ABSTRACT
With Marita’s permission, we will look at another instructive interaction from her class. In the transcript below, all of the participants, including Marita, are African American. We have chosen this interaction to challenge assumptions of sameness; that is, a frequent assumption is that if participants are all White or all Black, they share ways of seeing and valuing common to their race, including common worlds with consistent norms for identities and ways of relating. This particular transcript demonstrates the limitations of this monolithic view of race. The transcript illustrates how race is complicated by issues of social status and identity, and how those issues interrelate to create and disrupt various alignments among participants. These shifting alignments are the daily social activity in classrooms that either furthers or inhibits learning.
