Cross-race friendships and segregated peer groups among teens: An educational anthropology study of race relations in two 'integrated' United States high schools

In 1998, the "Southcity" Public School District was declared to be sufficiently racially integrated, or "unitary," by a U.S. district court. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted from January 2000--March 2001, this dissertation explores the status of race relations among students in two racially diverse high schools in a southern U.S. city. Student race relations are of particular concern at this time in U.S. history due to the abandonment of desegregation strategies that have helped to create and maintain racially diverse public schools. In this context of transition, this dissertation addresses the following questions: What patterns of integration and segregation exist among students in racially diverse high schools? How is racial segregation socially reproduced among high school students? To what extent are race relations being socially transformed by teenagers in racially diverse high schools? This research suggests that racial integration is strongest in the context of dyadic cross-race friendships, while patterns of racial segregation remain in peer group structures in public settings of the schools. Building upon the theoretical attention to structure and agency from practice theory and critical education theory, this dissertation argues that patterns of racial segregation among students were socially reproduced through peer pressure and an ideology that focused on individual choice. Although students claimed that racially bounded peer groups could be easily overcome by personal choice, the individual efforts of some students to disrupt the racialized social structure of their peers demonstrated the difficulty of achieving this goal. At the same time, the prevalence of cross-race friendships found in the two high schools suggests that students viewed each other as social equals across race, providing an ethnographic example of racial equality in schools that has heretofore been absent from critical education theory. However, students' emphasis on their own individual agency in shaping social relationships masked the extent to which school structures and policies contributed to shaping students' cross-race interactions. As a result, students concluded that there was nothing that schools could do to improve race relations. This research affirms the importance of seeking and maintaining racially integrated schools in order to foster cross-race sociability and racial equality.