Distinguished Speakers' Talk Summaries: Annette Lareau and C. J. Pascoe

Summaries of talks given by sociologists Annette Lareau and C. J. Pascoe at UBC.

Annette Lareau’s talk on February 2nd, 2021 focused on the challenges that Black middle-class parents face when choosing schools for their children to attend and showed that the schools that Black middle class parents want their children to attend don’t actually exist. Dr. Lareau explained that the previous studies on school choice have largely focused on individual decision making while tending to overlook powerful structural constraints that parents often face when making these choices. She noted that as Neoliberalism rose in the U.S. in 1980, there emerged a large number of choices of schools. These schools are typically deeply segregated both by racial backgrounds and economic backgrounds as well, with the economic gap continually increasing. Previous studies indicate that school choice is done through meaningful choices and it is parents that do the choosing as opposed to the schools. The Black middle class, which Dr. Lareau focused on in her research, belongs to a group that has specific resources that can be used and depended on by Black middle class parents during school selection, those resources being social ties and cultural capital. Due to race and class segregation, the Black middle class is uniquely constrained by certain structural conditions, and previous research on school selection has not sufficiently emphasized these conditions’ influence. Black middle class parents have complex preferences for which schools their children should attend, but these structural constraints impede these preferences from being realized. Dr. Lareau conducted a qualitative study, which entailed engaging in in-depth interviews with 24 Black middle class families that all lived in or near large cities and most had children aged 4-6. The participants were in the middle class, which was defined by having a Bachelor’s degree and working a job in which one had complex skills and autonomy. The interviews were done face-to-face and the participating families were each compensated with $50 and a pie. The in-depth interviews showed that parents have preferences for schools that are simultaneously racially diverse and have high academic performance. However, further research indicates that schools adhering to such a description, don’t actually exist. Schools tend to either be racially diverse with lower academic performance, or predominantly White with higher academic performance. Parents are thus faced with a difficult choice, simultaneously wanting their children to be in a racially diverse school, which they often defined as having a large number of African-American children so that their own children could feel comfortable, as well as wanting the school to have high academic achievement. Due to the nonexistence of such schools, the parents had to make one of two compromises; either send their children to schools with the majority of its students being White, or send their children to schools with lower than desired academic achievement. In making this choice, parents adopted one of two strategies; assiduous rationality, or falling back on the familiar. The strategy of assiduous rationality was more unusual and entailed gathering a lot of information about all of the schools they were considering, making systematic comparisons across all, and selecting the best option given the structural constraints. The second and more common strategy of falling back on the familiar entailed trusting their social ties - finding someone in their social network who had faced similar dilemmas and trusting that the same tactics they ended up choosing in their situations, would work for their children as well. Both choices, enrolling into predominantly White schools in particular, resulted in parents experiencing mistrust and anxiety. In particular, the parents were anxious about their children experiencing racial discrimination from the school district, with White children predominantly being placed into special programs while Black children being overlooked. These anxieties, which often kept the parents up at night among other effects, were picked up on by their children, which in some cases affected their academic performance and caused them to have institutional mistrust.

Dr. Lareau’s talk thus emphasized the importance of addressing structural constraints that result from race and class segregation and that Black middle class parents face when selecting schools that their children will attend. C. J. Pascoe’s talk on March 2nd, 2021 focused on her project regarding inequality and change in an American high school. Dr. Pascoe explained that after she released her first book, Dude, You’re a F*g, she began noticing a rise in discussions of bullying. There were many and various anti-bullying projects and campaigns. However, she kept hearing high school students state that bullying did not happen in their high schools, which did not match up with how frequently and pointedly it was discussed and discouraged.

Dr. Pascoe’s current project, which is conducted in an era of increased discussions of inequality, is concerned with finding out how inequalities are reproduced and challenged in a progressive high school. This project involved two years of ethnographic research and fifteen interviews with students and teachers. The high school was the least wealthy but the most racially diverse one of its neighbourhood and was located in a town with high numbers of both white supremacists and Christians. It was characterized by discourses of love, kindness, and care - teachers knew their students closely.

Dr. Pascoe explained that class, age, race, and gender inequalities are typically not addressed in high schools because they are considered to be too political, and that this produces inequality. She also discussed the Politics of Protection, which refers to how different students are positioned within their schools and how influential their opinions and voices are as compared to those of the other students.

A result of not addressing topics that are considered too political is that high schools cannot observe serious challenges to the regimes of the normal and end up using bullying and kindness discourse to avoid significant structural change. However, within the high school, youth-led activism resulted in a push back against the school’s framing and possibilities for more just institutions within it were suggested by the students.

Dr. Pascoe brought up some cases of events that transpired in the high school so as to illustrate this perpetuation of inequalities. The high school’s Gay Straight Alliance tried to have a drag event on campus. To the alliance’s surprise, the event got approval from the principal, who said “we weren’t going to push very hard”. The way it would be carried out had to be explained to the school body, but it went ahead, and was successful in that teachers performed in it and young people in attendance celebrated at its end like they do in normative events.

Essentially, the school, which typically demands a normative sexuality, took a stance to celebrate the LGBTQ community. However, there are several nuances that point to this event being treated differently than normative events are, which points to the reproduction of inequalities within the school. Firstly, the school got some complaints from parents that were not in attendance at the show, which does not happen with normative events. Secondly, the district’s equity coordinator expressed concern, specifically about transgender people potentially experiencing bullying and harm if there was pushback against this, suggesting the possibility of a transgender student being asked by another student to borrow their wig. As well, it was insensitively suggested that drag consists entirely of cisgender people dressing up. So, it can be concluded that the school had a sanitized sexiness and that it had a very particular impression of what a transgender person is and what their needs are. The school seemed to have imagined needs to focus on individual interactions as opposed to institutional factors, so, as a result, transgender people were considered to experience inequality at an individual level, not institutionally.

Another example of a school event that Dr. Pascoe discussed was a philanthropic program in which the students of the high school engage in pageants to raise money for pediatrics over the course of a few months. Dr. Pascoe mentioned that one of the acts in the pageant was a reenactment of the Santa costumes dance from Mean Girls, which raised no concerns from the school, and students that participated in it were actually considered role models because they supported the school’s values. This, compared with the reception of the drag event and with the raised concerns for the students that participated in it highlights the ways that normative events are supported while others are not. As well, with the philanthropic program specifically, most participants in it were honours students and it entailed that their parents were affluent because participation in the program required money and parents’ leisure time, both of which are only possible in the case of affluence. On some occasions, economically disadvantaged students were actually asked to leave the program. Therefore, this program reproduced inequality and built interactional racism into the school processes.

As well, Dr. Pascoe noted some outdated language in the high school’s board policies and different requirements for pink prom as opposed to regular prom. The pink prom required parental agreements, which the regular prom did now. Additionally, the pink prom was held on the same night as the big school music, thereby discriminating against the significant overlap of students that wanted to attend both the pink prom and the musical. Another frustration that was brought up was the bathroom problem at the school. There was only one gender-neutral bathroom in the entire school, it was positioned right by the office, and only has one stall.

The high school’s students had concrete requests of the school - for it to enact policy changes and infrastructural modifications. They pointed out microaggressions of racial inequality at the school and intersectional inequality such as students of colour feeling like the Gay Straight Alliance students took up too much attention and space.

Some of Dr. Pascoe’s takeaways from conducting ethnography at the high school were that much of the work on inequalities is generated in work places, which makes it hard to see certain things, and that age constitutes how much power you have. The students’ specific and well-formulated concerns were not given the same consideration as an adult’s concerns might have been.

As well, Dr. Pascoe noticed that even within the same age groups, not all concerns and claims were given the same consideration. For example, it was felt that white students within the Gay Straight Alliance were given more consideration than students of colour, which points to the notion that only “non-threatening” diversity is supported. Dr. Pascoe concluded that some forms of diversity conceal others, but that the schools are able to craft space for student feedback and pushback. This was concluded from the fact that during one exam season, the principle made time in the exam schedule for a student walkout. Therefore, the school is able to support students’ activism, but only does so on its own terms, which reproduces inequality. Dr. Pascoe thus illuminated the nuanced ways in which inequality is reproduced in high schools that hide behind a facade of unity and acceptance.