http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/793286274

Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting WhiteAfter "Brown"

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. The following chapters are contained in this book: (1) Introduction: Desegregation without Integration; (2) Everyday Experience, Culture, and Acting White; (3) Becoming a Cultural Object: Academic Achievement and Acting White among Black Students; (4) Susceptibility to Oppositional Peer Cultures; (5) Belonging: Course Selection and Race in the Age of Laissez Faire Tracking; and (6) Conclusion: Restoring the Promise of Brown.

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