Intersectional work and precarious positionings: Black middle-class parents and their encounters with schools in England

Abstract

This paper reports on data drawn from a study exploring the educational strategies of 62 Black Caribbean heritage middle-class parents. In this paper, we consider the respective roles of race and class in the shaping of parents’ educational strategies, deploying an analysis that focuses on their intersection and seeks to hold both race and class in productive tension. Drawing on empirical data, we illustrate how parents’ classed and raced identities shape their interactions with school staff.

Keywords:

• Black parents
• school
• intersectionality
• social class
• race

Notes

1. Gender is extremely important in this project, for example we will be writing about the differential positioning of Black boys and girls by both their teachers and parents. Additionally, as already noted, the majority of our respondents were women. The way in which the apparently neutral ‘parent’ and ‘parenting’ comes to mean – in practice, ‘mother’ and ‘mothering’ – has been discussed elsewhere (e.g. Vincent 2010). However, in this paper, the focus is on the interaction of class and race.

2. For example: the Family & Parenting Institute e-newsletter; the GTCE e-newsletter; Black solicitors network; and 100 Black Men of London e-newsletter.