Shades of White
White Kids and Racial Identities in High School
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- 22,99 €
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- 22,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
What does it mean to be young, American, and white at the dawn of the twenty-first century? By exploring this question and revealing the everyday social processes by which high schoolers define white identities, Pamela Perry offers much-needed insights into the social construction of race and whiteness among youth.
Through ethnographic research and in-depth interviews of students in two demographically distinct U.S. high schools—one suburban and predominantly white; the other urban, multiracial, and minority white—Perry shares students’ candor about race and self-identification. By examining the meanings students attached (or didn’t attach) to their social lives and everyday cultural practices, including their taste in music and clothes, she shows that the ways white students defined white identity were not only markedly different between the two schools but were considerably diverse and ambiguous within them as well. Challenging reductionist notions of whiteness and white racism, this study suggests how we might go “beyond whiteness” to new directions in antiracist activism and school reform.
Shades of White is emblematic of an emerging second wave of whiteness studies that focuses on the racial identity of whites. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as to those involved with high school education and antiracist activities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This timely but disappointing study looks at racial identity among students at two California public high schools, one urban and racially diverse, the other mostly white. Perry, a community studies professor at UC Santa Cruz, seeks to discover what being "white" means to European-American students. Unsurprisingly, she learns that whites in a diverse environment are more conscious of their ethnicity than those in a homogenous one. Sort out the unfriendly academic syntax ("little to no association with racialized differences within a socio-cultural milieu that was self-confirming contributed to the construction of white as 'norm' and a race-neutral logic of social organization"), and the results never penetrate much beyond the predictable finding that suburban white students don't spend much time thinking about their racial identity, while the urban white students were ambivalent and conflicted about theirs. A "participant observer" at the schools, Perry frequently reminds readers of her intimacy with the students ("I knew the hallway people Melissa was referring to"), but her observations are full of presumptive speculation about their thoughts and motivations ("I intuitively felt... Carli was punctuating her presence with urban black slang... to impress Mark"). The students' voices, though quoted abundantly, are framed and perhaps overdetermined by Perry's assumptions about their inner lives. The racial issues that the students face are meaningful; one wishes we had a more trustworthy guide leading us through their world. A more readable choice is Denise Clark Pope's Doing School, which Yale published last year.
