Skip to product information
1 of 1

Oxford University Press, USA

Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White After Brown

Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White After Brown

Regular price $40.95 USD
Regular price Sale price $40.95 USD
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Format
Quantity
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.


Author: Karolyn Tyson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 02/21/2011
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780199736454

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2011

About the Author

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

This title is not returnable

View full details