The Dimensions of Racialization and the Inner-City School

The articles in this issue together articulate the varied ways in which inequality and urban education intersect and interact. Woven throughout is a common denominator that binds these particular investigations—the concept of race . Heretofore, scholarly analyses of race and educational inequality have reached heterogeneous conclusions: from race as a reified identity correlated with educational disparities, to urban education as an institution that promotes virulent ideologies, to racialized patterns of interaction that reproduce educational stratification. We draw upon these articles to synthesize these perspectives and articulate the relationship between urban education and race as an ongoing feedback loop: race (re)produces the phenomena of urban education, while urban education (re)forms race. The intertwining of these two reproduces both the dominant meanings of race and the hierarchical location of racial groups in the social order across five key domains: ideologies, institutions, interests, identities, and interactions.