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September 2, 2002 UCSC in the News For academic researchers, question-and-answer media interviews afford the rare opportunity to discuss their work with a journalist and see the conversation appear in print with minimal editing. Pamela Perry, assistant professor of community studies, enjoyed the opportunity to describe her work on racial identity among high-school students to a reporter with the Christian Science Monitor. The article is reprinted with permission below.
Exploring race through white teens' eyes A sociologist compares students' experiences in two high schools with
vastly different racial compositions By Stephanie Cook When Pamela Perry was studying anthropology in graduate school, she posed
a tough question to her colleagues: What does it mean to be white? They didn't think they had an ethnic identity, she recalls. "I thought,
culture is something everybody has. Why is it as a white person I don't
think I have a cultural identity? Well, ethnic means minority to most
people. White people identify with the majority--and we don't call it
anything." Those conversations sparked Ms. Perry to write a book about a phase of
life when identities are often shaped: the high school years. In "Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School"
(Duke University Press), she writes about her two-and-a-half-year experience
in two California schools in the mid-1990s. The two schools, near Santa
Cruz, were practically identical in academics, size, socioeconomics -
in nearly everything but ethnic composition. Clavey High is the name she assigned to a large, diverse public school
in a metropolitan area on the Pacific Coast. Only 12 percent of students
there are white. Valley Groves (also a pseudonym) is about 20 miles away,
in a onetime agricultural area that has now become suburban. The student
body represents both working-class and professional families and is 70
percent white. Perry attended classes, chatted with cliques, and talked with white teens
to gain their insights on prejudice, privilege, and "white guilt." Many students told Perry that racial groups became more boldly defined
in high school as kids etched out their identities and became more aware
of pressure--from society and their peers--not to cross racial lines. Two white friends at Clavey, Kirsten and Cindi, recall how their taste
in music changed over the years. Kirsten says that she and her friends,
regardless of race, listened to rap and R&B in elementary school.
But she now listens to alternative and country. "As you get older ... you discover what your 'true being' is. So then people's musical tastes change," she told Perry. "There's an undercurrent ..., a desire to feel accepted." Now an assistant professor of community studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, Perry spoke with the Monitor about what she discovered
at two schools with such contrasting racial compositions. On students' willingness to open up: The white kids felt solidarity as whites at Clavey. There were distinctions
between cliques, but they weren't hard and fast ... whereas over in the
white school, they made a sharper distinction among themselves as whites.
So punk-rockers and jocks weren't hanging out together. On the atmosphere at each school: There was an assumption that the students were bad--even though there
was almost an equal amount of crime at both schools. At one school, the
dominating theme was nurturing.... The other was more punitive. [Young
people] absorb that. On how the students' views differed: In the urban school, there was a bit of both comfort with other races
and tensions. I heard a lot of contradictions--but white kids said they
wouldn't change the experience ... of befriending different [races]. But the same students would say the most racist comments--stronger than
[the comments made by] any students in the white school. They saw their
privilege but also saw the black kids in remedial classes. [There was
also] a desire to understand and overcome racism. On the degree to which students think race matters: Because whites in the suburb had little association with people of color,
their race sensitivities made them ignorant about what was going on....
They weren't as aware of huge discrepancies in white and black incomes.
They thought, 'Now we're living in a world where race doesn't matter anymore.' At the multiracial school no one said race didn't matter--regardless
of being conservative or liberal. They wanted to meet to discover their
sameness, which also makes us realize [that there are] racial injustices. On academics and tracking: Some kids were there because their parents put them there. I talked to
counselors who would say that black and Latino parents wouldn't lobby
as much to put their kids in advanced classes. Suburban students were more defensive, fearing they were going to be
[denied opportunities in favor of] someone less qualified. In both schools, students were in the advanced placement classes. In
the multiracial school, these tracks were very racialized in students'
minds. The Asians and whites were in upper classes while blacks and Hispanics
were in the remedial or lower classes. Kids [equated] whites [with] going to college and blacks and Hispanics [with] dropping out. Tracking systems almost assured their futures. On whiteness as 'normal': We can't just be different and equal. It's hard for us culturally to
all be "normal"--once you point out a difference, it has to
be good or bad. If we [whites] see ourselves as the norm, how does that affect how we look at difference? So when students see themselves as the norm they are more inclined to feel entitlement--not even consciously. I have a complaint about multiculturalism in schools where you have an
Asian-American assembly, an African-American assembly, and so on. We don't
put white culture up as spectacle. So the concept of multiculturalism
days reproduces the notion that white is standard and minorities are spectacles. On integrated schools and new approaches to multiculturalism: Urban schools are in terrible disarray. [We need to] improve inner-city
schools and neighborhoods in ways that will ultimately support integration. There also need to be true multicultural programs in schools--schools that take on the task of integrating their student bodies and not segregating them by tracking. Detracking has the benefit of raising all ships. Tracking reproduces notions of racial hierarchy. The purpose of multiculturalism should be that people can find and validate
their histories through curriculum ... [that is] not so Eurocentric. There
isn't just one kind of knowledge that is the right knowledge. We need
to help white students make sense of their own race and not feel guilty.
Copyright © 2002 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
Online at csmonitor.com
Highlights
of Making the News columns from the 2001-02 academic year. |
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