Abstract
Reginald was a smart, sociable, and confident black high school junior, with lots of friends in school and in his neighborhood.2 Similar to many other students interviewed, he also differentiated the good and bad groups of students by race and ethnicity. Over four years, I listened attentively to students such as Reginald as they explained a commonly held belief that African American and Latino students were the “bad or loud” and disruptive students in comparison to the Asian American students who were “good or quiet,” obedient, and academically successful. These categories were constructed around oppositional peer groups based on race and ethnicity and were repeated by students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Susan: Can you tell me about the different groups in school?
Reginald: All right, you got … different types of groups … a group of people who don’t care about school, who walk around the hallways. You got a group that want to do well in school …
Susan: … Let’s talk about the group that … don’t care about school …
Reginald: They … go to lunch … if the security guards happen to catch them, they go to class … They’ll just disrupt the class, throw books around, stuff like that. I pay no mind to them.
Susan: … What types of people are they?
Reginald: … Well, one, I don’t think they care about themselves. Two, most of them is blacks and Hispanics. Like … mostly, the highest rate … of people in a group that go to class is Chinese people. Blacks, Hispanics, hang out in the hallway, playing around, going to (the) lunchroom … three times a day.1
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© 2010 Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom
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Rosenbloom, S.R. (2010). Rethinking High School as a Relational Journey. In: The Multiracial Urban High School. Palgrave Studies in Urban Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114739_1
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