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Unequal City provides an in-depth discussion of exactly this issue: how adolescents’ perceptions of themselves and the larger social world are shaped by their daily interactions with others, particularly as they travel back and forth from school. This book examines Chicago adolescents’ experiences within and navigation through ostensibly free yet potentially penalizing places like urban schools and neighborhoods to reveal that their perceptions of social and criminal injustice are both stratified by race and rooted in place.
First, it explores how high school students from different social, racial, and economic backgrounds experience police contact and perceive injustice along a gradient that diverges along racial and ethnic lines. Second, it uses the experiences of youth, particularly their interactions with teachers, police, and parents, to uncover how their experiences shape their perceptions of themselves and their wider social worlds. Finally, this book uncovers the driving forces behind, and consequences of, policies that have intricately linked the
public school system and the criminal justice system.
Youth are highly attuned to the distribution of opportunity and the presence of social inequality.
Jacob defined and measured justice as the congruence between actors’ expectations about key agents in the justice system (police, courts, and other legal offices) and their perceptions of the actual behavior of these agents, with injustice denoted as the gap between those expectations and perceptions.
much of the sociological research on perceptions of justice reveals minimal differences between the races in their endorsement of basic principles of justice. Indeed, although as a group African Americans have historically experienced some of the country’s highest levels of discrimination, they report some of the highest commitments to education, equity, and opportunity.
17 They have not “given up.” Instead, the stark differences come into play when we look at experiential justice—that is, perceptions of the way justice is distributed in fact.18
Geographies
of exclusion are the literal mappings of power relations onto geographic places and their commensurate social spaces, such as schools and neighborhoods. Through this frame we can begin to understand social boundaries and exclusionary landscapes, particularly how physical terrain becomes imbued with social meaning and markers, which together shape what Sibley terms the “ecological self.”25
Possessiveness—that is, the desire to control space—governs social interactions at all of these levels, but particularly at the neighborhood and school levels, where homogeneity paints differences as a threat.26 In our very human desire to feel safe in our surroundings and confident that we can protect our loved ones, we can all too easily become suspicious of anyone who does not look or talk or walk like us. From this perspective, we all become defined by place—both by the places where we do not belong and by those where we do.
“cognitive landscapes”
Because public schools are typically organized around geographical catchment areas, they reinforce and exacerbate the effects of residential segregation and social isolation.
A burgeoning area of research has concluded that perceptions of social injustice are positively related to crime and delinquency, showing that perceptions of injustice have an impact not only on individual lives but also on all aspects of our society.40
One aim of this research is to learn how their hopes and dreams have been affected by the opportunity structure made available to them in our purportedly democratic society.
neighborhood. Schools are essentially institutionalized spaces in which structures of power re-create themselves. They are also social sites where the ultimate objective is to shape the formation of students’ knowledge of self, community, nation, and world. Thus, we must confront crucial questions: What exactly are our young people learning in school—not just about math and science but also about their own importance and the relative worth of their peers? What signals are they receiving about what the future holds?
police officers and other mechanisms of social control have become a central feature of urban
schools since the early 1990s,
day. Once seen as a group in need of societal protection, urban students are now more commonly seen as the problem. And
In Chicago—and indeed, throughout urban America—young people’s affiliation and identification with a place can wholly change the trajectory of their lives.
The policing of boundaries, both formal and informal, internal and external, has shifted since the modern civil rights era; today intraracial boundaries can be just as fraught as the long-standing interracial boundaries seen prior to the 1960s. These boundaries both create and sustain attachment to group membership.13
Young people making these longer journeys to school may become more aware of their disadvantage; in addition, sending students from “bad” neighborhood schools to “good” schools elsewhere inadvertently exposes them to new kinds of dangers besides threats to their physical safety, including the danger of possibly negative encounters with the police.
Neighborhoods, in other words, are often still more segregated than the schools located in them.
For many young people, navigating through danger and social deprivation in their school setting is their typical experience; they have no choice but to figure out how to adapt to their environment.
The investigation found that school attendance zones had been gerrymandered to perpetuate segregation.
young people daily navigate a racially ordered “geography of opportunity” wherein the resources for improving school and life chances are meted out by race, class, and zip code.35
greater numbers of police in a neighborhood can lead to a stronger feeling of insecurity. Safety means different things to different people, particularly to young people of color who disproportionately feel harassed by the police.
the time and energy accorded to achieving safe passage is also stratified by race, place, and circumstance.
Students’ perceptions of safety and their actual exposure to violence and crime are heightened when they cross social and symbolic boundaries. Those who live in a city learn certain things about how to “stay safe” in their neighborhood. There, they may know the problem areas and even the problem people, but that knowledge is missing when they pass through less familiar places. Over time students on their way to and from school may acquire some knowledge about those passages, but the sheer amount of instability and mobility inevitably exposes them to places whose rules they do not know and
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Although the most idealistic portrayal of schools holds them up to be institutions where students are inculcated with democratic ideals and academic knowledge, in reality schools have a variety of other functions as well. They socialize students to mainstream societal norms and promote social integration across and within groups. They also create and reinforce social hierarchies.46 Schools require that students interact with both peers and authority figures whose identities and experiences may either be similar to theirs or be the total opposite. What students take from
these encounters indelibly shapes their perceptions of both the larger social world and themselves.
Schools have long been understood as places of “formation,” which provide knowledge and skills to further the social and cultural development of students, in contrast to places of “reformation,” such as workhouses and prisons, which strive to correct individuals’ behavioral dysfunctions and to rehabilitate them and their standing in society. We as a country trust that schools will shape our young; promote their social, intellectu...
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It should also be clear that society as a whole benefits when schools accomplish their missions of socialization and acculturation. Students are taught to respect and obey authority, to follow directions, to be on time and follow schedules, to meet deadlines, and much more. Where those lessons are not learned, certain properties of reform within educational institutions become apparent.
After the home, school is the second-most-important place for socialization; at school we figure out who we are and how we are supposed to engage with the rest of the world. Whether or not they were explicitly conceived that way, schools thus act as structural forces.
Young people understand a great deal about their value, both the value they assign to themselves and the value they believe others see in them, by examining the state of their surroundings.
A school is generally assumed to be a safe haven, but depending on its location, security and quality can vary enormously.
Contemporary urban public high schools are simultaneously sites of both danger and refuge, places where adolescents negotiate their identities, learn how to represent themselves to society, and manage multiple external forces of social control. In effect, the societal microcosm that schools represent can also be interpreted as a distortion of our society, rather than as a true reflection of it. Schools, with their bell schedules, classroom routines, and standard lunch and recreation times, are designed to remove the unpredictability at the heart of young people’s daily lives, to replace
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Once young people begin high school, whether in Chicago or any other city, they enter a stage when they are venturing farther and farther away from home. This is the case not only because of the logistics of getting to school, but also because adolescents are in the developmental phase in which they seek exposure to more people and to varied experiences. Young people cross all types of boundaries to attend school—racial and ethnic boundaries, gang lines, and class barriers, to name only a few. What is more, the physical terrain they are asked to cross is governed by various social norms
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Young people’s various journeys to school, like those of Michelle, Alex, Michael, and Max, expose them to different kinds of environments, raising their awareness of their own social position and that of others. Instead of opening up a new world of opportunity, traveling to a higher-ranked, better-resourced school may present a student with evidence that the world he comes from is worse than he thought. Instead of providing an escape from a bad area, the commute may subject
the student to greater scrutiny, surveillance, and violence—either physical or symbolic.
Schools become “boundary objects,” or “organizational interfaces,” that make it necessary for adolescents to develop and maintain coherence across their social worlds.53
Dewayne does not leave Harper High every day just to sequester himself at home, as Keisha does. Instead, as he takes great pride in telling me, he ventures all over the city instead of putting up walls. In fact, crossing neighborhood lines has widened his perspective on how the world works and given him greater options for both self-perception and behavior.
his closed social network creates an even stronger urge in Dewayne to transgress the visible, durable, and salient spatial boundaries that constrain him and others who both live and learn in homogeneous settings.56
But no matter whether students travel six miles or walk six minutes to attend school, safety is at the forefront of their minds. They understand the role of place in shaping their realities, but some do not have the benefit of using place to change their reality in a positive way. Traveling to a higher-ranking, safer school in a different neighborhood is one way of transgressing boundaries. But staying in your own neighborhood to attend school, even if that school is not deemed high-quality, can seem much safer than the alternative. The
divergent paths and divergent outcomes of these young people reveal the great impact of physical mobility on social mobility.
Instead of mirroring a city’s spatial concentration of poverty and inequality, schools can upend those conditions by providing a space where racial, ethnic, and class diversity is achieved. However, schools can also exacerbate existing stratifications by further cloistering the young people who attend their neighborhood school in segregated residential environs.
When public policies—like school desegregation decrees and public housing demolition and relocation programs—do not recognize the social realities of the intended beneficiaries, these policies may make residents’ lives more challenging and present them with greater dangers.
Because race and place intersect at school, young people’s physical mobility affects their understandings and expectations for their social mobility. This dawning recognition of different kinds of discrimination, with its accompanying sense of how they rank on the hierarchy of social and structural advantage, is a crucial
component of their adolescent rite of passage.
Although members of different racial and ethnic groups walk down the same hallways and sit beside each other in class, they do not necessarily relate to or interact with each other.
Instead, they stick to their own.3
