Racing Religion: Productions of Race, Immigration, and Identity in an Urban Catholic School

• In Event: Diversity in Catholic Education

Abstract

This study illustrates how immigrant Vietnamese Catholic youth, in tandem with their White teachers, participate in the ongoing formation of linguistic and racial ideologies in urban Catholic schools through struggles to interactionally position themselves and their non-Catholic African American counterparts. Analyzing interaction among students at St. Dominic Savio , a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, I argue that demographic changes and emerging tensions amongst students are reflected in indexical patterns and the construction of meaningful categories of differentiation by students and teachers, patterns and categories which draw on linguistic, racial, and religious ideologies.

Author

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania