Reproducing and Resisting Whiteness in a Quasi-Desegregated Suburban High School: An Ethnographic Field Analysis.

Abstract

I conduct ethnographic research in a quasi-desegregated high school to determine how the structure of the institution in relation with white students’ level of interaction with non-resident black students impacts their understanding of the racial hierarchy and their place within it. Bourdieu’s notions of field and capital provide the guiding theoretical framework for this dissertation and structured both the collection and interpretation of the data. The data were collected through participant observation and interviews with faculty, white students and students of color and suggests the fluidity of whiteness: white students with objectively similar backgrounds who inhabit the same physical location can develop different visions of whiteness and white privilege. Reproductive tendencies were noted among white students whose experiences led them to observe but not interact with black students and resistance was noted among white students whose friendship circles, athletic endeavors and romantic relationships found them in consistent and personal interaction with black students. In some cases resistance was nascent or marked by contradiction indicating that the institutional tendency toward reproduction was formidable. This dissertation contributes to the sociology of race by illuminating the ways in which whiteness is insinuated within the culture of an institution but simultaneously concealed from whites’ view and how this arrangement reproduces normative whiteness and regressive notions of the racial other. In demonstrating the deeply rooted and seemingly non-racial ways in which race operates within institutions and how this perpetuates and reinforces racialized notions of difference, this dissertation reveals how race continues to structure social life in the post-civil rights era. Furthermore, this dissertation complicates monolithic notions of whiteness by showing that there is variation in whites’ ability to apprehend the continuing salience of race and white privilege while identifying one mechanism—interaction—that serves to explain this variation. The dissertation concludes by considering recommendations for pedagogical practice and institutional change that could nurture the inchoate strains of resistance that are identified.