ABSTRACT
In the last two chapters, you met the Vietnamese and Sudanese families. In this chapter, I introduce two white families and describe their experiences in the inner-city environment. rough my interviews with the teachers and community members, I learned that Bualo has two “class systems”— the “overclass” (the middle and upper middle class), who tend to send their children to the private schools or the best schools in the public system, and the “underclass” (the working class, poor, and/or minorities), who can only aord to send their children to neighborhood public schools. e two white families we will see here, being white but not middle class, belonged to the “underclass” system. eir children attended the declining inner-city schools with Africans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans in Bualo’s impoverished West Side.
