In this timely examination of children of immigrants in New York and London, Natasha Kumar Warikoo asks, Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in ...school? Warikoo challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture -- the clothing, music, and tough talk -- to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, Warikoo analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors and finds that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.
Given the frequent critiques of elite universities for admitting low numbers of state school graduates and, more recently, British Afro-Caribbean students, how do students attending those ...universities make meaning of the admissions process? Through an analysis of 46 one-on-one in-depth interviews with undergraduates attending Oxford University, we show that students believe in the fairness of the admissions process, while lamenting the lack of opportunities for educational advancement faced by some disadvantaged youth in British society. Despite their understanding that many British youth do not have access to educational experiences that make Oxbridge an attainable goal, most students do not support changes to make access more equitable across class or racial/ethnic lines. This perspective, which legitimates the status students gain through matriculation at an elite university, supports the maintenance of unequal access to an Oxford education despite the advantages that education is known to confer to graduates. The findings demonstrate elites acknowledging the disadvantages of particular groups in society without acknowledging their own advantages in the same system. They do so by recognizing two elements of merit: (1) intelligence, which most students assumed led to their own admission; and (2) cultivation of that intelligence, which requires elite secondary schools and which most students see as disadvantaging particular groups in society. In the paper we highlight differences in meaning-making between graduates of grammar, comprehensive and private schools.
This article shows that an ethnically diverse student population leads to blurred ethnic and racial boundaries in high schools. Still, students in New York distinguish themselves much more along ...ethnic and racial lines than do London students. The evidence presented suggests that, in addition to national‐level differences, traditional British school structure, which provides continuity of peers through the form class as well as time for socializing, leads to less emphasis on ethnic and racial boundaries than in the anomic structure of traditional urban American public high schools. It follows that, to promote ethnic and racial integration among teens, schools should not only serve integrated student bodies but also should maintain structures that present opportunities for students to bridge racial and ethnic boundaries. The study employs ethnographic data from schools in New York and London and 120 in‐depth interviews.
In this timely examination of children of immigrants in New York and London, Natasha Kumar Warikoo asks, Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in ...school? Warikoo challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture -- the clothing, music, and tough talk -- to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, Warikoo analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors and finds that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.
This paper analyzes racial authenticity in the multiethnic context, by showing how second generation teenagers in New York and London evaluate and express racial authenticity among diverse peers. In ...these multiethnic contexts expectations of racially “authentic” cultural practices vary between groups but are nonetheless important for social status across groups. The data suggest that in multiethnic contexts both in-group members and out-group members help to maintain the boundaries of ethnic and racial identities. I show how teens engage both ethnic cultures as well as (black-identified) popular culture, using South Asians in both cities to illustrate the hybrid consumption practices influenced by both. Because expectations of racial authenticity limited boundary crossing, South Asian consumption practices blurred the boundary between “black” and “South Asian” taste cultures. A multi-method approach triangulates this research: ethnographic observations in 2 high schools (1 in each city), a random survey of 191 students in each school, and 120 in-depth interviews.