Simone Ispa-Landa

Gender, Race, and Justifications for Group Exclusion Urban Black Students Bussed to Affluent Suburban Schools

Relational theories of gender conceptualize masculinity and femininity as mutually constitutive. Using a relational approach, I analyzed ethnographic and interview data from male and female black adolescents in Grades 8 through 10 enrolled in ‘‘Diversify,’’ an urban-to-suburban racial integration program (n = 38).1 Suburban students (n = 7) and Diversify coordinators (n = 9) were also interviewed. All the bussed students, male and female, were racially stereotyped. Yet as a group, the Diversify boys were welcomed in suburban social cliques, even as they were constrained to enacting race and gender in narrow ways. In contrast, the Diversify girls were stereotyped as ‘‘ghetto’’ and ‘‘loud’’ and excluded. In discussing these findings, the current study extends previous research on black girls’ ‘‘loudness,’’ identifies processes of racialization and gendering within a set of wealthy suburban schools, and offers new theoretical directions for the study of racially integrated settings.

Once You Go to a White School, You Kind of Adapt: Black Adolescents and the Racial Classification of Schools.

Studies of when youth classify academic achievement in racial terms have focused on the racial classification of behaviors and individuals. However, institutions—including schools—may also be racially classified. Drawing on a comparative interview study, we examine the school contexts that prompt urban black students to classify schools in racial terms. Through Diversify, a busing program, one group of black students attended affluent suburban schools with white-dominated achievement hierarchies (n = 38). Diversify students assigned schools to categories of whiteness or blackness that equated whiteness with achievement and blackness with academic deficiency. Students waitlisted for Diversify (n = 16) attended urban schools without white-dominated achievement hierarchies. These students did not classify schools as white or black, based on academic quality. We assert that scholars may productively conceive of schools, not just individual students, as sites of potential racial classification. Furthermore, the racial classification of schools reinforces antagonism between black students attending ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ schools and perpetuates harmful racial stereotypes.

Racial and Gender Inequality and School Discipline: Toward a More Comprehensive View of School Policy:

Researchers often examine how a single policy is implemented, without considering the role that other policies and programs may play in how that policy is understood and enacted. For instance, current scholarship on school discipline rarely considers that in many schools, multiple disciplinary channels coexist. For example, to counter harsh and racially disproportionate punishment in schools, many school districts have established restorative justice programs. However, restorative justice programs are frequently introduced into schools that also maintain more authoritarian practices, including the presence of police officers with the power to arrest students. In other words, rather than supplanting punitive practices, restorative justice practices tend to coexist with them. In this article, I describe how the coexistence of these two different channels for dealing with student misbehavior could deepen race and gender disproportionality in punishment. In so doing, I sketch a program of research on school disciplinary practices and inequality. I also call for more attention to the broader policy context in studies of particular school programs and policies.

Persistently Harsh Punishments Amid Efforts to Reform: Using Tools From Social Psychology to Counteract Racial Bias in School Disciplinary Decisions

In response to concerns about overly harsh and racially inequitable school discipline, schools have introduced disciplinary reforms. However, even in schools where these reformative programs are present, many students continue to be subject to developmentally inappropriate discipline and striking racial gaps in disciplinary outcomes persist. Teachers’ implicit racial bias likely contributes to racial disparities in school discipline. In this article, I highlight two social psychological skills—perspective-taking and individuating—that have been found to reduce the effects of implicit bias in nonschool settings. I suggest that if developed in educators, these social psychological skills could also help reduce racial disparities in school discipline. I discuss implications for future research and policy.