process of what takes place in school.Ph.D.EducationEducational sociologyEthnic studiesSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132617/2/9977200.pd