Black Citymakers

resources, opportunity hoarding, parental engagement, home-school relations, and social networks are critical in our focus. In the first chapter, Lewis-McCoy explains his decision to focus exclusively on suburban educational race inequality, by elaborating on the above arguments. To illustrate, he discusses the “Saturday Science Club,” an “opportunity” that suburban district schools offered to parents to improve pupils’ science grades, in which exceptionally few Black pupils enrolled, in sharp contrast to affluent White pupils. The next part of this chapter critiques existing class-based arguments (Annette Lareau’s “concerted cultivation”) and race-based theoretical explanations (John Ogbu’s ecological model) that claim to explain pupils’ underattainment and educational racial inequality. Lareau maintains that parents who enroll their children in formally organized extracurricular activities (concerted cultivation) instead of letting them play as and when (natural growth), neglects the role of race by exaggerating the role of class. Lewis-McCoy argues that Lareau’s research is based on a biased sample and is contextualized within White British interests and culture. He then explains that Ogbu’s concepts, racial allegiance and solidarity, undermine the role of race because they are based on the assumption that Black pupils are responsible for their own underattainment, as a result of being overly conscious of the racial discrimination their parents experienced. The chapter closes by offering an alternative theoretical framework aimed at filling the gap identified in previous theoretical explanations: relational resource analysis, which draws on Charles Dilly’s categorical inequality framework. Chapters 2 to 8 discuss the findings in relation to the theoretical frameworks rejected and proposed in chapter 1. The second chapter begins with a brief discussion of the following research aims: working out how suburban districts decide what policies will help promote equality, how racial ideologies influence policy construction, and the roles families play in setting formal school policies. It does this by analyzing four policy interventions: redistricting plans in 1985 and 1997 and achievement gap initiatives in 1997 and 2004. This results in a richer understanding of biased educational opportunities favoring White residents in the suburban district. Using participants’ case studies, the third chapter discusses the role of family, the geographic locations where pupils live, and parents’ social networks to examine how the social distances between Black and White lives lead to different “opportunities” because Black and White pupils’ social networks and interests rarely match. This influences who is advantaged in the suburban education system and who is not. The fourth chapter continues this debate. It maintains that for far too long, and by exaggerating the role of parents’ social class, existing literature on “parental engagement with schools” has undertheorized the role and impact of race (and ethnicity). Two case studies are presented to show how and to whom opportunities and resources become available and constrained. The fifth chapter explores how Black and White parents socialize pupils into race and ethnicity and how this influences pupils’ interaction and the types of opportunities and resources to which pupils are exposed in suburban schooling. Chapter 6 shows how race and class are used by teachers to build assumptions about who is worthy of which types of resources and opportunities. It shows how teachers’ backgrounds inform which parents they hold favorable relationships with. Chapter 7 finishes the discussion of the findings by explaining why some Black parents removed their children from suburban education and others did not. The primary findings of the two groups of Black parents show that their “social worlds” (culture and interests) rarely clashed, even when class and household income was taken into account. Chapter 8 discusses the Black parents’ use of racebased social capital, which Lewis-McCoy describes as “Black social capital,” and reiterates the effectiveness of relational resource analysis. Despite its obvious strengths, there are three critiques of this book: insufficient reference is made to previous empirical studies (especially those in the United Kingdom), particularly those that have used theoretical frameworks the author rejects. A brief point about the difficulty of access is made, but this is not explained, given that in-depth interviews were conducted with more 100 participants.