Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice

by Carla Shedd

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 uncertainty with consistency. We believe that such procedures will better teach and socialize our children, but school—which should be an equalizing force in American society—may also reproduce existing social stratification by race, gender, class, and neighborhood.52