Drawing from interview and participant observation data collected during an ethnographic study of Asian students and race in a multiracial urban school, I examine the school’s role in the racial construction and academic and social positioning of Asian students vis-à-vis Black and Latino students. I analyze the subjective categories and racial paradigms through which adult members of the school community understood minority students as normatively differentiated racial subjects. I also examine the school’s role in giving material structure to racial categories through formal and informal practices that reinforced racial stereotypes, social divisions, and academic disparities. Overwhelmingly, I found that teachers and staff simultaneously utilized a color-blind discourse that denied the significance of race in shaping school life and advanced dual tropes of the Asian model minority and Black and Brown oppositional and/or deficient minority. Despite purporting ideals of color-blind equality, teachers and staff generally gave expression to unequal notions of Asian-ness, Blackness, and Latino-ness and privileged Asian students who aligned with model minority expectations over Black and Latino students. While a minority of teachers and staff attempted to redress these dynamics, they were institutionally unsupported in their efforts. The implications for educational equity were significant, as the positive racialization of Asian students reinforced hierarchy and stratification among Asian and non-Asian youth as natural functions of a meritocratic system, ultimately masking the reality of low educational quality experienced by all students in a struggling school.

Asian American students attend increasingly diverse schools, yet scholarship on their experiences typically considers them in isolation, leading to a group-level emphasis rather than a focus on the relational processes that give ‘Asian’ meaning as a social and educational construction and social location. Building on theories of racialization, I study an urban context where multi-group ethnic and racial relations are negotiated. My dissertation examines how Asian American and Black students, as well as staff, engaged in discourses and practices that reproduced patterns of inequality among groups of students of color in a high-poverty school that was 99% non-White, but where Asian Americans comprised almost half the student body. This research clarifies how positive but conditional notions of Asian-ness were created through and against negative ideas of Blackness, in particular. Staff generally contrasted engaged Asian American students with oppositional Black youth, despite the diversity of students’ aspirations and performance. While some contested these constructions, many students acted in ways that reinforced them. These biased perceptions ultimately led to greater support for Asians American students, who expressed a stronger sense of belonging to and ownership of the school than non- Asians. My work examines formal and informal stratification among racial minority youth and elucidates the ideologies and mechanisms that normalized it. Despite their academic heterogeneity, urban Asian American students were privileged through a re-inscription of the model minority myth that imputes a cultural basis for Asian American educational success, while Black students were interpreted through negative stereotypes and expectations. This dissertation highlights the costs of Asian American students’ privilege in this context and draws attention to the continued marginalization of racial minority students. It argues that the model minority trope and the trope of the oppositional and deficient Black subject were bound together in the schooling of Asian American and Black students. It reveals the power of the myth to shape how all students are positioned in a racial hierarchy, thus giving insight into racialization itself.