‘They might as well be Black’: the racialization of Sa’moan high school students

Abstract

This article explores the processes of racialization imposed on Sa’moan youth through policy and practice in one urban, US school district and at one high school in particular. Specifically, I use the methodological practices of defamiliarization and counter‐storytelling to examine the contradictory practices of racialization and the simultaneously oppressive and transformative potentials these practices catalyze. The analysis of this process is framed by the Critical Race Theory concepts of colorblindness and Whiteness as property, which powerfully illustrate how this racialization both disrupts and reifies reigning local and national racial norms and hierarchies.

Keywords:

• Critical Race Theory
• Samoan
• race
• achievement gap
• Asian American

Notes

1. I use the term ‘Sa’moan’ not to indicate a foreign, or non‐American, status, but in deference to the self‐claimed name of all the participants with whom I worked, and to the larger Sa’moan community in the West Coast city I call Jericho. I use the spelling ‘Samoan’ when it reflects the phonetic practices of certain participants – mostly White – and to reference dominant writing practices.

2. It is not within the purview of this article to detail those complex processes and the narratives that describe them. This is a story about the ways in which institutions and their members construct race. Therefore, I am not paying paramount attention to the stories of Sa’moan students and adults, but including them as they reflect the institutional dynamics.

3. I was reminded regularly by the Sa’moan youth and adults in Jericho, as well as Sa’moan and Islander scholars I met in Aotearoa, that they are not Asian. In some instances, people explained this reminder to me as an effort at disaggregating themselves from a racial identity imposed on them in vigorously culturally assimilative ways.

4. Discussions of Insider/Outsider status are rich in anthropology and anthropology of education (Narayan 1997; Nelson 1996, among others). It is not within the purview of this article to do justice to those discussions.

5. Most participants did not distinguish between the politically separate Sa’moas unless the specifics of the conversation necessitated it. When they did, they insisted on using the title ‘Western Sa’moa’ because, as participants explained to me, they are all Sa’moans.