Introduction

In the first few weeks of my fieldwork at Bay City High, I had a conversation about my research with Ursula Chambers, a European American parent who served as a volunteer at the school. At the time, some students from neighboring cities, including youth of color from lower-income communities, were enrolled at Bay City High due to its relatively strong academic reputation. Eager to defend the school against these perceived interlopers, Ursula sought to document its enrollment of nonresident students. During our conversation, she tried to enlist me in her cause as a stealth agent who might be able to gain access to carefully guarded school demographic records, because, as she explained, “you’re a researcher, not a rabble-rousing parent.”

The ethnoracial profile of Bay City High’s students was a central concern not only for Ursula but for many members of the school and the community. In its diversity, Bay City High School was a microcosm of California. As of the 2000 US Census, California officially became one of the nation’s few “majority minority” states, with residents of color outnumbering white residents. At the time of my study in 1995–96, the San Francisco Bay Area and Bay City itself were both slightly more than 50 percent white; however, the high school had no racial majority. European Americans and African Americans constituted the school’s two largest ethnoracial groups, although African Americans are only the fourth-largest ethnoracial category in California (after European Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans) and were also a relatively small group in Bay City. This disproportionate black student population relative to the city’s black population was partly due to the “white flight” of well-to-do families to private schools and partly due to the enrollment of African American students from neighboring communities in Bay City’s schools, the phenomenon that was so troubling to Ursula. By contrast, Latinos, who are projected to surpass whites as the state’s largest ethnoracial group and have displaced African Americans as the largest US ethnoracial minority, made up a small percentage of the Bay City population and the school’s student body. The number of Asian Americans at Bay City High was likewise small, and there were very few Native American and Filipino students. In other California schools, however, racial anxieties like Ursula’s have surfaced regarding large Latino or Asian populations.