Abstract
The tracking literature examines how academic hierarchies contribute to race and class differences in academic achievement, but it pays scant attention to how school structures also influence students’ racial and ethnic identities. Relatedly, race/ethnicity and immigration scholars focus on how schools serve as sites for observing the social construction of racial and ethnic identities but do not account for how school structures actively shape these identity outcomes. This study makes a contribution to the immigration, race/ethnicity, and education literatures by examining how academic tracking influences the racial and ethnic identities of second-generation West Indian students. Consistent with the tracking literature, the author finds that Mayfield High School’s academic hierarchy contributes to the racialization of West Indian students and, in doing so, intensifies their racial group consciousness. It also shows how academic tracking simultaneously increases the salience of ethnic identity among Afro-Caribbean students. These findings point to the significance of educational institutions in shaping racialization processes in schools and contribute to broader conversations regarding the evolution of the color line in American society.
Keywords
Data from the 2010 U.S. census indicates that the inflow of immigrants from 2000 to 2010 was the highest in U.S. history, accounting for 80 percent of the country’s population growth during that decade. Because the majority of these immigrants are Asians, Latinos, and people of African descent, many race and ethnicity scholars critique the mainstream immigration literature for not fully acknowledging that institutional racism informs how these immigrants integrate into American society, particularly when these immigrants are identified as Black. In this article, I address these concerns by focusing on the racialization of second-generation West Indian students at Mayfield, a racially and ethnically diverse high school in New York City.
Educational institutions play an important role in the racialization of children of immigrants (Feliciano 2009; Ocampo 2013), and this population now comprises about one fifth of all public school students (Camarota 2012). Although many immigration studies provide evidence showing that schools play an important role in shaping immigrant students’ racial and ethnic identities (Kasinitz 1992; Waters 2001; Woldemikael 1989; Zephir 2001), these studies lack explicit focus on processes of racialization that are prominent in race/ethnicity and education studies (Carter 2003; Lewis 2003; Perry 2002). What these genres both have in common, however, is a limited focus on how school structures influence racial and ethnic identity construction. Accordingly, in this article I examine how the structure of academic tracking influences the racial and ethnic identity formation of second-generation West Indian students.
Consistent with the tracking literature, I find that the academic hierarchy at Mayfield contributes to the racialization of second-generation West Indian students and, in doing so, intensifies their racial group consciousness (Hallinan 1994; Tyson 2011). However, the results also show how tracking simultaneously increases the salience of ethnic identity, because most Afro-Caribbean students are placed into the school’s lowest status academic track, which facilitates social interaction with coethnic peers. These research findings show the influential role of educational institutions in actively shaping the racial and ethnic identities of immigrant youth. Further, while the findings from this study capture reality in a particular moment, setting, and location, the analyses have implications for broader discussions regarding the transformation of the rigid Black/White color line in the United States into a more fluid system (Alba and Nee 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2004), that includes a more complicated definition of blackness. Equally important, my analyses with regard to the racialization of West Indian youth and their attempts at self-definition are consistent with Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation perspective, which points to sociohistorical processes whereby racial (and ethnic) categories are “created,” “inhabited,” and “transformed.”
Theorizing Race(ism) in the Study of Black Immigrants
Segmented assimilation theory suggests that although White immigrants have the option of assimilating into mainstream American society, racial discrimination erases this as an option for the growing numbers of Asians, Latinos, and people of African descent (Portes, Fernández-Kelly, and Haller 2009; Portes and Zhou 1993). It identifies the ethnic enclave as a mechanism for upward mobility for nonwhite groups who are strategic about selectively blending some aspects of mainstream culture with their cultures of origin. This option is not available to Black immigrants. Instead, the theory predicts that Black immigrant youth will adopt the “oppositional” cultural values of the African American underclass, leading inevitably to a downwardly mobile pathway.
As a whole, segmented assimilation theory acknowledges that race is associated with the pathways of particular nationality groups, and that “Blackness” is associated with negative social, educational, and occupational outcomes. Still, many race and ethnicity scholars criticize the immigration literature, within which segmented assimilation theory is the dominant paradigm, for minimizing issues of race and racism that are central to how people of African descent adapt or integrate into American society (Bashi and McDaniel 1997; Ostine 1998; Pierre 2004; Sáenz and Douglas 2015). The analyses in this article, in contrast, makes the racialization of West Indian youth a central focus.
In the inaugural issue of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Treitler (2015) suggested that the immigration literature places too much emphasis on group agency in explanations for variation in the social and economic outcomes among immigrants instead of the processes of racialization that are at the source of such differences. In the case of Black immigrants, for example, many immigration scholars assume that second-generation West Indian youth must “choose” between identifying racially to fit in with their African American peers or ethnically, on the basis of the national origins of their parents (Kasinitz, Battle, and Miyares 2001; Stepick et al. 2003; Waters 2001; Zephir 2001). 1 However, Pierre (2004) pointed to the failure of immigration scholars to recognize that racial and ethnic identification are “mutually constitutive” processes; that is, Black immigrant ethnicity emerges in part as a response to experiences with racial discrimination in the United States.
Similarly, some scholars identify a problematic tendency for immigration scholars to treat Black “racial” identity as equivalent to the “ethnic” identities of European immigrants. They assert that by conflating “race” with “ethnicity” in this way, immigration scholars fail to acknowledge that Black immigrants in the United States (like their African American counterparts) are being inserted into a status hierarchy in which Blackness is a stigmatized social category and anti-Black racism is part of their everyday reality (Bashi 1998; Bashi and McDaniel 1997; Ostine 1998; Pierre 2004; Sáenz and Douglas 2015; Treitler 2015). Keeping these existing critiques in mind, this study makes a contribution to the race/ethnicity, immigration, and education literatures by making the process of racialization a central focus of the analyses and by identifying educational institutions, academic tracking in particular, as a key mechanism that influences this racialization process. Equally important, this study provides an illustrative example of how racial and ethnic identity formation are “mutually constitutive” processes by showing that academic tracking also contributes to intensifying ethnic identification among West Indian youth.
Racial and Ethnic Identity Construction in Schools
Educational institutions are important sites for exploring racial and ethnic identity construction, and this is reflected in the robust bodies of literature on this topic from race/ethnicity, education, and immigration scholars (Feliciano 2009; Lewis 2003; Lopez 2003; Ocampo 2013; Perry 2002; Tyson 2011; Wells and Crain 1999). These scholars have explored the relationship between students’ racialized identities and variation in achievement-oriented attitudes and behaviors, how students are treated by authority figures in school, and the differential impact of school policies and practices on students’ academic experiences and outcomes (Carter 2005; Conchas 2001; Flores-González 2002; Fordham 1996; Lewis 2003; Lewis and Diamond 2015; Lopez 2003; Perry 2002; Rios 2011; Tyson 2011; Wells and Crain 1999). For example, Amanda Lewis’s (2003) book Race in the School Yard examines how macro-level racialization processes manifest in the everyday social interactions that take place in three elementary schools and communities with different racial, ethnic, and class compositions. She identified the significance of schools as “race-making” institutions through analyses of racial discourses, meanings, and messages emanating from multiple sources, including the curriculum, staff members, students, and parents. The present study builds on Lewis’s work by focusing on how school structures influence processes of racialization in schools.
Additionally, many scholars point to the significance of peer groups in shaping racial and ethnic identity construction in schools by facilitating or delimiting social interactions with peers who exert pressure to conform to a particular definition of self (Carter 2003; Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Kasinitz 1992; Perry 2002; Tyson 2011; Warikoo 2011; Waters 2001; Woldemikael 1989; Zephir 2001). For example, the oppositional culture hypothesis suggests that caste-like minorities such as African Americans develop “oppositional identities” to Whites in response to their history of exploitation and subordination in the United States (Fordham and Ogbu 1986). Drawing on Signithia Fordham’s (1996) research in a Washington, D.C., high school, the authors suggested that the pressure to be authentically Black often leads some students to reject academically oriented behaviors, such as speaking standard English, to avoid being accused of “acting White” (Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Ogbu 1978, 1988). Specifically, Fordham (1996) found that African American youth formed a subculture in which peer groups were the primary mechanisms for interpreting what it meant to be “authentically” Black and for policing each other’s performance of Blackness.
A growing body of literature has challenged the validity of the oppositional culture hypothesis in explaining racial and ethnic differences in achievement (Diamond and Huguley 2014; Downey and Ainsworth-Darnell 2002; Harris 2006). In particular, Carter (2003) used her research on low-income African American and Latino youth to argue that these students define “acting White” as adopting the dominant cultural capital of middle-class Whites, reflected in their tastes, preferences, styles of dress, interactions, and speech. Although Black and Latino youth did place a higher value on nondominant forms of cultural capital, such as African American vernacular speech or hip-hop styles, this preference was not evidence of an antiachievement orientation. Instead, students privileged the acquisition of nondominant forms of cultural capital because it allowed them to earn status, prestige, and a sense of belonging within peer groups. The analyses in this article build on Carter’s (2003) research by focusing on how second-generation West Indian youth use Jamaican popular culture, a form of nondominant cultural capital, to create a shared, affirmative identity and a feeling of belonging in a school in which Black racial identity was stigmatized. In doing so, this study expands on Carter’s (2003) research by adding the perspectives of Black immigrant youth to the conversation about what it means to be “Black.” Taken as a whole, Although these studies confirm the significance of educational institutions in shaping students’ racial and ethnic identities, they rarely address the distinctive role of school structures such as academic tracking. This study contributes simultaneously to the race/ethnicity, immigration, and education literatures by examining how academic tracking regulates the friendship networks of second-generation West Indian youth, as well as the meanings they associate with their racial and ethnic identities.
The Significance of Academic Tracking in Shaping Racial and Ethnic Identity
Tracking, the practice of organizing students on the basis of academic ability as a way to facilitate instruction (Hallinan 1994; Lee, Bryk, and Smith 1993) is a common organizational structure in American schools that has contributed to racial and ethnic differences in achievement. In particular, scholars have found that middle-class, White, and Asian students are overrepresented in higher tracks and often receive better quality instruction than low-income, Black, and Latino students, who are disproportionately placed in low-track classrooms (Kelly 2009; Oakes 1994). The tracking literature focuses primarily on explaining group differences in academic achievement (Hallinan 1994; Lucas and Berends 2007; Oakes 1994). However, this structure has the potential to influence the racial and ethnic identities of students because it facilitates opportunities for social interaction among students in the same academic program, which delimits their friendship choices (Kubitschek and Hallinan 1998). Although it is clear that tracking has consequences for the social identities of students, this avenue of inquiry remains underexplored in the tracking literature.
Only a few recent studies address the significance of school structures in shaping students’ racial and ethnic identities. For example, Natasha Warikoo (2011) compared the high school experiences of Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean students in London and New York to address how “school structures” and “multiethnic school environments” affect racial and ethnic boundaries among students when there is not a group that constitutes a clear majority. Although there was considerable racial and ethnic integration across both schools, she found that students in New York were more likely to differentiate themselves along racial and ethnic lines. Warikoo (2011) attributed higher rates of interracial friendships in London to the influence of the traditional British school structure, which comprises small learning communities in which students take classes together for many years and solidify social bonds. Consistent with this research, Warikoo claimed that school structures influence the boundaries between racial and ethnic groups in a diverse high school, but her analyses do not explicitly examine academic tracking.
In fact, few education or immigration studies explicitly address how academic tracking influences racial and ethnic identity construction. A notable exception, Karolyn Tyson (2011), examined the impact of tracking on the racial identities of students by showing that Black students are likely to use certain academic behaviors to define what it means to be authentically “Black” when they are tracked and segregated in low-status academic programs. She found that in schools in which Blacks are underrepresented in advanced-placement academic programs, high-achieving Blacks are ridiculed by their peers for “acting White” only when their Black peers perceive them to be arrogant. According to Tyson, this ridicule is a form of retaliation against a school structure that stigmatizes them. In response to their low status within the school’s academic hierarchy, these students establish their own status hierarchy on the basis of racial authenticity, whereby their self-worth is validated within peer groups and on the basis of criteria that are within their control. The current study builds on Tyson’s argument that tracking heightens racialized identities among Black students and can influence them to develop alternative status hierarchies in response to their marginalized status.
Ocampo’s (2013) research also explicitly engaged with the influence of academic tracking, particularly on how second-generation Filipino students identify racially. Ocampo argued that Filipino students thought of themselves as Asians while they were in high school because they were overrepresented in the highest tracks along with Whites. Because Filipinos were the largest Asian group in the school, their concentration at the top of the school’s academic hierarchy reinforced dominant narratives that mark Asians as academically talented model minorities. Ocampo found that Filipino students who attended community colleges close to their predominantly Filipino community continued to think of themselves as Asians. In contrast, Filipinos who went to selective schools at which the Asian American populations were largely East Asian American were more likely to question their identities as Asians. Furthermore, because these students struggled academically, they started to see themselves as underrepresented racial minorities and identified more with Black and Latino students.
The present study disrupts the Black/White dichotomy that conflates a Black racial identity with an African American ethnicity, which is present in varying degrees in the tracking literature as a whole. Instead, by focusing on the experiences of second-generation West Indians, I expand on the tracking literature by providing a closer examination of how academic tracking can influence both racial and ethnic identification simultaneously. Specifically, Tyson’s (2011) and Ocampo’s (2013) work posits that academic tracking is the mechanism that explains how and under what conditions one’s racial and academic identities become intertwined. I build on their work by placing the racialization process at the center of academic inquiry, making racial and ethnic identity dependent variables to be explained rather than independent variables that influence student achievement.
In summary, the literature on tracking focuses primarily on how this structure shapes students’ academic outcomes yet largely ignores its impact in shaping the social identities of students. Relatedly, education and immigration scholars who study racial and ethnic identity formation either focus on how race or ethnicity shapes students’ educational outcomes or focus on schools as sites for observing the social construction of racial and ethnic identities without accounting for how educational institutions actively shape these identity outcomes. This study contributes to these distinct bodies of literature by examining how academic tracking influences the racial and ethnic identities of second-generation West Indian students.
Methods
Data Collection
This article is based on a case study of Mayfield High School, located in Brooklyn, New York. West Indian immigrants are the largest Black immigrant group to enter the United States since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (Waters 2001), and the majority have settled in New York City, particularly in the borough of Brooklyn, making it an ideal study setting (Crowder and Tedrow 2001).
In 2000, a few years before this study was conducted, West Indian immigrants and their children constituted 54 percent of the Black population in New York City (Butterfield 2004). In that same year, Jamaica and Guyana ranked as the countries supplying the third and fourth largest foreign-born groups in New York City, while Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago ranked as the seventh and eighth. In New York City, the Jamaican population grew by 54.1 percent, Guyanese by 71.6 percent, Haitians by 90.1 percent, and Trinidadians and Tobagonians by 32.9 percent (New York City Department of City Planning 2004). Table 1 provides a snapshot of the high percentages of Jamaicans, Guyanese, Haitians, and Trinidadians and Tobagonians, respectively, who resided in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Percentage of Each National-origin Group that Reside in Each Borough.
Source: New York Department of City Planning.
Note: NA = not available.
Thus, although prior research assumed that African Americans constitute the majority of the Black population in Brooklyn’s urban schools (Waters 2001), these data indicate that when this study was conducted, West Indians constituted a majority of the Black population in many neighborhoods and schools (Crowder and Tedrow 2001), especially in Brooklyn.
Accordingly, the majority of the Black students at Mayfield, where this study was conducted, were children of Black immigrants from the Caribbean. In fact, Table 2 indicates that the students who participated in this study lived in predominantly Black neighborhoods where, on average, 40 percent of the residents were foreign born.
Characteristics of Neighborhoods Where Mayfield Students Reside, Census 2000 Demographic Profile Highlights.
I selected Mayfield on the basis of its (1) racial and ethnic diversity, (2) critical mass of Black students who were second-generation West Indians, and (3) academic hierarchy, as these characteristics were relevant to the study’s focus on the influence of academic tracking on the racialization of second-generation West Indian youth. As Table 3 shows, Mayfield is a diverse school with a student body that was 36 percent Black, 35 percent White, 9 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent Asian.
Characteristics of Mayfield High School, 2002–2003 New York City Board of Education School Report.
Mayfield is organized into three academic tracks: the medical science, humanities, and college prep programs. Approximately 60 percent of students are enrolled in the prestigious medical science and humanities programs, and the remaining slots are reserved for students who live nearby and list Mayfield as one of their top school preferences. They are enrolled in the less prestigious college prep program. Students in the medical science program are disproportionately White, Asian, and/or male. The humanities program is racially and ethnically diverse and predominantly female. The college prep program is predominantly Black, and the majority of these students are second-generation West Indians.
I interviewed and shadowed 12 students (6 male and 6 female) at Mayfield during the 2003–2004 academic year. I recruited most of these students during my first month of classroom observations by asking if their parents were from the Caribbean (not whether they identified as such). Because I had difficulty recruiting Black male students in the humanities and medical science programs, I recruited a few of these students with the assistance of a guidance counselor. All participants had parents who were born in the Caribbean, or they were foreign born themselves and had migrated to the United States before age 12. Appendix A includes information on the national origins of the students’ parents. Consistent with the demographic data presented earlier, 8 of the students had at least one parent from either Jamaica or Haiti; the other students had at least one parent from Saint Lucia, Guyana, or Barbados. All students and parents submitted signed consent forms, and each interview lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. Ten of the 12 interviews occurred after school in an empty classroom, and the other two occurred in the students’ homes. In my interviews I explored how students were influenced by their immigrant families, how they self-identified, and the meaning and significance of race and ethnicity for them and their peers. I also examined the students’ early schooling experiences and how they compared with high school, students’ perspectives on the academic programs at the school, and the racial and ethnic composition of each academic program.
The analyses for this article are based on approximately four months of ethnographic observations. I visited Mayfield for three consecutive days, every other month, for the entire academic year. I arrived at approximately 8:30 a.m. and left at 5 p.m. I sometimes remained later to observe extracurricular activities. I initially observed in classrooms as a way to recruit potential participants; thereafter, I did so while shadowing participants. In addition, I collected information in informal spaces such as the guidance office, the meeting spaces of cultural clubs (i.e., the Black Heritage Alliance and the Diversity Club), and the auditorium, where students often congregated between classes. Ethnographic observation is well suited for my research objectives because it allows me to capture the school as a whole, making it possible to focus on student behaviors and link them to institutional practices inside and outside the classroom (Angrosino 2007).
Data analysis proceeded using a multistage process whereby coding of data became more focused over time, using both manual and computer-based approaches. The original interview protocol, which was based in part on a review of the immigration and education literatures, was used to develop initial codes, and additional codes were created as new themes emerged in interview transcripts. I used QSR NUD*IST 6 to sort all of the interview data related to ethnic identity, peer influence, and the social organization of the school (tracking). I read all of these presorted student narratives and took notes that both summarized and interpreted these data. Finally, analytical memos taken during the data collection stage of the project guided the analyses and coding of observational data.
Findings
The analyses follow in three sections. The first section builds on the literature pointing to the significance of educational institutions as sites of racial formation. The second section builds on the previous one by pointing to how academic tracking can function as a mechanism of racialization by reinforcing racial group consciousness among second-generation West Indian youth, and the third section expands on the tracking literature by showing how it strengthens ethnic group consciousness.
Authority Figures Reinforce a Monolithic View of Blackness and a Black/Non-Black Divide
My initial conversations with two White male administrators gave me the impression that Mayfield was a racially and ethnically integrated utopia, but this perception changed when my observations and experiences contradicted their perspectives. For example, I often accompanied Ms. Shannon, the Diversity Club adviser, back to her office after meetings. On one occasion, she and her officemate, Ms. Shea, African American women who appeared to be in their 40s and 50s, respectively, discussed the growing level of disrespect among students and the best way to handle it. “You have to be firm or they will walk all over you,” said Ms. Shea, “but you cannot put your hands on them or they will be offended.” She further noted that this advice was particularly relevant to White men interacting with Black boys, because “they don’t know how to deal with them.” The two discussed a number of recent incidents involving White male teachers and young Black male students to illustrate the tension between these two parties. Although I had not observed any of these incidents, I started to link the increasing level of policing in the hallway with the amplifying racial tensions between White male teachers and Black male students. Similarly, Wayne, my most rebellious interviewee, informed me that Mayfield was more likely to criminalize the behaviors of Black male students than White ones:
There’s this crazy White boy. He leashed a girl and walked her in the auditorium. If they see me put a girl on a leash and walked her, come on I’m expelled. They’d be like I tried to rape her, tried to harass her. [Then, he also] hit a girl with a chair the other day. Had him out for 3 days. If I hit a girl with a chair, they would tell her to press charges. I know I would be out of Mayfield.
In addition, I visited Wayne at the school’s in-house suspension room and found that practically all of the students “doing time” that day were Black and male. Although I made no additional observations that established this as a pattern, studies confirm that schools are disproportionately (and undeservedly) more punitive toward young Black male students than any other group (Ferguson 2001; Noguera 2009; Rios 2011).
My conversations with Wayne, Ms. Shannon, and Ms. Shea also informed how I interpreted another incident I witnessed in the dean’s office at the beginning of the school year. I noticed a young man sitting in the corner of the room. A White man wearing a suit, who was approximately 40 years old, came in and started to speak to him about one of the young man’s friends, who had entered the building and “mugged” someone. The man in the suit was trying to get him to divulge information about his friend. He leaned in close to the young man’s face and gave him a speech about his parents coming from Pakistan for a better life and him “fuckin’ it up.” The young man must have corrected him because the White male in the suit responded, “Okay, from Guyana. Your parents are from Guyana.” As I left the room, he yelled at the young man, “This ain’t Sheepshead Bay or Tilden. This is Mayfield, and we take care of our own.” Because Sheepshead Bay and Tilden are predominantly Black schools, I deduced from this interaction that, upon learning that his family was actually from Guyana, the dean now associated this young man’s dark complexion with a “Black” racial identity. Furthermore, as a “Pakistani,” the young man was treated like a model minority from a “good” immigrant family, but as a Guyanese, he inherited the stigma of predominantly Black schools known for high levels of crime and low educational achievement among students. A deeper subtext to this conversation was that this young man did not belong at Mayfield and that it was the dean’s job to protect those (non-Black youth) who rightfully belonged from him and people like him. These incidents illustrate an existing pattern of racializing young Black men as criminals, regardless of their ethnic origin, and the role of schools like Mayfield in reinforcing this negative stigma.
Other incidents show that most Black students were subject to this type of negative stigmatization, not just Black male students. For example, unlike Wayne, Veronica, who identified as Haitian, was a very good student who followed the rules. However, she was just as conscious and critical of the academic and racial hierarchy at Mayfield:
Well, I’m a monitor for the guidance counselors, and one time, she asked me to deliver a pass, and, you could tell the kid was Chinese from his name, so I went to the class. The guy is like, oh, he’s not in this class. So I went back to her, and I gave her the note, I said, the boy’s not in the class. And then she looked at his name, she’s like, well, there, there must be a room change or something, ’cause this kid cannot be possibly be cutting. But if it was a Black kid, and I [have seen] them [do this], [if] the person is not in the class, they say, okay, thank you. And they just put the paper down.
My conversation with Veronica resonates with other experiences and observations that confirm that Black students at Mayfield were stigmatized, especially if they were in the college prep program.
In contrast, in a class session I observed, Mr. Battaglia, a young White male teacher in the social science department, tried to provide his college prep students with positive images of Blackness by emphasizing the “Black” (African American) contributions to American popular culture. In describing how “lots of music come from jazz, especially hip-hop” Mr. Battaglia played “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller, then told the class that although Miller was a White man playing swing music, the song was heavily influenced by jazz. In fact, he told the class, “A lot of American popular culture comes from Black people. What happens is, White people make it their own. The most popular example of this is what happened with rock ‘n’ roll.” Mr. Battaglia played an Elvis Presley song “Jailhouse Rock,” and then continued with his lecture: “Elvis made rock ‘n’ roll popular because a White guy did it. The pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll were Black, and White America thought rock ‘n’ roll music was ‘jungle music.’” He then played a Chuck Berry song, “Johnny B. Goode,” before proceeding with the lesson and extending the analysis to rhythm and blues hits of the 1960s, the emergence of rap in the 1970s, and finally to contemporary artists that students recognized. The students appreciated examples from Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Jay-Z, and other popular rap artists. Eventually, a boy in the back started to yell out a request for reggae music. Mr. Battaglia ignored him and played 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” instead. Another Black male student in the back of the room put in another request. “Mr. Battaglia, reggae.” He finally conceded and played Jamaican dancehall artist Sean Paul’s “Gimme the Light.” The boys who had requested reggae danced.
Although Mr. Battaglia’s lesson seems designed to instill Black racial pride in his students, the lesson actually reinforced a mainstream view of Blackness in the United States as synonymous with an African American ethnic identity. Given Mr. Battaglia’s expertise in American popular culture as it has evolved through music, his lesson might have referenced the relationship between hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall, as Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc played a key role in the creation of hip-hop music, and megastar rapper Biggie Smalls was the child of Jamaican immigrants (Rivera 2003). Thus, despite his attempt to create a curriculum that was empowering and culturally relevant to his students, Mr. Battaglia’s lesson demonstrated that he, like other institutional agents at Mayfield, might have internalized a monolithic view of Blackness as synonymous with an African American identity. Even so, his attempts to instill racial pride in his students provided a counterbalance to the stigmatized status of Blackness within the school as a whole.
Tracking, Racialization, and the Black/Non-Black System of Racial Categorization
The analysis that follows shows how Mayfield’s tracking system contributes to the racialization of second-generation West Indian students. Their overrepresentation in the school’s lowest status academic program reinforced negative stereotypes of Blacks in American society as less intelligent than Whites and Asians. Specifically, Mayfield’s tracking system is composed of three academic programs, the medical science, humanities, and college prep programs, which are ranked according to academic rigor. Student interviews suggest that this tracking system intensified the racial group consciousness of second-generation West Indian students, as is evident in how most students consistently used the language of race when asked to compare the different academic programs. Janet, a Jamaican student in the humanities program, said,
First thing, it’s White people, it’s like, very few Blacks, like, in the one [humanities] class, we’ve probably got 5 Black people, and the rest is 20 White people . . . and then like, say, 8 Chinese [Asian] or something. . . . Most of the Chinese [Asian] people are in the med sci program.
The use of racial labeling to describe the differences between these three programs reflects the effectiveness of the school’s tracking system in making students conscious of racial categories and distinctions that exist in the larger society. By physically separating racial groups from one another, Mayfield’s system of tracking ensures that the world inside of school mirrors the racially segregated communities outside of school (Massey and Denton 1993). This solidifies racial boundaries on the basis of what scholars describe as a Black/non-Black system of racial categorization (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Yancey 2003).
Femi, a Haitian student in the college prep program, built on Janet’s statement to show that she was aware that her school’s tracking system also institutionalizes racial disparities in access to valued resources. She stated, “The Chinese [Asian] people get more than the White people, and the White people get more than the Black people would. It’s always like that in [Mayfield].” Although Femi did not explicitly state what “more” consists of, my observations and interviews confirmed that many college prep students perceived the humanities and medical science programs as having more prestige, more resources, better quality teaching, and smarter students than their program. And because each track was associated with a particular racial group, students transferred the positive and negative associations of each academic program to the overrepresented racial group within it. In this case, the tracking system reinforced the low status that was accorded to Black students at Mayfield. In response, West Indian students developed an informal status hierarchy within the school’s academic hierarchy that positioned Blackness at the top of the racial hierarchy within students’ peer groups. In fact, interviews with West Indian students in the specialized academic programs indicated that some of the Black (West Indian) students in the humanities and medical science programs felt pressured to form friendships primarily with other Black (West Indian) students. For example, Janet explained,
Yeah. ’Cause the Black people would say that I am a cornball. A Black person would say that about me. Like, if you’re talking to [only] White people, and you don’t talk to nobody that’s Black, and no other Black person know you, you’re a cornball.
In contrast to the low status of Black students in the school’s academic hierarchy, here, Janet pointed to the significance of “Black” social capital needed to succeed socially among her peers. That is, although Black students might be viewed favorably by authority figures for making it into one of the school’s prestigious academic programs, they still need to cultivate relationships with other Black students to signal that they do not internalize the negative stigma associated with Blackness in the school as a whole. This type of negative sanction resonates with some aspects of Fordham and Ogbu’s (1986) oppositional culture hypothesis, which attributes the low academic performance of African American students to the influence of a peer culture that denigrated academic success as “acting White.” This argument was based on the premise that, as involuntary minorities, African American youth rebel against an educational system they perceive to be an instrument of the dominant White American culture.
The experiences of second-generation West Indian students at Mayfield are also consistent with Tyson’s (2011) assertion that accusations of “acting White” are a convenient weapon some Black students in low-status programs use to put arrogant Black students “in their place.” For this reason, it is not enough for Black students in the selective programs to have predominantly Black friends; those friends have to belong to the college prep program in order for it to count favorably. As Janet said: “If I don’t talk to a lot of Black people in the humanities, I know people in the college prep program, so I don’t really focus on Black people within the Humanities program.” Building on Carter’s (2003) distinction between dominant and nondominant cultural capital, these findings suggest that there was both a formal and an informal status hierarchy at Mayfield. The formal status hierarchy was governed by the school’s institutional agents and valued the acquisition of dominant cultural capital; the informal status hierarchy, in which nondominant cultural capital was the most valued currency, was directed by the Black West Indian students. Although Blackness was a stigmatized social category within the formal status hierarchy, it was a privileged social category within the students’ peer groups. As a result, in order for Black students in the selective academic programs to succeed socially, they needed to socialize with college prep students in order to show that they rejected the school’s attempt to stigmatize Blackness.
How Tracking Also Facilitates Ethnic Identification
Earlier I suggested that Mayfield’s tracking system stigmatizes Blackness and reinforces a Black/non-Black system of racial categorization among West Indian youth. I also suggest that Black West Indian students respond to Mayfield’s academic hierarchy by making Blackness a high-status category within their peer groups. However, in the world in which these students lived, “Blackness” and “West Indian–ness” were interchangeable. For example, Leah, a humanities student from St. Lucia, compared the diversity of Mayfield with the predominantly White elementary and middle schools she had previously attended. She reported feeling “less like an outcast” when she arrived at Mayfield because of the “strong Caribbean presence” at the school. In this particular case, Leah is representative of the rest of her peers in equating “Caribbean-ness” with “Blackness” in the same way most Americans equate “Blackness” with an African American ethnic identity. As such, the data that follow illustrate a type of racial formation that is consistent with predictions that the meaning of Blackness will change as the racial hierarchy in the United States continues to evolve (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Omi and Winant 1994).
In this particular case, Mayfield’s system of academic tracking also reinforces a collective “West Indian” and/or island-specific identity because, most of the Black college prep students primarily interact with coethnics. Femi discussed this at length in our interview:
When I first came to [Mayfield] my freshman year, people would ask like, um, what nationality are you? Oh I’m Haitian. Oh I’m Haitian too! And, like, you go around and I never met, like, except one of my friends, he’s the only, like, person from down south, the only American person. Everybody else, Trinidad, um they’re Bajan, they’re Haitian. Mostly Haitian. Um, a lot of people it’s just 100 percent [of them are West Indian].
Femi’s response illustrates the role of the school’s academic hierarchy in reinforcing the salience of ethnic identification among students. For instance, Femi asserts that 100 percent of the students she initially encountered at Mayfield were West Indians, implying that this was the case for the school as a whole. However, this is not possible, because although the majority of the school’s Black population is West Indian, only 36 percent of the students at Mayfield are Black.
The impact of Mayfield’s academic hierarchy is similarly reflected in other students’ descriptions of the Haitian population as the largest West Indian national-origin group at Mayfield. During our interview, for example, Wayne, a Jamaican student in the college prep program, said, “Half of Mayfield, I could say like 70 percent of Mayfield is Haitian.” Similarly, a student named Delroy misstated that “everyone” in his classes was Haitian, Jamaican, or Guyanese. However, Delroy was in the medical science program, in which Black students were relatively scarce. This pattern of misperception illustrates the tendency for second-generation West Indians to use one another as their primary frame of reference, a frame of reference that is shaped by the schools system of tracking. Thus, I often found that when West Indian students used the term everybody, they were referring to other West Indian students.
The tendency for second-generation West Indians to use coethnic peers as their primary frame of reference also reflects that, in most cases, their social networks beyond school are also predominantly West Indian. For this reason, most of the students were perplexed by my questions regarding any potential conflicts between West Indian and African American students at Mayfield. Omar’s response to my question explains these students’ puzzled looks. According to him, “if you live in Brooklyn, Caribbean people are [always] around you . . . and in school, it’s the same way.” The strong Caribbean presence in their neighborhoods and schools facilitated the development of Jamaican popular culture as a “cool commodity” among students, and this provided both an incentive and a preference for second-generation West Indians to identify ethnically (Richards 2014). For example, when asked why he preferred to identify as Jamaican and Grenadian, Wayne stated,
[Being] American is whack. It’s like, boring, man. Everybody comes from the Caribbean or whatever. It’s like you just want to fit in with your family so much and being just American while everybody else comes from Jamaica is whack.
Wayne’s response reflects a strong pattern in the data whereby ethnic identification was both a social norm among second-generation West Indian youth, as well as a cultural resource that was valued within peer groups. Although the students in this study lived in neighborhoods that likely reinforced ethnic identification, Mayfield’s academic hierarchy contributed to making the school a reflection of the students’ outside lives. In doing so, it creates an environment in which ethnic identification and Caribbean cultural artifacts are taken for granted and unwittingly become criteria for fitting in within peer groups.
Some students attempt to convey mastery of island-specific dialects and accents so that they could fit into the predominantly West Indian social environment. I observed an example of this in a college prep classroom in which Angelique first introduced herself as Cuban and Jamaican. However, because of her biracial background, I noticed that she would negate potential challenges to her identity as a Cuban-Jamaican by publicly displaying her “Jamaican-ness” through interactions with her peers. One day during class, one of Angelique’s male classmates refused to take off his hat because he thought that his hair was “messed up.” In what sounded to my Jamaican ears like an unconvincing imitation of a Trinidadian accent, Angelique told him, “We don’t care what you look like whether you look like a batty boy [this is a slur directed toward queer men] or . . . .” When the teacher admonished Angelique to stop talking, she inquired, “You don’t want me speaking in patois?” I realized at this point that Angelique thought that she was speaking Jamaican patois. However, from the perspective of people from the Caribbean, confusing a Trinidadian accent with a Jamaican accent is tantamount to confusing the melodious speech of a Mississippian with the edgy brogue of a New Yorker. If Angelique had been raised in a home in which even one parent was Trinidadian or Jamaican, she would never have confused these two very distinctive dialects.
Thus, although Mayfield’s tracking system inadvertently segregates Black students and elevates their racial consciousness, it also elevates the status of the West Indian ethnic identity by ensuring that most Black students interact primarily with children of West Indian immigrants in school. In doing so, it makes coolness dependent on the performance of a West Indian ethnic identity (Richards 2014). Furthermore, the special status associated with being West Indian means that these students’ ethnicities could trump the negative stigma associated with Blackness within Mayfield’s system of academic tracking. Overall, these findings illustrate Pierre’s (2004) argument that among Black immigrants, racial and ethnic identity formation are interdependent social processes.
Conclusion
Some scholars have criticized the immigration literature for framing issues of identity as dependent on group agency instead of focusing on processes of racialization that limit the identity options available to people of African descent in the United States (Pierre 2004; Treitler 2015). This study makes a contribution to the immigration literature by making the racialization of second-generation West Indian youth its primary focus and by pointing to the significance of educational institutions in reproducing the racial hierarchy and distinctions that exist in American society. It does so through an examination of how the structure of academic tracking influences the racial and ethnic identity formation of second-generation West Indian youth at Mayfield, a racially and ethnically diverse high school in Brooklyn, New York.
This article builds on an existing literature that examines processes of racialization in schools. At Mayfield, West Indian youth are racialized as Black and stigmatized within the school’s academic hierarchy. In response, they create an alternative status hierarchy in which a West Indian ethnic identity is accorded positive esteem within peer groups. These findings expand on Carter’s (2005) work suggesting that Black students use nondominant forms of cultural capital to bond with one another and to create a shared, positive Black racial identity in schools in which they are made to feel like cultural outsiders. My analyses show that Jamaican popular culture plays a similar affirmative role for these students, by providing a sense of belonging to a broader “West Indian” community. Furthermore, my data show that “ethnicity” serves a positive function in providing second-generation West Indians with an identity that is valued and celebrated within peer groups, and as such, identifying ethnically acts as a countervailing force against the negative stigma associated with being racialized as Black within Mayfield’s academic hierarchy. This evidence is illustrative of Pierre’s (2004) assertion that for Black immigrants, racial and ethnic identity construction are often “mutually constitutive” social processes. That is, negative experiences with racial discrimination likely provides an incentive to identify ethnically.
Although many race/ethnicity and education scholars use schools as sites for exploring racial and ethnic identity construction, these studies often neglect to examine the significance of school structures (Carter 2005; Lewis 2003; Perry 2002). Alternatively, although the tracking literature examines how academic hierarchies contribute to race and class differences in academic achievement, it rarely addresses how this structure influences the social identities of students. This study’s focus on how academic tracking influences the racial and ethnic identities of West Indian youth bridges the gap between these two bodies of literature. The findings show that Mayfield’s system of academic tracking intensified the racial group consciousness of second-generation West Indians by inadvertently segregating them in the school’s lower status college prep program, whereas most White and Asian students were concentrated in the school’s two most prestigious academic programs.
The evidence for this article resonates with Tyson’s (2011) work, which emphasizes how tracking contributes to solidifying racial boundaries when it segregates Black students in low-status academic programs. However, this study adds nuance to Tyson’s work and the tracking literature as a whole by demonstrating that academic hierarchies can heighten racial and ethnic identification simultaneously. For although the tracking literature assumes that all Black students are African American, the majority of the Black students in my study were second-generation West Indian youth. As such, these findings have implications beyond these particular literatures by illustrating that it will become increasingly problematic for scholars to conflate the racial and ethnic identities of people of African descent given the increased ethnic diversification within the U.S. Black population.
These findings are also a departure from the common assumption among immigration scholars that West Indian youth either choose to identify racially like their African American peers or ethnically on the basis of the national origins of their parents (Kasinitz et al. 2001; Vickerman 2001; Waters 2001). My research shows, in contrast, that second-generation West Indian youth experienced no contradiction in embracing these two identities simultaneously. Furthermore, the evidence shows that this elevation of their West Indian roots did not signify a rejection of their racial identities as Blacks (Richards 2014), as other scholars have argued (Kasinitz et al. 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993; Waters 2001). It is possible that these findings, which are consistent with recent research (Butterfield 2004; Richards 2014), reflect a new phenomenon that is specific to a particular time and space. That is, in twenty-first-century New York City, especially in Brooklyn, where West Indians are concentrated, “Blackness” is becoming increasingly synonymous with “Afro-Caribbean–ness” (Kasinitz et al. 2008). Thus, it is important to acknowledge the uniqueness of the study location, site and population. As such, future studies could be designed to more directly incorporate the points of view of young people who are Asian, Latino, or African American in different types of schools reflecting a wider geographic distribution.
Despite the qualifications above, the findings generated in this case study have broader theoretical implications for the study of race/ethnicity, immigration, and education. The present analyses provide insights that further advance our understanding of how new immigrants are likely to influence the evolution of the U.S. system of racial stratification. In particular, my findings are consistent with some scholars’ prediction that the Black/White color line in the United States is likely to evolve into a Black/non-Black racial divide (Lee and Bean 2007; Marrow 2009; Treitler 2013) where Whites are likely to accept some Asians and fair-skinned Latinos as long as they accept the dominant racial ideology that rationalizes the continued exclusion of people of African descent. There is also evidence in support of Bonilla-Silva’s (2004) prediction that West Indian immigrants are likely to influence the transformation of Black identity because, while the West Indian youth in this study valued and celebrated their ethnic distinctiveness, they equally embraced their identities as Blacks and did not distance themselves from African Americans. The growing population of immigrant youth also means that educational institutions will continue to play an important role in socializing them into the existing racial hierarchy and/or will become sites where these lessons are both contested and transformed. Most important, consistent with Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation perspective, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how social institutions are instrumental to processes of racialization.
Footnotes
Appendix
Profiles of Interviewees.
| Student’s Name | National Origin of Parents | Mother’s Job | Father’s Job | Mother’s Educational Attainment | Father’s Educational Attainment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wayne | Jamaica and Grenada | Banking | Accountant | Some college | Master’s degree |
| Femi | Haiti | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Janet | Jamaica | Nursing assistant | Hotel worker | High school | High school |
| Jean | Haiti | Dressmaker | Engineer | NA | College degree |
| Olivia | Barbados | Works in a bank | MTA | High school | High school |
| Leah | St. Lucia | Nanny | Mortgage office | High school | College degree |
| Zac | Haiti | Principal | Principal | College degree | College degree |
| Natalie | Guyana | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| Paul | Barbados and Panama | NA | Surgeon | College degree | College degree |
| Omar | Jamaica | Technical—works with computers | NA | Some college | NA |
| Delroy | Jamaica | X-ray technician | Postal worker | NA | High school |
| Veronica | Haiti | Nurse | Electrical installer | College degree | High school |
Note: MTA = Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Acknowledgements
Many people provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article. I am indebted to Karolyn Tyson, Vilna Bashi-Treitler, Melissa Weiner, Natasha Warikoo, Sabrina Pendegrass, Murray Milner, Holly Young, and my writing group members Patricia Herrera, Erika Dammer, and Eric Grollman.