Introduction

At Bay City High School, a large, multiracial urban public school in the San Francisco Bay Area, race was a frequent topic in classrooms, hallways, and the schoolyard. But it was also an uncomfortable topic for many students, who preferred not to be racially labeled. One such student was Damien. A tall, thin sophomore with pale skin and wiry light brown hair, Damien was a talented artist and athlete who spent much of his time at school with a group of African American boys. His speech was influenced by African American Vernacular English, the linguistic variety used in his friendship group, and his clothing and hairstyle reflected current African American youth fashion. Damien attracted the curiosity of a number of his classmates of all ethnoracial backgrounds, because they could not figure out whether he was in fact black, and he himself refused to discuss his racial identity. By controlling this information and affiliating with African American youth language and culture, Damien was able to present an identity that aligned him with his friends without allowing others to categorize him racially.

Damien’s situation, which was unusual but by no means unique at Bay City High School, presents a number of challenges to commonly held views of identity as either a social category or a psychological state. First, individuals do not passively inhabit identity categories to which they have been assigned; rather, they negotiate and navigate these categories in a variety of ways within social interaction. As a result, the social classification of any given individual is not necessarily obvious to others, and one’s assigned social category is not always the same as one’s social identity. In the above case, for example, Damien’s classmates were unable to classify him racially, and although some students believed he was European American, he did not embrace this category as his racial identity, at least at school.