Crossing Borders: A comparative analysis of race, ethnicity and culture in different U.S. and South African school contexts

Prudence Carter

As a NAE/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, I will begin and complete the first phase of a cross-national, comparative study of two different schooling contexts—multiethnic vs. Black-dominant schools—in the United States and South Africa. The task of redefining schools as resources for the social and economic advancement of racialized minorities is a key aspect of the social transformation that is now underway in post-apartheid South Africa, much like the United States’ unfinished experiment with racial integration. Although it has been nearly fifty years since Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. still has not succeeded in equalizing educational outcomes and life chances for its various racial and ethnic minorities. South Africa now faces the challenges of social transformation and integration that have long characterized the United States. South African citizens are reframing schools as institutions designed to remedy the subordinate status of Blacks and other non-white racial/ethnic groups. South Africa follows the path of the U.S. in the quest for racial and ethnic progress, although some might argue that they are taking a relatively more progressive route with the nation’s “radical inclusion” policy, outlined in its newly minted, post-apartheid, democratic constitution. A central question of interest is how different inter- and intra-group relations influence students’ ideological and cultural approaches to academic and socioeconomic opportunity. Given the racial order in both South Africa and the U.S., Blacks and other subordinated ethnic groups (for example, Latinos in the United States and Colored and Indian students in South Africa) encounter different socio-cultural and political dynamics about integration in both their respective community and school contexts. While much of the educational research provides valuable insight into some racial and ethnic processes in schooling, the tendency has been to homogenize the experiences of students from various racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Hence, we know little about how both within and among groups, students’ cultural approaches to schooling shift when the racial and ethnic makeup of the school varies. To investigate these processes, I am developing a mixed-methods study relying on personal observations, interviews (both individual and group) and surveys of students and teachers located within minority-dominant (“segregated”) and multi-racial/ethnic (“integrated”) high schools (grades 9-12) from a total of eight schools in four cities: two in South Africa and two in the United States. Despite important cultural, economic, historical, and political differences between the two nations, a comparative study of their educational landscapes can offer important insights into the intersections of race/ethnicity, gender relations, class resources, ideology, culture, and access to opportunity via schooling.

About Prudence Carter

Prudence L. Carter is an Assistant Professor in the department of sociology at Harvard University. Carter’s primary research agenda contends with prevalent cultural explanations used to explain academic and mobility differences among various racial and ethnic minorities and whites. Carter’s other work has centered on how racial and gender constructions intersect with poor neighborhood conditions to shape the differential educational outcomes between low-income African American male and female students. At present, she is completing a book entitled Not the "White" Way: High Aspirations, Achievement and Culture among Low-Income African American and Latino Youth (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), which speak to various conceptual and analytic issues, as well as policy implications gathered from her a survey and ethnographic interview study of low-income African American and Latino students in New York. In addition, Carter has begun preliminary fieldwork in South Africa on a comparative project of how issues of culture and school organizational norms interact and affect the educational achievement of both U. S. and South African schoolchildren. In this collaborative effort, she hopes to develop not only an international, comparative study, but also as a multi-regional, U.S. comparative project on the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender and achievement. Professor Carter received her Sc.B. in applied mathematics-economics from Brown University (1991), her M.A. in sociology and education from Teachers College, Columbia University (1995) and her M. Phil. and Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University (1999). Before joining the faculty at Harvard in July 2001, Carter was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Poverty, the Underclass and Public Policy and the Program for Research on Black Americans at the University of Michigan.