Cleaved Identity: Bonding, Boundary-Making, and Relational Worlds in Elite Mobility Preparation

• In Event: Peer Groups, Boundary-Work, and Educational Mobility

Abstract

This paper examines how cohort-based college preparatory programs produce not only peer solidarity but a distinctive form of relational identity I call cleaved identity. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork at Uplift Academy, a New England nonprofit that prepares predominantly Black and Brown middle school students for elite independent schools, I argue that the very process that forges tight in-group cohesion also produces sharp boundary-making, simultaneously binding students to one another and distancing them from peers in their communities of origin and their anticipated peers in elite school environments. The term "cleaving" captures this duality deliberately: to cleave means both to bind together and to split apart, and both dynamics unfold at once. The "identity" in cleaved identity is relational rather than self-conceptual. It describes a patterned way of orienting toward others--a structure of recognition that students develop through the Uplift experience--organized around what I call aspirational alignment: evaluative distinctions that sort people by their apparent orientation toward growth, effort, and educational attainment. Drawing on Lamont's work on symbolic boundary-making, I show that these distinctions are not simply personal but pedagogically installed. Uplift actively teaches students to read the social world in ways that produce the boundary-making alongside the bonding. The paper also extends Crenshaw's intersectionality framework in a new direction: Uplift produces intersectional recognition--being seen simultaneously as a person of color, as economically marginalized, and as academically serious — as a scarce resource. Because students are explicitly taught this recognition will not be available elsewhere, the cohort becomes its primary site, and those outside are read as unable to provide it. This has consequences for students' relational worlds that the existing literature on mobility programs, which emphasizes the protective functions of peer bonding, has not fully reckoned with.

Author

• Garry Mitchell, Duke University