Abstract
This research explores how black middle-class parents in white-dominant schools utilise their agency to deal with inequality in their children’s schools. The personal interests and motives of parents as reflected in their decisions to employ specific strategies over others are explored. In addition, how those decisions position them in their ability and effectiveness in addressing inequality and advocating for their children when critical racial incidents occur, are also explored. It therefore also examines the extent to which racial integration has succeeded in white-dominant schools where black parents constitute a racial minority. It highlights subtle ways in which inequality and discrimination is expressed within the schools in post-apartheid South Africa. It also raises questions about whether it is feasible to tackle inequality at a micro-level of the school. And it asks whether black middle-class parents, with their material resources are in a better position to tackle inequality at the level of the school. The study reveals that the parents are not just victims of racial injustice but that their patterns of deploying agency actually create contexts in which the very strategies they employ unintentionally perpetuate white racial hegemony and continued inequality.
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Notes
- 1.
This research emanates from my PhD study titled: The educational motivations and strategies of black middle-class parents in predominantly white schools in post-apartheid South Africa, University of the Free State, 2017.
- 2.
The parents in my study did not simply drop off their children at the school gate and drive off to work or gym in their fancy cars as it was alleged in the media that they “cede their responsibility towards their children once they are dropped off at the school gates” (source: The Times (2012) time 00:21).
- 3.
Here I am borrowing from what Babalwa, one of the parents in my study suggested that Black parents are takers, referring to incidents where black parents seem to cooperate without question or dissent to what the school officials demand, even to their own detriment.
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Matentjie, T. (2019). Race, Class and Inequality in Education: Black Parents in White-Dominant Schools After Apartheid. In: Spaull, N., Jansen, J. (eds) South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_15
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