Chapter 9: The Politics of Nativism in U.S. Public Education: Critical Race Theory and Burundian Children With Refugee Status

In this chapter, we draw upon Nativism (Higham, 1955), Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1992) and Latino critical theory (Bernal, 2002) to frame the representation of a three-year postcritical ethnographic (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004) study of the resettlement that Burundian children and families¹ with refugee status² endured in Riverhill (pseudonym), a small city in Appalachia in the rural South of the United States. Specifically, we analyze the political discourse of nativism and the ways in which it exacerbated neoconservative commitments in one elementary school that many of the Burundian children attended. We share our research findings about one local school, interviews with teachers and a principal, and fieldwork from the community project with the families. We represent findings generated from our analysis, which include Burundian students’ disorientation, discouragement, and for some, forced tracking into special education, as well as educators’ articulations of assimilationist practices.