ABSTRACT
While John Ogbu did not engage the voluminous scholarship on caring or caring theory (e.g., Danin, 1994; Fisher & Tronto, 1990; Gilligan, 1982; Noblit, 1994; Noddings, 1984, 1992), neither have caring theorists engaged Ogbu’s research and theorizing on U.S. ethnic minorities. Such engagement would have been mutually beneficial. For Ogbu, the etiology of oppositionality might have been placed more squarely on schools, where the micro-political dynamics between majority teachers and minority students, through a discourse on caring, reinscribe the larger social relations of power about which he wrote. In addition, the predicate in Ogbu’s argument about oppositionality might have been that oppositional youth reject not achievement or education, but rather, schooling. By schooling, I refer to a system of unequal power relations in which schools objectify or treat students and their families like objects. They are done to rather than with. Indeed, Ogbu (1974) accorded importance to this process of objectification when he referred to relations between school officials and minority youth in terms of a “patron-client relationship” that is in turn linked to broader historical, cultural, and structural factors that generate school failure.
