Racism, Public Schooling, and the Entrenchment of White Supremacy

A Critical Race Ethnography

Sabina E. Vaught

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781438434681, 9781438434674
• eBook ISBN: 9781438434698
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The racial achievement gap in U.S. education is a pervasive and consistent problem, an unavoidable fact of public schooling in this country. Because This Is Not for Us is a multi-site critical race ethnography of policy and institutional relationships in an large urban West Coast school district, focused on the practices that created and sustain the achievement gap in that district's schools. In this daring and provocative work, author Sabina Elena Vaught examines how this gap, and the policies and practices that sustain it, is produced and reproduced by structures of racism and race attitudes operative in education. She interweaves numerous interviews with and observations of teachers, principals, students, school board members, community leaders, and others to describe the complex arrangement of racial power in schooling, and concludes that the institutional relationships that create and support policy practices ensure the continued undereducation of Black and Brown youth.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Jericho
• Chapter 1 The Color of Money: Student Funding and the Commodification of Black Children
• Chapter 2 The Jeremiad: Decentralization and the Deregulation of Democracy
• Chapter 3 Martin Luther King, Jr. High School: Hate Speech and the Grammar of White Supremacy
• Conclusion: Speaking Truth to Power, Acting Truth to Power
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography