concept within the social sciences of normative cultural practice, a term that describes a set of dominant expectations, values, principles, and modes of representation that tend to guide interactions within public institutional settings in the United States. Normative whiteness, as Pamela Perry has argued, draws from a set of ideological understandings that, although broadly shared within the population, tend to be linked to particular ways of understanding history, citizenship, notions of self and other, and the very concept of culture itself (2001: 61). The notion of normative whiteness, to paraphrase Margaret Andersen, is less about bodies and skin color than about discursive and material practices that privilege and sustain the dominance of White imperial and middle-class Eurocentric worldviews (2003: 29).
In the United States, two popular discourses underlie practices of White normativity and help account for the damaging forms they may take in racially and socioeconomically diverse schooling contexts, particularly—I will argue—in school settings shared by White and Latino students. The first is that of assimilationist integration which, while typically allowing for some level of public expression of culture and language by ethnic citizens, tends to limit toleration to safe, “folk” genres such as festivals, cultural celebrations, ethnic restaurants, and some forms of media (Baquedano-López 2000; Hill 1999). Strong public expression of cultural and linguistic diversity beyond those contexts—for example, in institutional settings like public schools, workplaces, and voting booths—is often taken to be threatening to national unity and encouraging of ethnic separatism. A second pillar of normative whiteness, which finds justification in the same liberal democratic principles that support the assimilationist perspective, is the racial ideology of color blindness. From a color-blind perspective, the role of multicultural public schooling is to transcend racial consciousness through race neutrality and the social principle of equal treatment, thereby reaffirming the meritocratic idea in U.S. society that economic and social mobility are possible for all those who will work hard and conform to norms and habits of those already in power.
Problems arise in racially and ethnically diverse public schools when these foundational discourses of normative whiteness find themselves at odds with a range of common strategies and practices used by self-proclaimed “multicultural” schools to pursue their inclusive educational missions. These include, for example, racial and cultural pride activities and events, cultural commemorations, ethnic and cultural clubs, and various “ethnic studies” curricular offerings. The result is a certain schizophrenia inherent in many multiracial, socioeconomically diverse schools today, which says that the promotion of multiculturalism is good, but only if it takes noncritical forms that do not interrupt the assimilative function and “neutral” (color-blind) stance of schools. This has justified attacks on anything but the most muted and power-neutral forms of multicultural education, particularly with regard to educational programs designed specifically to address questions of power and status along lines of race, class, and culture. Moreover, wide-ranging reforms like the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, with their focus on basic skills development, have had the consequence of reinforcing more monocultural, classlocated norms for schooling, as well as condoning a long-standing refusal to acknowledge difference or diversity as a resource. In this manner, even resourceful practices of biculturalism and bilingualism (including code-switching varieties) can be viewed as political challenges or “anti- assmilationist apparatus(es) that challenge the norming process” (Guiterrez, Baquedano-López, and Álvarez 2000: 223). Ultimately, systematic attempts to engage sensitive issues surrounding socioeconomic, racial, or cultural differences in White/Latino shared schooling contexts tend to be vilified as ethnically interested, subversive forms of “victim politics” that promote racial polarization, focus on historical injustices rather than contemporary color-blind conditions, appeal to White guilt, or are motivated by the resentment of Whites (Ovando and McLaren 2000: xix). Moreover, school-based programs that extend beyond the “heroes and holidays” approach to cultural and racial diversity risk being dismissed as “extracurricular” and a distraction from the more “academically rigorous” technical skills training believed to constitute quality education (see Chapter 6 for a case study).
Student Responses to Practices of Normative Whiteness in Schools
Institutional practices of normative whiteness do not, of course, go unchallenged in schools. A long line of student-centered ethnographic research in U.S. public schools has examined the ways in which working-class racial minority youth (including African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Native American) have employed diverse forms of cultural practice to produce a sense of belonging and solidarity against the White middle-class norms required in the school context (see, for example, Davidson 1996; Foley 1996; Gitlin et al. 2003; Philips 1983). In many cases, such practices take the form of willed resistance against the acquisition of school-valued knowledge, but this is not necessarily the case. Angela Valenzuela (1999), in her study of Mexican American students in a South Texas high school, demonstrates that what would appear to be students’ posture of resistance or “not caring” about school, is actually experienced by them as a sense of ambivalence—a feeling of being caught between a desire to succeed in school, and a level of resignation to the dominant attitudes that marginalize their cultural and linguistic heritage, which they experience as a key element of their group social status (for related analyses, see Davidson 1996; Gibson and Bejínez 2002; Gibson, Gándara, and Koyama 2004; Gitlin et al. 2003; Zentella 1997). In each of these cases, what may appear to be student resistance or academic disengagement may have less to do with an ability or motivation to succeed academically in school than with a desire, as a member of a stigmatized social group, to find a space of equal status among others and to “construct a positive self within and economic and political context which relegates its members to static and disparaged ethnic, racial and class identities” (Zentella 1997: 13).
Collectively, these studies focus on the ways in which unexamined norms of Whiteness and commitments to color-blindness may serve not only to reproduce the school success of middle-class White students in racially mixed school settings but also to actively promote the marginalization of working-class Latino students and discourage their involvement in school contexts that are known to facilitate students’ social integration and academic success, including high-impact co- and extracurricular activities (Davidson 1996; Gibson and Bejínez 2002; Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, and Mehan 2000). It is in this sense that White normativity can pose a significant and often unacknowledged limit on the effectiveness of educational programs in White/Latino desegregated schooling environments, particularly when student success depends on deep engagement, equal participation, and collaborative learning across what may be significant lines of politicized racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender differences (Fine, Weis, and Powell 1997).
By identifying challenges posed by institutional practices of normative whiteness in racially and socioeconomically diverse school settings, I do not mean to suggest that effective integration is impossible. Instead, I mean to emphasize that the co-location of students in a desegregated setting may do more harm than good if there is not also a strong understanding of, and willingness to address, a broader set of sociocultural and contextual factors—powerfully at play within schools—that mediate student learning, motivation, engagement, and academic success. Ultimately, student learning is a social and political process influenced not only by the school’s formal curriculum and the experiences that students bring into school with them but also by students’ interactions within the school, both with peers and with the staff who organize opportunities for student learning and participation based often on their own (classed, raced, and gendered) assumptions, orientations, and belief systems that often go unacknowledged (Bartolomé and Trueba 2000). In a reframing that challenges popular educational reform logic, Ray McDermott suggests that “instead of asking what individuals learn in school, we should be asking what learning is made possible by social arrangements [within schools] . . . and see differential patterns of academic success along racial lines as an institutionalized, social event rather than a one-by-one failure in psychological development” (1997: 120). McDermott’s admonishment suggests a reimaging of the pursuit for “quality education” from one that seeks to promote a near-exclusive focus on improving classroom instruction to one that seeks to address how schools, as whole institutions, may structure
