Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199736456 ISBN 13: 9780199736454

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the "acting white" slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness, Integration Interrupted argues that when students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful lesson conveyed by schools, not their peers. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research, Karolyn Tyson shows how equating school success with "acting white" arose in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education through the practice of curriculum tracking, which separates students for instruction, ostensibly by ability and prior achievement. Only in very specific circumstances, when black students are drastically underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, do anxieties about "the burden of acting white" emerge. Racialized tracking continues to define the typical American secondary school, but it goes unremarked, except by the young people who experience its costs and consequences daily. The rich narratives in Integration Interrupted throw light on the complex relationships underlying school behaviors and convincingly demonstrate that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how we organize our schools.

About this title

About the Author

Karolyn Tyson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199736456
• ISBN 13: 9780199736454
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222
• Editor: Tyson Karolyn