Race at the Top

Abstract

Race at the Top addresses topical subjects about parental anxiety, racial discrimination, and migrant assimilation in an upper-middle-class suburb where White and Asian-origin families monopolize a high achieving public high school, Woodcrest. Behind the town’s progressive façade and without overt racialization, White parents mobilize to advantage their children through school policies that curtail the academics stressed by Asian-origin parents. By seeing this clash through the frame of American assimilation theories, this otherwise novel and well-written book does not address it as biopolitical clash of class created by the expansion of the global upper-middle-class, a plausible alternative hypothesis.