Up against Whiteness: Students of Color in Our Schools

Abstract

on how race and racism play out in the everyday lives of students in urban schools across the United States. The articles demonstrate that racial ideologies shape and constrain students' academic experiences and identities, especially as they intersect with class and gender ideologies. And while white students are conspicuously absent from many urban schools, the articles suggest that whiteness remains the ubiquitous norm against which students of color are judged. Taken as a whole, these articles go a long way toward moving us beyond a solely black and white discourse on race, and in an attempt to continue this conversation I will weave a discussion of my work with Asian American students into my reflection on the articles in this issue of AEQ. The articles by Cammarota and Rolon-Dow both demonstrate that gender complicates the way race is experienced by young men and women of color. Schools and the larger society construct young Latino men as possessing a deviant, dangerous, and improper masculinity that must be contained and policed. Cammarota argues that the negative stereotyping of Latinos contributes to their alienation from school. Cammarota's findings confirm other qualitative research on the intersection of gender and race that suggests that men of color are often seen as expressing dangerous and improper masculinities. Like Latino men, African American and Southeast Asian American men often are criminalized in the mainstream imagination (Ferguson 2000; Lee in press; Lei 2003). In my recent study on Hmong American high school students (Lee in press), I found that Hmong American boys' expressions of masculinity, like that of other boys/men of color, were judged against the standards of white hegemonic masculinity. Some Hmong American boys, for example, were viewed as being too quiet and therefore not masculine. Other Hmong American boys were viewed as possessing a dangerous and deviant masculinity. Many white teachers wrongly assumed that