Children of Immigrants in a Suburban Context: Constructing and Challenging Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity

• In Event: Encountering Race: Discourses of Race and Racialization and the Education of Immigrant Youth in the United States and Europe

Abstract

In the last several decades, there has been a dramatic increase of racial and ethnic diversity in America’s suburbs (U.S. Census 2000). It is estimated that among the largest 102 metropolitan areas, almost half (47 percent) of all minorities live in suburbs (Brookings, Frey 2001). Studies show that this population shift in suburbs has been largely driven by increase in populations of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, as well as African Americans who are predominantly concentrated in suburbs of 35 metropolitan areas. Sometimes coined as “melting pot suburbs” this demographic shift is challenging the deeply held binary stereotype of “Chocolate city and vanilla suburbs” and the implications that these shifts may have for race relations, education reform, and public policy (Brookings, Frey 2001).

For the past several decades, social scientific work on race and space has focused on urban America and residential segregation between blacks and whites. Seminal works on urban America and race focused on deleterious effects of black segregation in central cities and “white flight” to the suburbs. However, recent changes of immigration patterns and demographic shifts in suburban America are creating new patterns of minority suburbanization raising important questions of how the meaning and significance of race and ethnicity may be changing. This change in recent residential patterns is informing and shifting our understandings of boundaries of racial and ethnic categories, institutional and hidden effects of racial stratification, and patterns of assimilation and symbolic ideals of becoming “American”. These questions are undoubtedly being shaped and informed by shifting previous understandings of “black and white” racial discourse to a more “prism” model in the context of increasing immigrants from Asia and Latin America (Zubrinsky & Bobo, 1996; Cited in Krysan & Lewis, 2004).

In the midst of these important demographic shifts and emerging studies, there is a limited understanding of how racial and ethnic boundaries are being formed and negotiated by students in changing suburban schools. As one of the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, children of immigrants and racial minorities are transforming suburban schools that have historically been more homogeneous. In order to explore some of these questions, this paper will examine a case study of a public high school in suburb of New Jersey. Some of the questions addressed are: 1) How are racial boundaries being negotiated to maintain privileges for certain groups and disadvantaging others?; 2) What role do schools play in facilitating these racial boundaries and maintaining structural racism coded by race, color blindness, and justified stereotypes?; 3) In what ways are these patterns of inequality being negotiated, reproduced, and challenged by students, parents, teachers, administrators?; 4) In the context of polarized black and white racial discourse, how is the increase of immigrants from Asia and Latin America in suburb schools changing the meaning and significance of race and ethnicity?

Author

• Jamie Lew, Rutgers University