When the Black Kids Moved In: Racial Reproduction and the Promise of Intergroup Dialogue in an Exurban High School.

Abstract

Education reform in the United States has largely failed to address the ways in which race shapes outcomes and is navigated in schools by students, teachers, and administrators. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at Jefferson High School—a rapidly growing, increasingly diverse, exurban school in the Midwest—this dissertation explores the promise of intergroup dialogue for creating more socially just schools. It finds that without intentional efforts to enact racial justice, teachers, students, and administrators engage with race in ways that reproduce, rather than interrupt, hierarchical race relations, discrimination, segregation and inequality. Jefferson presents at once a unique case study and a familiar American community. Between 1992 and 2009, the percentage of African American students at Jefferson High School nearly doubled. However, unlike most schools in the U.S., there were not significant disparities in income by race. Many families in the area, black and white, attained their “middle class” status through rapidly disappearing, unionized, blue-collar labor and a subprime housing market. This study documents the patterns of race relations that dominated the school. Although many students claimed to be “post-racial,” their interactions were rife with racial jokes, slurs, and intimidation. Administrators and teachers feared grappling with issues of race, willfully ignoring racial tensions and adopting colorblind frames to explain the racial disparities they witnessed between students. As a result, students were left to figure out how to negotiate race on their own—often doing so in hyper-racialized ways that perpetuated stereotypes and led to discrimination and bullying. The final chapter explores the use of intergroup dialogue to interrupt racial reproduction by following a group of students and teachers who participated in an intervention that sought to improve school climate and culture around issues of race. It concludes that dialogue can interrupt prejudice and has the potential to provide teachers and students with skills and knowledge to more effectively address issues of race and discrimination in their classrooms and schools. While not sufficient to improve schools independently, such interventions are necessary to the success of any meaningful effort to reform U.S. education.