Racism, Public Schooling, and the Entrenchment of White Supremacy: A Critical Race Ethnography

Description

Demonstrates how ingrained ideas of race created and sustain racism and inequity in U.S. schools.

Racism and inequity in U.S. education are pervasive and consistent problems, unavoidable facts of public schooling in this country. This book is a multisite critical race ethnography of institutional relationships and organization in a large, urban, West Coast school district. In this daring and provocative work, Sabina E. Vaught examines the policies and practices that created and sustain racialized inequity and White supremacy in that district’s schools. 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. Ultimately, Vaught’s analyses map the ways in which institutional relationships around schooling ensure the continued undereducation of Black and Brown youth.

“Beautifully written and sophisticatedly argued, this book is a must read for anyone interested in race, policy, and schooling. The text is well informed, rigorously researched, complicated in its analysis, and rhetorically deep. Vaught’s careful analysis of schooling and its large policy-related issues is masterful; the story she tells is simultaneously heartbreaking and all too familiar.” — Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Arizona State University and University of Alaska Fairbanks

“Sabina Vaught has captured, with poignancy and precision, the complexity of racialized educational inequity. Vaught skillfully draws on CRT to ground her analysis and demonstrates the ways in which racism persists to disenfranchise ‘the least of these’—our nation’s children.” — Adrienne D. Dixson, coeditor of Critical Race Theory in Education: All God’s Children Got a Song

“Vaught addresses the interrelationship of a number of important issues with insight, clarity, personal experience, and a call to (re)commit ourselves to the pursuit of equality and justice for all students.” — Alice McIntyre, author of Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers