Chapter 4: War of the Half-Breeds: Communities of Color as a Resistant Response to Raced and Racist Education in the Midwest

This is a story about how a small group of male students of color resisted the places in their high school that were designed against their ways of being, as well as the spaces of whiteness that intentionally maintained self-fulfilling prophesies of failure for students of color. Their story, centered on questions of race and schooling, is certainly not new. Iterations of this narrative have been told across time (e.g., Cooper, 1892; Bethune, 1938; Rist, 1973; Winfield, 2007), gender (e.g., Gordon, 1993; Lorde, 1984; Woodson, 1933), and disciplines (e.g., DuBois, 1903; Heath, 1983; hooks, 1994; Jackson, 1968). For example, ethnographic accounts document the multiple ways marginalized student populations resist systems of oppression in schooling (Page, 1991; Tatum, 2003; Willis, 1977). In so doing, they serve not only as a backdrop to this chapter but stand as significant illustrations of the iterations and recursions across historical and contemporary contexts that inform students’ lived experiences in schools.