Racial Formation and Success among Korean High School Students

This article ethnographically examines the relationship between success, racial identity, and racial formation among Korean students in one New Jersey public high school. Using Racial Formation theory (Omi & Winant, [1986. Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge]; Winant, [1994. Racial conditions: Politics, theory, comparisons. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press]), the author demonstrates how students at this particular high school use competing racial projects of neutrality and visibility to embrace and/or contest the dominant, white notion of what it means to be an academically successful student. The findings emphasize the need to look beyond cultural explanations of success and failure to include an analysis of the ways that schools themselves affect the constantly shifting terrain of racial formation.