ABSTRACT
The concepts of colorblindness, interest-convergence, racial realism, and white privilege are used to explain how federal mandates and common school policies and practices, such as tracking, traditional curricula, teacher classroom practices, and student surveillance, sustain a racially hostile environment for students of color in majority white suburban schools. Critical Race Theory is used to interpret the students’ perceptions of their experiences in majority white suburban schools. As a theoretical lens, it provides a historical filter for explicating and analyzing past and present contexts that create specific learning environments. The concept of curriculum as ‘intellectual property’ is used to explicate reinstantiations of white privilege and supremacy in suburban schools. Curriculum as intellectual property or ‘curriculum property’ is the means by which the materials, programs, rules, structures, and pedagogies of the school reinstantiate white privilege.
