Danger in the Safety Zone: Notes on Race, Resentment, and the Discourse of Crime, Violence, and Suburban Security

Contemporary sociology of education theorists writing on the topic of racial antagonism have tended to focus too narrowly on sites within the classroom and the school (Giroux, 1994). Insights that might be gained from the study of popular media-television, film, and popular music-and their influence on racial formation and racial antagonism have been forfeited. Yet, paradoxically, it is in popular culture that racial identities and interests are constructed, reworked, and coordinated and then infused into the expressive and instrumental orders of school life. American middleclass white youth and adults know more about inner-city black people through long distanced but familiar media images than through personal everyday interaction or through representations offered in textbooks.