This article ethnographically examines the relationship between success, racial identity, and racial formation among Korean students in one New Jersey public high school. Using Racial Formation theory (Omi & Winant, [1986. Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge]; Winant, [1994. Racial conditions: Politics, theory, comparisons. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press]), the author demonstrates how students at this particular high school use competing racial projects of neutrality and visibility to embrace and/or contest the dominant, white notion of what it means to be an academically successful student. The findings emphasize the need to look beyond cultural explanations of success and failure to include an analysis of the ways that schools themselves affect the constantly shifting terrain of racial formation.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank George Bond, Lambros Comitas, Charles Harrington and Hervé Varenne for feedback on earlier versions of this article. In addition I thank the students of the Anthropology Colloquium at Teachers College, Columbia University for their comments and support. I would like to give special thanks to Lesley Bartlett for her constant advice, encouragement and insights throughout all phases of this project. Finally, I would like to thank Soo Ah Kwon, Bryan Brayboy, and anonymous readers at the Urban Review for their feedback.
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Melissa Marinari is a PhD candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies. She has also been a high-school teacher of Spanish since 1992
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Marinari, M. Racial Formation and Success among Korean High School Students. Urban Rev 37, 375–398 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-005-0019-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-005-0019-x