J Youth Adolescence (2017) 46:2391–2394 DOI 10.1007/s10964-017-0758-5

BOOK REVIEW

Carla Shedd: Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2015, 217 pp, ISBN: 978-0-87154-796-5 Caitlin Taylor Stanfel

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Received: 15 September 2017 / Accepted: 16 September 2017 / Published online: 6 October 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

In Unequal City: Race, School, and Perceptions of Injustice, Carla Shedd emphasizes the idea that the paths youth take in Chicago every day matter a great deal; your address might define your future, and there may be unintended consequences because of race and place. Unequal City delves into the minds and lives of youth in Chicago to understand how often they face obstacles travelling to and from school, or even while they sit in classrooms. According to Shedd, the typical American adolescent learns as much from their way between their homes and schools as they learn in school about their identity, social inequality, and authority embedded in society’s social structure. Shedd discusses the observation that life in America is shaped by a well-established racial hierarchy, and Unequal City tries to make sense of how adolescents reconcile their position on this hierarchy with their perceptions of equality and their life experiences; what is normal for these youth is affected by their individual place in a larger social structure. Their emerging recognition of different kinds of discrimination, coupled with their sense of where they fall on the hierarchy of social and structural advantage, is a crucial step in their adolescent rite of passage. While this book was primarily designed to educate society on youth’s perceptions of social and criminal injustice—perceptions most often studied in adults—Shedd now hopes that her work will encourage researchers to broaden their exclusive focus on courts, jail, and police and begin to associate schools with these penalizing institutions. Shedd argues that schools, and the daily

* Caitlin Taylor Stanfel [email protected] 1

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

journeys taken by students to get there, influence how young people experience equality and inequality. As an experienced sociologist and criminal justice expert, Carla Shedd conducted her field research on students from four Chicago public high schools: Lincoln Park High, Payton College Prep, Tilden Career Community Academy, and Harper High. These four schools were selected primarily on the basis of their racial composition and neighborhood settings so as to provide readers with four distinct contexts. Shedd used these unique environments to illustrate that young people daily navigate a racially ordered geography of opportunity wherein the resources are distributed by race, class, and zip code. Shedd utilizes both quantitative and qualitative data to magnify the voices of young people, and her work builds a strong case for why social scientists and policymakers should focus on the home and school contexts to understand how perceptions of inequality are formed by the youth’s racially divergent worlds and their interaction with authority figures. Shedd urges that it is increasingly important to study these interactions now, when under the pretense of establishing safety, schools have increasingly become part of a universal carceral apparatus. To initially engage the audience and introduce a central theme of Unequal City, Shedd begins Chapter 1 by discussing a 2006 episode from a highly popular syndicated tabloid talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, that featured students from Shedd’s research. Oprah wanted to observe these schools and use their vastly different settings to reveal the disparities in educational opportunities and available resources. Shedd referenced the episode to show that students in the city of Chicago are committed to a separate and unequal education simply because of where they live as well as to present an essential theme of her book: relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is the way people compare

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their plight with similarly situated others—an individual must have a conception of justice to have a conception of injustice. Shedd uses this theory of relative deprivation to illustrate the significance of how adolescents’ perceptions of themselves and the larger social world are shaped by their daily interactions with others, particularly as they travel back and forth from school. Shedd further explains how Chicago’s streets are defined by a history of racial and class stratification, and what is particularly interesting to Shedd is how the discrepancy in resources and opportunities resulting from these stratifications affects Chicago’s youth. Geography of opportunity, or more truthfully “geography of inequality,” Shedd explains, results from the fact that adolescents have to traverse social and physical terrain both inside and outside of public schools—forcing them to cross boundaries of race, class, and neighborhood; and how adolescents navigate this geography has a significant impact on their perceptions of social and criminal injustice. “Perceived injustice” measures young people’s attitudes about social and structural disadvantage, and the key objective of Shedd’s study was to explore how high school students from different social, racial, and economic backgrounds perceive injustice along a gradient that separates along racial and ethnic lines. To open Chapter 2, Shedd proposes the idea that the journeys adolescents take between school and home, whether safe or dangerous, are a significant force in the lives of America’s inner-city youth. To illustrate this concept, she uses the case of Derrion Albert—a 16-year-old inner-city teenager who was murdered when he accidentally walked into the path of an escalating fight between rival factions of a neighborhood. His case serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of crossing neighborhood boundaries for educational purposes. Shedd spends a substantial amount of this chapter discussing the history of school desegregation, and states that even after Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the racial segregation of schools, integration was still only minimally successful in Chicago. Shedd elaborates that because of “white flight”—Whites moving from the city to the suburbs and from public to private schools—Chicago’s black and Hispanic students were left behind in Chicago’s public school system. This discrepancy in populations would have a major impact on the life chances and life trajectories of the black and Hispanic students left behind. These educational changes, along with residential changes, would lead to school and housing instability, and as Shedd stresses throughout the chapter, when social cohesion is interrupted, danger can arise. Shedd also discusses how the racial and ethnic composition of schools has a significant impact on school policies and the resulting resource allocation. For example, compared to schools that educated predominantly White students, schools with a majority of students of color had lessexperienced teachers, poorer facilities, and a lack of

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textbooks and libraries. In sum, Shedd uses Chapter 2 to stress that Chicago is a racially stratified city—a place where employment trends, housing policies, and school conditions have long exposed and perpetuated the boundary between Whites and African Americans. In Chapter 3, Shedd examines schools as an influential institution for teens, and begins by detailing a trip to one of the four Chicago public high schools. By discussing the racial divide of the students and the police presence, Shedd is intent on painting a picture for the reader so they can better visualize and understand the culture of the school. Shedd describes an interview she conducted with a female, African American student while visiting an inner-city school. The student provides a statement summarizing the dynamic of the school environment: “diverse but not integrated.” Shedd explains that although different racial and ethnic groups walk down the same hallways, they do not necessarily relate to or interact with each other. This observation introduces an unfortunate paradox of trying to increase racial diversity but ultimately diminishing social integration. Shedd then delves into the concept of the racial–spatial divide—a structural mechanism capturing the resources available to young people—by recounting her interviews with students from the four different Chicago public schools. Shedd explains that where students fall on the racial–spatial divide clearly effects how they perceive opportunity and injustice in areas such as education, employment, and access to quality housing. What emerges from Shedd’s interviews in all four schools is the predominant role of race and place in shaping the students’ worldviews and perceptions of injustice. For example, Shedd explains that students who attend primarily black schools and live in an “extremely isolated” environment will have less knowledge about structural inequality and less awareness that they are likely to receive lesser treatment because of their race; they have a smaller frame of reference with which to experience (personally or vicariously) injustice and relative deprivation. After her detailed interviews with the students, Shedd concludes that instead of providing students with different, beneficial opportunities, spending time with people of different races more often seems to leave youth of color perceiving themselves as deprived or subordinated relative to White youth. In Chapter 4, Shedd explores how pervasive prisonlike conditions have become common in our educational system and discusses how students identify with these mechanisms of control, such as metal detectors, pat downs, ID tags, etc. Shedd attributes schools’ resemblance to correctional facilities to the adoption of zero tolerance policies; these practices initiated a “universal carceral apparatus” that undermines the educational functions of these institutions and instead views the students through a criminal gaze. However, the irony of the situation, as Shedd points out, is

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that these zero tolerance policies and the accompanying police presence have not translated into safer learning conditions or less disruptive behavior. From the interviews Shedd conducted, she states that the students actually feel that the security guards escalate conflicts, rather than making them feel safe; the students instead feel imprisoned. These mechanisms of control suggest suspicion of certain groups of youth, and this environment operates under the assumption that adolescents are criminally inclined and deviant. In response to this growing universal carceral apparatus, Shedd stresses the need for “restorative justice,” rather than the implementation of get tough policies. The design of restorative justice is to address or prevent conflict before it escalates and to guide the management of conflict after it occurs. Therefore, authoritative institutions should make it a goal to convey a sense of fair treatment and procedural justice. In sum, Shedd explains that the culture of the public school system is socializing urban adolescents to interact with agents of the law inside their schools, thereby conditioning them to interact with police outside the school, however, not as students, but as suspects. Chapter 5 explores how urban youth’s experiences with injustice shape their opinions of authority figures. Shedd opens the chapter with a quote from a student, illustrating one of the central themes of the chapter: adultification. The quote reads, “[Getting locked up by the police] affects [kids’ lives] because they have already experienced what adults would experience. I think they should have their childhood and not be having it taken away with one little incident” (Shedd 2015, p. 120). This quote demonstrates how some police interactions, whether warranted or unwarranted, mark an early exit from adolescence. Adultifcation, Shedd explains, is a process that transitions adolescents to the realm of adult-like experiences, responsibilities, and consequences because of their identity or behavior. Further, Shedd stresses that officially recorded criminal activity can lead to “cumulative disadvantage”—a piling up of negative experiences and failures that make it difficult for a person to succeed. Increased and invasive police contact not only marked the “end of innocence” for these students, but also has unfortunately disrupted any basic notions they previously held about the police being a resource available to “serve and protect” them and their communities. For example, several students who live in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods believe that they do not receive quality service from the police. Shedd recounts several statements from students that claim it takes police hours to respond to a call; therefore, only a few students are actually willing to call the police if they have a problem. Shedd also addresses the issue of the students’ varying perceptions of police officers’ racial biases. Through personal or vicarious encounters with police, Shedd explains that youth have developed well-formed opinions on officers’ prejudices and

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practices that help illuminate why police may view them as criminal or suspicious; race, skin tone, age, gender, appearance combined with place and peer group become important in their assessment and rationalizations of police behavior. In the book’s last chapter, Shedd discusses the overall findings and conclusions of her field research of the four Chicago public schools. Shedd states that her findings ultimately uncover how perceptions of both social and criminal injustice differ across the racial and spatial contexts of Chicago’s youth. For example, African American and Hispanic students perceive greater social and criminal injustice than do their White and Asian American counterparts. Youth’s perceptions of social injustice provide insight into their beliefs about their chances of upward mobility in the community, and their perceptions of criminal injustice capture their opinions about police treatment and how deeply it is affected by negative stereotypes. Shedd’s findings illustrate that Black and Hispanic youth generally believe that their race-ethnicity reduces their chances for upward mobility in education and occupation. In regards to the concept of relative deprivation, Shedd concludes that the racial composition of a school greatly shapes students’ perceptions and experiences. Shedd explains that increased school diversity may lead to higher perceptions of injustice among African American and Hispanic youth; this speaks to the protective properties of social isolation, which can inhibit youth from confirming their disadvantaged position in the community. Shedd ends the chapter by stressing an important implication of the universal carceral apparatus: just as schools are beginning to resemble prisons, the youth contained in these spaces are in danger of internalizing these negative racial and class stereotypes and fulfilling the expectations that authorities project onto them. Carla Shedd’s book, Unequal City, delves into the lives of inner-city youth and explores the ways in which these vulnerable Chicago residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. Specifically, it examines how high school students from different social, racial, and economic backgrounds experience police interaction and recognize injustice along a gradient that separates on racial and ethnic lines. Unequal City also attempts to uncover the driving forces behind, and consequences of, policies that have connected the school system with the penal system. To address these themes, Shedd provides revelatory excerpts from interviews she conducted with these inner-city students at Chicago public schools and from them extrapolates enlightening insight on their perceptions of social and criminal injustice. Shedd argues that these perceptions offer a substantial understanding into young people’s perspectives at a formative stage when their decisions and resultant behaviors may drastically determine the

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trajectory of their lives. Therefore, Shedd urges—under the concept of “restorative justice”—it is important to prevent or address conflict now, in this phase of the youth’s lives, before it escalates or alters their trajectory. Shedd states that educators, researchers, cultural critics, and politicians often lament the problems of youth today without devoting any serious time to understanding their motivations or experiences. Although that argument may not be welcomed, it does help to explain why aggressive security measures in schools tend to be ineffective (see Tanner-Smith and Fisher 2016) and why even after-school programs intended to help at-risk youth tend to not reach desired effects (see Kremer et al. 2015). Perhaps even more controversially, her study also helps to explain how racial diversity in schools does not necessarily erase black students’ perceptions of equity (see Bottiani et al. 2016). Therefore, with her field research, Shedd hopes to encourage policymakers and society alike to start considering the home and school contexts in understanding youth’s perceptions of equality. By amplifying the voices of young people, this study has the potential to influence a more sympathetic and rehabilitative approach when it comes to handling, and listening, to inner-city youth.

J Youth Adolescence (2017) 46:2391–2394 Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of Interest ing interests.

The author declares that they have no compet-

References Bottiani, J.H., Bradshaw, C.P., & Mendelson, T. (2016). Inequality in Black and White high school students’ perceptions of school support: an examination of race in context. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45(6), 1176–1191. Kremer, K.P., Maynard, B.R., Polanin, J.R., Vaughn, M.G., & Sarteschi, C.M. (2015). Effects of after-school programs with at-risk youth on attendance and externalizing behaviors: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 44 (3), 616–636. Shedd, C. (2015). Unequal city: race, schools, and perceptions of injustice. New York, NY: Russel Sage Foundation. Tanner-Smith, E.E., & Fisher, B.W. (2016). Visible school security measures and student academic performance, attendance, and postsecondary aspirations. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45 (1), 195–210.