Brown Bag Seminar: Despite the Best Intentions: Exploring Why Racial Inequality Persists in Good Schools

In the post–civil rights era,  practices that support racial inequality inside and outside schools have become more subtle and elusive than they once were. Rather than functioning through overt and easily recognizable processes of racial exclusion, contemporary racial patterns are supported by structural inequalities, institutional practices, and racial ideologies that reinforce each other but present themselves as largely nonracial.

This lecture examines how such subtle racial practices operate in schools by focusing on one empirical example – the city of Riverview and specifically, Riverview High School – that is seen by many as a bastion of racial harmony. It is a town many residents say they chose because it is a diverse community within a larger segregated metropolis where the schools are very strong and where racial integration has existed for nearly 40 years. It is also a district where racial achievement gaps have persisted for decades. Riverview in many ways offers a chance to study the best-case scenario – a liberal community with ample resources that has an explicit commitment to diversity and equality. We ask, why then, despite the best intentions, are they not doing better?

Amanda E. Lewis is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and co-director of the university-wide Race and Difference Initiative at Emory University. Her research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities and how our ideas about race get negotiated in everyday life.

She is the author of several books including the award-winning Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color-line in Classrooms and Communities (Rutgers University Press 2003). She is currently at work on a new book (with John Diamond), titled Despite the Best Intentions: Why Racial Inequality Persists in Good Schools (Oxford, forthcoming). She lectures and consults regularly on issues of educational equity and contemporary forms of racism.