Marketing diversity and the ‘new’ politics of desegregation: overview of an urban education ethnography

Abstract

Situating ethnographic methods within a framework of engaged research we offer a window into the adoption, implementation, and sociopolitical dilemmas of 15 African American males participating in a program designed to maintain diversity at one of Chicago’s most successful and elite public high schools. The article presents a four-year study (2007–2011) of an explicitly class-based and implicitly race-based attempt to engage the ‘new’ politics of desegregation and the microprocesses of integration. Promoted as reaching across geographic, race, and class boundaries, the Black Male Achievement Initiative (BMAI) at Selective Preparatory Academy (SPA) is just one of many attempts to satisfy stakeholders in a political environment that promotes school choice and voluntary initiatives to desegregate schools. Situated within the local context of Chicago school reform, the BMAI provides opportunities and builds relationships even as it raises questions about racial formation, the appropriation of space, the meaning of diversity, and how such educational programs are part of the broader processes of gentrification.

Keywords:

• race
• diversity
• desegregation
• African American males
• race practices

Notes

1. In 2005, more than 10,700 students vied for 2565 places in the city’s eight selective enrollment high schools. This translates to approximately one in four students who were accepted.

2. The growth in percentage of white students at SPA would undoubtedly have been larger had schools not been able to exercise certain court-ordered flexibility in admissions prior to the anti-affirmative engaged ruling.

3. One of the boys ultimately left SPA because he was recruited by another of the selective enrollment schools to play sports.

4. The significance of these numbers is that this is also characteristic of the other top selective enrollment schools where faculty of color has also declined and is significantly less than the district as a whole.

5. The principal’s first meeting with BMAI students occurred at semester break during a Christmas dinner provided for students and their parents. It was during this time that the principal explained the purpose of the program and their role in its success.

6. During the 2007–2008 SPA’s faculty and staff consisted of only four persons of color.