Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys

Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education

Nancy Lopez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an ethnographic study of Carribean youth in New York City to help explain how and why schools and cities are failing boys of color.

CHAPTER 1
Unequal Schooling: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education

On a glorious bright summer morning in June 1998 a long-awaited graduation ceremony was under way for Urban High School seniors in New York City.¹ The service was held in a majestic gothic cathedral located in an upper middle class Manhattan neighborhood—miles away from the dilapidated housing and urban blight enveloping Urban High School’s low-income Dominican immigrant neighborhood.

Perched in the balcony of the cathedral, I had a bird’s eye view of the ceremony. Dressed in their finest clothes and with their invitations in hand, several generations of bubbly family members—parents, siblings, grandparents, and godparents—beamed with pride as they entered the church to see their loved ones awarded a high school diploma. For these immigrant families, the sacrifices and hardships they had endured through the vagaries of the migration processes had paid off; their United States–born children would in most cases be the first in their families to have had an opportunity to graduate from high school and pursue higher education—well on the way to fulfilling the American dream of a better life.

To the familiar tune of the “Pomp and Circumstance” graduation march, triumphant young men draped in blue caps and gowns escorted jubilant young women in white caps and gowns down the aisle of the cathedral. Toward the end of the march, Ms. Polanco, a proud mother sitting beside me, turned to me and exclaimed in Spanish, “Mira! Hay más muchachas que muchachos!” [Oh look at that; there are more girls than boys!] Indeed, several rows of young women had to be paired up with each other.

The gender breakdown of the graduating class of Urban High School is part of a long established but seldom studied trend in educational attainment. In the United States as well as in other industrialized countries across the globe, such as England, women attain higher levels of education than men.² In 1996, there were 8.4 million women enrolled in U.S. colleges, compared with 6.7 million men, even though there were slightly more college-age men than women in the population at the time.³ Women also had higher college completion rates than men: 26% to 29%, respectively.⁴ Not only did women outnumber men in institutions of higher learning, they also earned better grades and outperformed men on reading and writing tests.⁵ Women also comprised the vast majority of students in honors classes. It is predicted that as early as the year 2007, the gender gap will reach 2.3 million, with 9.2 million women enrolled in U.S. colleges compared with 6.9 million men.⁶

The gender gap in education is most pronounced among racially stigmatized groups, namely Blacks and Latinos. During the 1990s twice as many African American women as African American men earned college degrees.⁷ In the Boston public schools it was estimated that for the high school graduating class of 1998, for every 100 Black and Hispanic males attending a four-year college there were 180 Black and Hispanic females.⁸ In the New York City public schools, home to over a million students, where the majority of the student population is also Black and Latino (86%), more women than men graduated from high school. In 2000, 44% of Latinas graduated compared to 35% of Latino men; for Blacks 49% of women graduated versus 39% of men.⁹

The race-gender gap is already discernible among the new second generation—the children of post-1965 immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia.¹⁰ In Florida and California, in a longitudinal survey of second-generation Black, Latino, and Asian youth, it was found that young women outperformed their male counterparts in terms of educational attainment, grade point averages, and educational aspirations.¹¹ Among second-generation Vietnamese youth in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mexican-origin youth in San Antonio, Texas, we see similar patterns.¹² A targeted sample of second-generation Dominicans surveyed for the Second Generation in Metropolitan New York Study found that twice as many women (18%) as men (9%) were enrolled in two-year or four-year colleges.¹³ The same pattern held for college degree holders: twice as many women (10%) as men (5%) had earned associate’s degrees or bachelors degrees. Not surprisingly, 5% of women went on to graduate school, compared with only 1% of men.

Throughout the 1990s, at the City University of New York City (CUNY), where the majority of students are Black and Latino, most of whom are from the Caribbean, women comprised the majority of enrolled Black and Latino undergraduates—up to 70% in graduate programs.¹⁴ These statistics bore out during my adjunct teaching (1993–1997) at CUNY campuses. In any given semester anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of the undergraduates enrolled in my introduction to sociology classes as well as courses I taught on Dominican studies were women. Even over the course of the seven years I attended graduate school (1992–1999) (the Ph.D. program in sociology at the graduate school and University Center of the City University of New York), there were six Dominican Ph.D. students, and all but one of us were women.

Despite the fact that historically women have enrolled in schools at higher rates than men, there is a dearth of studies exploring why this is so, particularly among racially stigmatized groups. In the words of the president of Columbia University’s Teacher’s College in New York City: “We need to be concerned that higher education is losing poor and minority men, that more African American men are going to prison than to college.”¹⁵ These trends beg several questions: What accounts for the race and gender disparities in education? How is it that men and women who belong to the same racial and ethnic group, attend the same schools, grow up in the same social and economic circumstances, and live in the same neighborhoods have different outcomes in terms of their educational attainment?

This book grew out of a compelling need to understand the dynamics that contribute to race and gender disparities in urban education. To unravel these dynamics, I focus on how race and gender intersect in the lives of the children of the largest new post-1965 immigrant group in New York City—second-generation Caribbean youth.¹⁶ The children of Dominican, Anglophone West Indian, and Haitian immigrants provide fertile ground for investigating the race-gender gap in education because they share many commonalities. First, Dominicans, Haitians, and Anglophone West Indians immigrants generally enter the United States as permanent residents, in contrast to other Caribbean immigrants, such as Puerto Ricans, who are United States citizens, and Cubans, who are considered political refugees. Second, women predominate in Caribbean migration flows.¹⁷ Consequently, these communities have fairly high rates of households headed by women. Perhaps the most central commonality shared by the vast majority of Haitians, West Indians, and Dominicans is that they are primarily of discernible African phenotype and thus provide an interesting test case of post–Civil Rights race relations in contemporary U.S. society.¹⁸

My interest in second-generation Caribbean youth also stems from my personal history. My mother emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States during the 1960s, and I, along with all my four siblings, was born and raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Although my father eventually joined us during the 1970s, my parents separated in the 1980s. This pattern is not uncommon, as at some point in time women head many Caribbean families. (I attended New York City public schools, where the overwhelming majority of my classmates were from the Caribbean—mostly Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Haitians, as well as African Americans and a sprinkling of Asians.) Over half of the youth interviewed for this study grew up in circumstances similar to mine—in a mother-headed household, a low-income family, and de facto segregated and stigmatized neighborhoods.

Understanding the educational trajectories of the children of immigrants is key to understanding their incorporation into U.S. society because education remains one of the most important measures of an individual’s prospects for social mobility and economic well-being. In this chapter I describe the theoretical frameworks that have been used to examine the second generation; I also describe my methods and propose a race-gender experience framework for unraveling the race and gender disparities in education. I end with a description of the chapters that follow.

The hegemonic approach for studying the second generation generally rests on the laurels of the ethnicity paradigm.¹⁹ In the ethnicity framework, uncovering how the cultural characteristics of a given immigrant group and examining whether the values of a given ethnic group have facilitated or stunted their process of becoming “American” via assimilation is the central concern.²⁰ Segmented assimilation theory emerged in an effort to explain the “divided fates” or the multiple educational and labor market trajectories of the children of post-1965 immigrants.²¹ Acknowledging that assimilation can mean upward or downward mobility, segmented assimilation theorists were interested in uncovering which sector of United States society a given immigrant group would assimilate into.²² Portes and Zhou (1993) have argued that the United States currently has a pattern of segmented assimilation, or multiple ways in which immigrant groups are incorporated into distinct sectors of U.S. society. They suggest three distinct paths. First, a given immigrant group may assimilate into white mainstream middle-class society and experience upward mobility. Second, a group may assimilate into the racially stigmatized lower classes and experience downward mobility. Finally, a group may carve out an alternative route, whereby it preserves its immigrant identity and experience upward mobility. Portes and Zhou (1993) posit that the type of assimilation a given ethnic group undergoes depends largely on its mode of incorporation, its color, and its place of residence, as well as its social networks and the cultural capital of its respective ethnic communities.

Segmented assimilation theory has been instrumental in dismantling the assumption that losing ethnic distinctiveness and conforming to mainstream cultural practice was a prerequisite of intergenerational upward mobility. However, among the shortcomings of the segmented assimilation theory is the reduction of racialization processes to the static notion of “color.” Instead of exploring how the second generation is assigned racial meaning, segmented assimilation theorists simply acknowledge that the second generation comes in different “colors.” Race, which in this framework is operationalized simply as “color,” takes a back seat to ethnic differences. For segmented assimilation theorists what is central to the education and social mobility of the second generation is their cultural values and networks, not how they are racialized.

Another pitfall of the segmented assimilation theory is that gender is treated as a static independent variable, rather than a central analytical focus of inquiry. Race and gender not only are categories of identity, but also embody social relations, social organizations, and lived experience. As we will see, the second generation is treated like racialized and gendered bodies, not as “genderless” ethnics or “raceless” genders. Thus, a real weakness of segmented assimilation theory is that its central analytical category—assimilation—neglects the fact that the very social networks, neighborhoods, schools, job opportunities, and family arrangements that are open to the second generation are racialized and gendered.

We need a new approach to understanding the race-gender gap in education—one that incorporates the notion of intersecting race and gender processes that can be examined as lived experiences. In this book I examine intersecting racialization and gendering processes as key to understanding educational trajectories. While mapping the ethnic identity formation of the second generation is an interesting endeavor, it is my contention that unraveling their educational trajectories requires a grasp of their racialization in U.S. society first and foremost. Instead of asking, How is the second generation assimilating into the American mainstream? I ask, How is the second generation racialized and gendered? How do they experience race and gender in daily life? How do racialized and gendered experiences shape life perspectives? How do race-gender experiences in public spaces differ for men and women? How do formal and informal institutional practices within schools “race” and “gender” students? How do family life and gender roles influence how young men and women view the role of education? What is the impact of the race-gender experiences men and women encounter in the workplace on their outlooks? How can oppressive racialization and gendering processes be revealed, interrupted, and rearticulated to create more equitable and liberating educational opportunities, particularly for low-income urban second-generation youth?

This book pioneers a conceptual bridging of diverse bodies of literature in education, sociology, and anthropology, which seldom speak to one another regarding racial formation theory, critical race theory, sociology of education, segmented assimilation theory, critical race feminist theory, Black studies, and Latino studies.²³ In working toward a race-gender theoretical framework, I bring race and gender from the margins to the center of the analysis. I challenge the notion that ethnicity predicts social mobility and instead focus on how the race-gender meanings that are assigned to the members of the second generation influence the type of education that is available to them, as well as the types of experiences they have throughout their youth and young adulthood.

The race-gender experience framework employs two central concepts for unraveling experiential differences with race and gender processes, namely race-gender experiences and race-gender outlooks. Race-gender experiences are the social interactions that take place in a given social sphere, such as public spaces, schools, work, and the home, in which men and women undergo racial and gender processes. Experiential differences with race(ing) and gender(ing) processes have important implications for how men and women view the role of education in their lives.²⁴ Over time, the cumulative effects of race-gender experiences shape men’s and women’s race-gender outlooks. Race-gender outlooks are life perspectives and attitudes about how social mobility is attained.

The unifying thread of this book centers around an analysis of the distinct race-gender experiences second-generation Caribbeans are confronted with throughout their youth and young adulthood. I illustrate how race-gender experiences accumulate and ultimately affect how men and women come to understand the role of education in their lives as well as their prospects for social mobility. Because of their disparate experience with race and gender processes, young men and women from the same ethnic and class backgrounds come to view the role of education in their lives in vas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Unequal Schooling: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education
• CHAPTER 2 From "Mamasita" to "Hoodlum": Stigma as Lived Experience
• CHAPTER 3 "Urban High Schools": The Reality of Unequal Schooling
• CHAPTER 4 "Problem" Boys
• CHAPTER 5 Rewarding Femininity
• CHAPTER 6 Homegrown: How the Family Does Gender
• CHAPTER 7 After Graduation: Race and Gender in the Workplace
• CHAPTER 8 Education as a Way Out: The Future of Latino and Black Education
• APPENDIX A Description of Second-Generation Caribbean Women Interviewed, Ages 18-30
• APPENDIX Β Description of Second-Generation Caribbean Men Interviewed, Ages 18-30
• APPENDIX C Summary of Focus Group Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index