Amanda E. Lewis

“What Group?” Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of “Color‐Blindness”

In this article I argue that despite the claims of some, all whites in racialized societies “have race.” But because of the current context of race in our society, I argue that scholars of “whiteness” face several difficult theoretical and methodological challenges. First is the problem of how to avoid essentializing race when talking about whites as a social collective. That is, scholars must contend with the challenge of how to write about what is shared by those racialized as white without implying that their experiences of racialization all will be the same. Second, within the current context of color-blind racial discourse, researchers must confront the reality that some whites claim not to experience their whiteness at all. Third, studies of whiteness must not be conducted in a vacuum: racial discourse or “culture” cannot be separated from material realities. Only by attending to and by recognizing these challenges will empirical research on whiteness be able to push the boundaries of our understandings about the role of whites as racial actors and thereby also contribute to our understanding of how race works more generally.

There Is No “Race” in the Schoolyard: Color-Blind Ideology in an (Almost) All-White School

This article examines the racial messages and lessons students get from parents and teachers in one suburban school community. I examine the explicit and “hidden” curriculum of race offered in the school as well as exploring community members’ racial discourse, understandings, and behaviors. During a yearlong ethnographic study, all community members consistently denied the local salience of race. Yet, this explicit color-blind “race talk” masked an underlying reality of racialized practices and color-conscious understandings—practices and understandings that not only had direct impact on students of color at the school, but also have implications for race relations more broadly. I argue that this apparent paradox is related to the operation of new racial ideologies becoming dominant in the United States today, and conclude with suggestions for how this racial logic might be challenged.

Everyday Race-Making Navigating Racial Boundaries in Schools

Sociologists working in the racial formation tradition have made a clear case for under-standing race as a political and social construction and have detailed macroprocesses of production. However, we still do not understand enough about how race is reproduced through microlevel interactions. Drawing on ethnographic data from research in schools, the author examines everyday race-making—the processes through which race and racial categories are reproduced and contested in daily life. As racial identities are assigned to individuals and racial categories are mapped onto groups, these groups and individuals are simultaneously included in or excluded from a variety of social interactions and social institutions. It is through these everyday interactions that racial boundaries are formed and renegotiated.

Researching “Black” Educational Experiences and Outcomes: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations:

This article delineates how race has been undertheorized in research on the educational experiences and outcomes of Blacks. The authors identify two dominant traditions by which researchers have invoked race (i.e., as culture and as a variable) and outline their conceptual limitations. They analyze how these traditions mask the heterogeneity of the Black experience, underanalyze institutionalized productions of race and racial discrimination, and confound causes and effects in estimating when and how race is “significant.” The authors acknowledge the contributions of more recent scholarship and discuss how future studies of Black achievement might develop more sophisticated conceptualizations of race to inform more rigorous methodological examinations of how, when, and why Black students perform in school as they do.

RACIAL APATHY AND HURRICANE KATRINA: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era

During the crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina, many Americans expressed surprise at the dramatic levels of racial inequality captured in the images of large numbers of poor Black people left behind in devastated New Orleans. In this article we argue that, to better understand both the parameters of contemporary racial inequality reflected in the hurricane’s aftermath and why so many were surprised about the social realities of racial inequality that social scientists have known about for decades, it is essential to recognize the shifting nature of Whites’ racial attitudes and understandings. There is widespread evidence that in the post-civil rights era the expression of White racial prejudice has changed. In fact, during the post-civil rights era subtle and indirect forms of prejudice have become more central to the sustenance and perpetuation of racial inequality than are overt forms of prejudice. We draw on both survey and qualitative data to investigate current manifestations of White racial attitudes and prejudices. Our results indicate that racial apathy, indifference towards racial and ethnic inequality, is a relatively new but expanding form of racial prejudice. We further show that Whites’ systematic “not knowing” about racial inequality (White ignorance), which was manifest in the reaction to the crises after Hurricane Katrina, is related to this racial indifference. Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race). These phenomena serve as pillars of contemporary racial inequality that have until now received little attention. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and the practical implications of our results for understanding racial dynamics in the post-Katrina United States.

Race and school achievement in a desegregated suburb: reconsidering the oppositional culture explanation

Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this ‘school structures’ argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and are cognizant of racial patterns of track placement within the local school context, the authors found no evidence that Black students oppose school achievement. These findings are important because they shed light on some of the educational dilemmas that Black students encounter, which have received limited attention in prior work on oppositional culture. These dilemmas include cross‐race peer pressure from Whites among high‐achieving Black students and dilemmas of low achievement among Black students who struggle academically. Based on the findings, future lines of research are suggested that might help researchers better understand racial achievement disparities in such contexts.

Conundrums of Integration: Desegregation in the Context of Racialized Hierarchy

Recent scholarly and public conversations have given renewed attention to integration as a goal, an aspiration, and/or an “imperative.” These calls for integration are infused with the conviction that segregation is a linchpin, if not the linchpin, of persistent racialized hierarchies. While the costs of persistent segregation remain clear, the call for integration as the unequivocal answer is more contested. In this article we grapple with some of these conundrums of integration, asking whether, in fact, integration furthers equity and if not, why not? To explore this issue we focus on an “integrated” space—Riverview, a successful high school known for its diversity—and drawing on theory from social psychology, we show how the promise of integration in such contexts is undermined. We conclude that while integration may well be a necessary condition to advance equity, it is not by itself a sufficient condition to ensure it.

Our “Ideal Girl” Prescriptions of Female Adolescent Sexuality in a Feminist Mentorship Program

Adolescent girls must contend with several sets of competing expectations at the discursive intersection of sexuality, age, gender, and race. This article examines how a feminist mentorship program for early adolescent girls engaged the issue of sexuality. Despite the program’s self-described feminist orientation, ethnographic analysis revealed its reliance on moralistic, age-based standards of appropriate sexual interest and behavior; the suppression of sexuality; and girl-as-victim discourse. These data bolster the call for reformed, sex-positive approaches to adolescent sexuality and reveal some of the complexities involved in cross-generational feminist interventions.

Beyond Prejudice? Young Whites’ Racial Attitudes in Post–Civil Rights America, 1976 to 2000

A key finding from previous research on trends in Whites’ racial attitudes is that much of the decline in the expression of racial prejudice over the past seven decades can be attributed to the replacement of older, less tolerant White cohorts by younger, more tolerant cohorts of Whites in the U.S. population (i.e., cohort replacement). An implicit assumption of much of this work is that cohort replacement will continue to produce unidirectional liberalizing trends in Whites’ racial attitudes because of the more tolerant attitudes of each younger cohort. In this article, we reexamine the cohort replacement hypothesis focusing on young Whites’ racial attitudes and whether change is in substance or form. We develop a theoretical argument about the shifting nature of young Whites’ racial attitudes and understandings in the post–civil rights era by building on Forman’s concept of racial apathy and the expanding literature on color-blind racism, which posits that during the post–civil rights era, subtle forms of racial prejudice have become more prevalent than overt forms. We empirically test this argument by investigating trends in, and determinants of, young Whites’ racial attitudes from 1976 to 2000, using nationally representative samples of White high school seniors. Although we find a liberalizing trend for some racial attitudes, we do not find a similar pattern for contemporary forms of prejudice, particularly racial apathy. In addition, we find that the social determinants of young Whites’ social distance attitudes (traditional prejudice) and expressions of racial apathy (contemporary prejudice) have been remarkably consistent over time. Collectively, these results indicate the need for greater attention to the expression of subtle forms of prejudice among young Whites generally, and to the potentially destructive force of rising levels of racial apathy specifically.

Working at the Intersection of Race and Public Policy The Promise (and Perils) of Putting Research to Work for Societal Transformation

Today, race and ethnicity scholars generate a wealth of important research that documents the parameters of racial and/or ethnic inequality, how such inequality persists, and how it relates to, or intersects with, other dimensions of social life. Here we argue that these scholars should devote their abundant intellectual energies not only to illuminating the parameters and causes of racial injustice but also to producing work that might shift popular understandings and stimulate change. We ask, how can we collectively be more deliberate and strategic in grappling with how to do research that matters in the world? This is not a new question but places us within a long tradition of race scholars who were, and are, deeply invested in producing knowledge in service of societal transformation. In what follows we take up the question of how to do work that is intellectually rigorous and deeply engaged. Specifically, we offer a close examination of the intersection of racial and/or ethnic research and public policy. We begin by arguing for a much broader definition of public policy than typically gets deployed within academic institutions. We then turn to outlining some of the opportunities and challenges of trying to do this work. Finally we provide a number of concrete examples of how scholars of race/ethnicity can and do deploy their research in the world.