In light of recent events of racialized violence across the United States, there has been renewed calls for schools to address issues of racism in head-on ways. In these efforts, teachers have engaged in critical reflection on their teaching practices and curricular materials. In doing so, however, they often overlook an important pedagogical tool for fostering critical conversations about race: the school space itself. In this article, the author presents spatial ethnographic data from a larger immersive study of racial pedagogies at a school in South Central Los Angeles. In order to address the overlooked value of the school space as pedagogue, the article focuses on the highly racialized hallway iconography present at the school. In particular, the article interrogates the racial politics embedded in the content and theorizes a means of understanding school design choices as a form of public pedagogy. Building on Torin Monahan’s theory of “built pedagogy,” the author puts forth a theory of the “built pedagogical environment.”

Scholars have long sought to examine the ways in which urban schools serve as sites of social reproduction and thus, contribute to racial and other social inequalities in the society writ large. To date, research has emphasized the deleterious effects of harmful pedagogies, unrepresentative curricula, unequal access to family resources, problematic sorting practices and school segregation. This large and influential body of scholarship has yielded many important insights about educational problems, but has often framed studies of inequality as being between Whites and people of color. The result of this dominant framing is that we understand less about the machinations of racial inequality between racially minoritized groups. My study addresses this gap by studying one school site over four consecutive school years, including two years prior to the killing of George Floyd and two years after. The study focuses on two primary research questions: (1) What are the sources and mechanisms of Black-Latinx inequalities in a school tailor-made for equitable education across racial lines? and (2) How does a Latinx-centric politics of coalition shape how the school, as an organization, conceptualizes of and responds to racial (in)justice? These questions allowed the study to attend to a sociological puzzle: a self- described social justice school with dedicated teachers, a community-grounded origin story, and a 100% non-White population that contains racial disparities across myriad academic and social dimensions. To examine this puzzle, I utilized observations, in-depth interviews (n=93), and document analysis. Though operating from a quasi-inductive stand point, the project has three intellectual genealogies: racial politics, anti-Blackness, and organizational theory. Findings include a climate of anti-Blackness at school and in the community, characterized by the failure to acknowledge and address Black suffering. Further, a Latinx-centric view of social justice and racial solidarity politics consistently foreclosed opportunities for meaningful organizational change. The insights from this study have significant implications for research on education, race, and organizations. It also contains important lessons for practice and policy, ranging from classroom instruction to school leadership to diversity work to district, state, and federal policymaking.