Introduction

Early in my fieldwork, I spent the lunch period wandering the school grounds, getting a sense of who hung out where. I was immediately recognizable as an outsider to many students, but given the number of student teachers, classroom observers, guest speakers, and other campus visitors, my presence was never questioned. Yet I could feel curious eyes upon me as I moved through the school’s social space. Over time, I formed connections with various groups that I could hang out with and talk to at lunch, but I never completely lost my discomfort walking alone through the school grounds at lunchtime, and particularly past two large, predominantly European American groups of students: one in the school’s central courtyard and the other in the Park. It was only later that I learned that these groups were as salient to other students as they were to me, and that they comprised some of the most elite white teenagers at Bay City High School.

As a large, multiracial urban high school, Bay City High differed from many smaller suburban schools in lacking a hegemonic popular crowd that forged trends, tastes, and social alliances. But the two groups I noticed at lunchtime were highly visible among the school’s European American youth, based on the spaces they claimed on the school grounds. These students were sometimes called preppies (or jocks if they were involved in athletics); at other times they were simply referred to as popular, a term that was usually not complimentary, for it was associated with social exclusion and negative evaluation of others. Such students were ambitious, high-achieving, and deeply involved in the school’s institutional structure via prestigious extracurricular activities such as the student council, the school newspaper and the yearbook, and white-dominated sports like soccer and lacrosse. Although these teenagers were genuinely interested in enriching their high school experience through challenging classes and time-consuming after-school activities, they also knew that excelling in such domains would strengthen their applications to the selective colleges and universities to which they aspired.