Introduction

During my research at Bay City High School, I got to know Sweet Pea, an outgoing African American girl, rather well, for she was in several of the classes I observed, sometimes as a student, at other times as a student aide to the teacher, and occasionally even as a guest speaker. Given her high profile in these contexts, Sweet Pea was well known and well liked by teenagers of all races and seemed comfortable in almost any situation. I was therefore surprised by her reply when I asked her whether she ever spent time in the Park, the open grassy area where many of the school’s nonmainstream white youth – skaters, granolas, rastas, and punks, among others – hung out. She answered, “I went to the Park one time and everybody was getting arrested over there,” and then added, “You know, people be stealing people’s money off their backpacks, so I don’t go there.” Sweet Pea’s apprehensiveness about the Park struck me because I had heard similar sentiments during my conversations with European American teenagers regarding the Hill, a primarily African American hangout area – including the same expression of anxiety about thefts from students’ backpacks.

These comments confirmed what I had already observed from my first day of fieldwork: Bay City High School, like many multiracial American high schools, was a racially divided space. But at the same time, as I quickly learned from my work with European American teenagers, it was also a stylistically divided space, with the Park primarily associated with nonmainstream white styles and the school’s courtyard primarily associated with mainstream white styles. To be sure, these symbolic boundaries were more ideological than real, for social groups and their geographies had porous borders, and students of both stylistic orientations (as well as those of other ethnoracial groups) hung out in both spaces. Yet teenagers were highly attuned to the rigid ideological divisions that organized the school’s landscape.