When Race Meets Class: Being African American in a Small-City High School.

This paper is part of a larger book project, tentatively titled, When Race Meets Class: Being African American in a Small-City High School. Since the summer of 2001, I have been following the lives of about 40 African American teenagers in a diverse small-city high school in the Northeast. The population of the city is approximately 60,000 with the racial breakdown of the student high school being approximately 20% black, 5% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and 70% white. Forty percent of the over 1600 high school students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. This paper focuses on three male high school students and traces their hopes, fears, and educational experiences. Through the voices of the teenagers themselves, various factors are put forward to shed light on understanding the longstanding and puzzling academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in high schools. In addition, this paper examines how the broader experience during the high school years influences not only educational outcomes but socioeconomic attainment as well. Theoretically this papers seeks to develop a deeper understanding of race in contemporary American society and persistent racial inequality that neither reduces race to class inequality nor conceptualizes race separate from what I call a racialized class structure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]