Abstract
In this carefully crafted and theoretically sophisticated study, Mary E. Thomas offers a much-needed critique of the limitations of multiculturalism to fight racism, sexism, misogyny, and violence in schools. Thomas interviewed 26 African American, Anglo, Armenian, Filipina, and Latina girls in 2005 at a Los Angeles high school after a race riot ended in a police lock-down. As the young women wondered why they all could not “just get along,” Thomas listened closely to their narratives and detected an underlying racism and sexism in their comments. Thomas deployed psychoanalytic theory to interpret these seeming contradictions.
Thomas offers a refreshing critique of two mainstays of neoliberal thought, multiculturalism and agency. She introduces what she calls banal multiculturalism and theorizes its negative effect on girlhood studies and educational policy. Thomas calls for training a wider, global lens on these concepts in order to see that centuries of colonialist, racist, and misogynist oppression cannot simply be overcome by offering up multiculturalism and, I would add, its cousin diversity.
Thomas masterfully navigates this argument through her five substantive chapters, drawing deeply from her empirical examples: the narratives of the girls themselves. Chapter Two demonstrates the ways in which her participants neatly use ideas of multiculturalism to divide themselves into groups by ethnicity and race. Instead of masking over this “opaque racism” and writing it off as naiveté, Thomas hovers there to uncover how the promise of multiculturalist futures actually clouds the ability to garner a critical race perspective. The young women can more easily avoid the confrontations and contradictions of racism by operating in (unconscious) apoliticized, ahistoric framings of hopes for harmless affiliation and counterfeit rapport.
In the next chapter on the sexual attraction of racism, Thomas introduces the Freudian concept of condensation, or the unconscious mingling of many characteristics so as to be able to highlight certain ones and suppress others. In the girls’ interview data, they claim, “Boys are stupid!” (for fighting), but also express a sense of relief—at not having to fight; that boys, by race and ethnicity, protect “their” girls—thus condensing several ideas about feminine passivity, protection, violence, fear, desire, and racism.
Thomas notes in Chapter Four how her participants adamantly separate themselves by race and ethnicity into different spaces on the high school campus and beyond, and participate in the surveillance that compels these separations. Simultaneously, the young women express many feelings about these segregations—fear, nervousness, anger, pain, and discomfort. Using the psychoanalytic tool of healthy paranoia, Thomas untangles the participants’ narratives to argue that identity-formation requires a certain othering. Again, the author adeptly attends to the role of subjectivity in spatial understanding, and urges schools to do more than just rearrange bodies in their multicultural programming. Her work supports the notion that addressing the racism, misogyny, and violence in adolescent school spaces will require much more than the celebration of stereotyped ethnic holidays.
Chapter Five addresses the development of identity and subjectivity that occurs in the family narratives of the young women. Many of the interviewees related stories of immigration, first-generation parents, and the uses of discrimination and racism to develop and maintain a singular racial or ethnic identity within the family. Thomas refers to the productive nature of these, often unconscious, conflicts. At once, the young women continue to voice a desire for racial and ethnic unity, and display (either spoken or not) how this is impossible if they are to maintain their racial/ethnic identities carved through psychic technologies of difference. Carefully articulated, her participants’ narratives drive her analyses that push race and ethnic studies, girlhood studies, and theories of education to move beyond the fantasy of multicultural unity and simplistic references to agentic choices youth may make.
In the end, her study participants explain what they want from school—to be safe, to feel that the school is interested in their education, and that their voices are heard. Paradoxically, the author notes that the young women often confuse surveillance and control with being cared for and attended to. Thomas notices that after the riot many students called for more police presence at the school even though most were students of color well aware of the history of racist policing in Los Angeles. She theorizes this collusion with a racist state against their own best interests as a caution against always taking study participants’ words at face value, as a call for a deeper look at what unconscious motives may be at work, and in a fascinating turn, an argument against putting the feminist burden of agency on their shoulders. That is to say, the theme of the neoliberal empowered agentic girl who will lead us into the multicultural future where we all just get along, so prevalent in contemporary girls’ studies, must be abandoned for a more subtle understanding of the dilemmas of formulating subjectivities in a post-identity politics (failed identity politics?) setting.
The innovative analyses offered from this study herald the centrality of new work by new theorists. No longer can we simply offer notions of intersectionality, diversity, or agency as a remedy for our misogynistic, racist education policies, or for that matter, in our struggles for feminist, anti-racist, pro-sex, violence-free communities. Each chapter demonstrates the productivity of staying with conflict and “working with it” instead of burying or ignoring it.
This challenging text may be useful in advanced undergraduate seminars but definitely in graduate courses in gender and women’s studies, education, sociology of race and ethnicities, qualitative methodology, and contemporary theory. The adept application of psychoanalytic theory to decode qualitative interview data is additionally instructive. Thomas adds an exceptional and provocative study to our research on the politics in the urban U.S. schoolyard setting.