ABSTRACT
Identity politics are often discussed in ways that suggest only minority groups, particularly African-Americans, Hispanics, and so on, promote and profit from identity politics. They propagate these politics to their interests, and they are chiefly the ones affected by these politics in terms of notions of fragmentation of identity and so on. It is the author's contention that current tendencies towards essentialism in the analysis of race relations significantly inhibit dynamic understandings of the operation of race in daily life, and race-based politics in education and society. The theoretical and methodological issues concerning race are complex, and therefore require comparative and relational approaches to analysis and intervention in unequal relations in schools. Gender differences partially influenced and modified the racially inflected ways in which teachers evaluated, diagnosed, labelled, and tracked their students.
