Notes

1. All names of schools, districts, and people are pseudonyms.

1. Referencing the sources of the quoted material in this paragraph would compromise the anonymity of the district and schools. For this reason, I have not included citations, but I have them on file.

2. There were also many refugee students from Sudan and the Congo in the Salt Lake area, but this was not articulated to me by anyone in the Zion School District and rarely recognized in the efforts with which I was familiar.

1. For a more complete articulation of these approaches, please see Castagno 2009.

2. Despite common understandings of the word co-opt, I am not convinced that it requires conscious intent on the part of the actor. In the tradition of Derrick Bell’s (1992) work, I am more concerned with the effects of people’s actions than with the reasoning or motivations driving the actions. This is similar to David Gillborn’s (2008) analysis of racism in the United Kingdom’s educational system and his use of the word conspiracy (which builds on a long history of African American scholarship on conspiracy).

3. For another discussion of the tension between a focus on individuals and structural racism within the dominant racial paradigm among teachers, see Vaught and Castagno 2008.

1. This is the criterion-referenced test the Zion School District used to comply with NCLB regulations.

2. In the Salt Lake area, Pacific Islander and Polynesian are used interchangeably to denote the significant number of people in this community from Samoa and Tonga. Among the teachers in my research, the diversity within these labels was rarely noted.

3. MESA stands for “mathematics, engineering, and science achievement.” This was a program in the Zion School District that aimed to involve students of color and low-income students in these fields where they are traditionally underrepresented.

1. I conducted this evaluation collaboratively with Charles Hausman.

1. Whiteness also obviously works through mean people and ill-intended policies and practices. Indeed, as I watched voter-suppression tactics being employed during the U.S. presidential elections in 2012, I was vividly reminded of this.