Learning War/Learning Race

Abstract

The tragedy of September 11th produced immense controversy and re-ignited simmering culture wars in the media over the presentation of these events in American schools, or what students should know. The ethnographic research conducted with fourth-grade students in a public school in Brooklyn, New York, side-stepped this debate in order to contribute to it. Specifically, the goal was to capture what children do in fact know through an investigation of their modes of speaking and writing about these events. What figured most prominently in the students’ talk and writing was their racialization of a far-away and ill-defined enemy. By showing how this racialization was also evident in the students’ interactions and friendship, and contextualizing these patterns in the racial (dis)order of the United States, I suggest that the events of September 11th and the war on terrorism have produced a culture of fear that will have lasting, if as yet unintelligible, effects on the racial dynamics of the United States.