Abstract
While more is known about how racially minoritized youth in urban settings turn to activism to counter marginalizing schooling practices, less is known about what this looks like in suburban schools and communities. I engage with scholarship on fugitivity and critical youth studies to examine the issues that shape and drive racially minoritized youth’s activism at a suburban school in Iowa. My analysis examines how participants engaged in activism to fight for a more equitable and just schooling environment. I unpack how youth of color made sense of a school culture invested in ghosting and gaslighting when they voiced their grievances and mobilized for equity and justice. I also examine the tensions that youth wrestled with in their activism.
Introduction
In Freedom Dreams, R. D. G. Kelley (2002) asked, “What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?” (p. 8). This study explores these questions with racially minoritized youth activists at Meadowland High School (MHS, pseudonyms used throughout), a predominantly white and well-resourced suburban school located outside of Des Moines, Iowa. Despite its commitment to equity (e.g., after-school affinity spaces, district equity director), racially minoritized youth at MHS were often left wanting more from their school. As Clarissa, a Black student, shared with me, “Overall, the message is that youth are fed up.” Clarissa’s critique reflected a frustration with a school that, despite expressing pride in their ethnic and racial diversity and commitment to equity, struggled to live up to the needs of racially minoritized youth. I couple Clarissa’s observation with Kelley’s questions to examine what racially minoritized youth fought against and for through their activism at MHS.
In this youth-centered critical ethnographic study (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022), I examine racially minoritized youth’s grievances and activism to hold their school accountable for their marginalizing experiences. As such, this study is guided by the following question: How do suburban racially minoritized youth use activism to fight for a more equitable and just school? I draw from participant observations, formal and informal interviews, and document collection (e.g., student work) to learn from 12 racially minoritized youth. While this study entails the participation of Asian, Black, and Latinx youth, I use “racially minoritized” not to homogenize but rather to speak about these students as a collective. There is no question that the youth of this study came to their activism shaped by their experiences and identities, but this study does not examine those important particularities; instead, this study is about how youth from different ethnic and racially minoritized identities came together to advocate for a more equitable and just school.
While a great deal is known about racially minoritized youth’s activism in and out of urban schools (Ginwright et al., 2006; Kirshner, 2015), less is known about what this looks like in suburban contexts. Diamond et al. (2021) observe that the lack of focus on suburban schools is partially attributed to how policymakers and researchers have constructed suburban and urban schools, which has led some to believe that many of the pressing issues educational researchers examine are uniquely urban problems. Yet, urban schools do not have a monopoly on inequality. Scholars have challenged renderings of suburban schools that all too often depict them as “good” places for children to learn by reframing them as sites of contestation and exclusion (see, for example, Lewis-McCoy et al., 2023; Miller & Schugurensky, 2025; Rhodes & Warkentien, 2017; Warikoo, 2022). This nuanced framing highlights how suburban schools, including those with equity commitments, perpetuate inequality through colorevasive and exclusionary schooling policies and practices (see, for example, Handsman & Siegler, 2025; Irby, 2022; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Lewis-McCoy, 2014). This reality takes on added significance at a time when racially minoritized youth are remaking the demographic landscape of suburban schools.
While white youth represent the largest bloc of students attending suburban schools, their numbers have fallen to 40 percent of total enrollments (Frankenberg & Siegel-Hawley, 2024, p. 19). As such, racially minoritized students now constitute a majority of those attending suburban schools. According to Frankenberg and Siegel-Hawley (2024), “Latinx students are the next largest suburban group, making up a third of the enrollment, while the Black enrollment share declined to about 15%. Asian students are approximately 8% and multiracial students represent 4.5%” (p. 19). It is important to expand the educational gaze to suburban schools to understand how inequality shapes racially minoritized youth’s desires and efforts for equitable and just schools.
This study took place amid a local and national educational policy environment wherein lawmakers sought to quell efforts to advance equity and justice in public schools. For example, in Iowa, where this study took place, conservative elected officials passed a state law in 2021 aimed at restricting the work educators could do regarding issues of race, gender, and sexuality because such efforts were deemed “divisive” and tantamount to “indoctrination” (Richardson, 2021). While this dynamic was not originally envisioned to be part of this study, I could not ignore it, as it impacted participants’ ability to learn about issues they deemed important and their desires for justice in and out of their school. While these types of policies have had a chilling effect on K–12 educators’ ability to engage their students on issues they care about (Hambacher et al., 2025; Rodriguez et al., 2025), these contexts have “not altogether suppressed political activity among young people” (Terriquez et al., 2020, p. 1). Youth in these contexts have turned to activism to challenge these legislative efforts (Castillo et al., 2025; Castro et al., 2024).
In what follows, I provide a literature review that brings together scholarship across the fields of suburban education, youth voice, and activism. Additionally, I rely on scholarship on fugitivity (Coles et al., 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013) and critical youth studies (Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2014) to frame and analyze youth’s activism. I then provide an overview of my fieldwork and data analysis. Lastly, I report on three findings. First, I unpack how racially minoritized youth at MHS made sense of a school culture invested in ghosting and gaslighting when they voiced their grievances and mobilized for equity and justice. Second, I highlight some of their activist efforts to underscore their desires for adult accountability and solidarity. The last finding examines the tensions participants wrestled with in their activism.
Literature Review
In this section, I bring together research on racially minoritized youth at the intersection of suburban education, civic education, and youth voice. I first engage with scholarship on racially minoritized youth in the field of suburban education to highlight their schooling experiences in these contexts. I then draw from the literature on civic education and youth voice to examine how racially minoritized youth advocate and mobilize through activism for equity and justice in schools. Given the lack of research on these issues in suburban contexts, I also include academic literature on these issues in urban schools.
Racially Minoritized Youth in Suburban Schools
The increased presence of racially minoritized youth in predominantly white suburban schools complicates their presumed academic benefits. As Chapman (2014) writes: While students of color in majority White schools have higher GPAs and rates of college attendance than their urban school peers, they suffer from racial anxiety, hostile school environments, and a lack of adult support in ways that significantly affect their schooling outcomes. (p. 323)
As such, a growing body of scholarship highlights the precarity that minoritized youth in suburban schools work to resist (see, for example, Carter, 2005; Chapman, 2014; Kelly, 2020; Rodriguez, 2020, 2023; Shirazi, 2018a). This reality reflects what Venzant Chambers (2022) calls the “racial opportunity cost.” In her work with academically successful Black and Latinx students, Venzant Chambers (2022) examines how schooling environments invested in whiteness negatively impact students’ identities that are reflected through psychosocial, community, and representational costs. Investments in what Venzant Chambers (2022) describes as “white racial logics” facilitate practices that work to marginalize racially minoritized youth in and out of the classroom (Drake, 2022; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Ochoa, 2013). For example, Ochoa’s (2013) work with Asian and Latinx youth in a suburban school in California examined how educators relied on deficit thinking to “academically profile” students. Meaning that educators’ racialized thinking led to beliefs and practices of Asian and Latinx communities that tracked them in and out of academic opportunities, such as access to honors and advanced placement (AP) courses.
These types of deficit practices can be further exacerbated when considering the schooling environment of suburban schools. For example, Carter’s (2005) work with Black and Latinx youth in a suburban school located outside of New York City underscored the important role that their identities and cultural practices played in helping them navigate their classes. Carter’s (2005) scholarship challenged deficit perspectives on Black and Latinx students by framing youth resistance as not oppositional to their education, but as a critique of schooling practices that failed to understand their cultural and linguistic worlds. Similarly, Rodriguez’s (2018) work with Latinx youth in a suburban high school outside of Chicago challenged deficit perceptions that associated Latinx youth’s silence in the classroom with academic disengagement. Latinx youth’s relationship with silence is best understood as a dynamic interplay shaped by race, space, and place that reflects the ways they were silenced by white youth and used silence as a survival mechanism. Moreover, Rodriguez’s (2020) research illustrated how schooling practices alongside how white youth surveilled Latinx youth’s bodies impacted how they navigated different academic and social spaces, ultimately positioning these students as visitors in their school. Similarly, in a study of Muslim youth in a Midwestern suburban school, Shirazi (2018b) examined the consequences of a principal’s decision to close a Muslim Student Alliance and how that primarily served to alienate Muslim students from the larger fabric of their school. Collectively, these studies speak to a schooling landscape that struggles to affirm and embrace the assets that racially minoritized youth bring to their schooling. In doing so, revealing the limits of predominantly white and well-resourced suburban schools.
Reframing Racially Minoritized Youth’s Political Participation
Given the focus of this study, this section brings a review of existing scholarship that challenges traditional understandings of what constitutes legitimate forms of political participation. More specifically, I weave together a review of scholarship on racially minoritized youth’s activism based on what is known in the fields of civic education and student voice.
Civic Education and Racially Minoritized Youth
The state of youth political participation in the US is often characterized as one in crisis. For some scholars, the lack of civic knowledge and participation reflects the “civic knowledge gap” (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1997), “civic opportunity gaps” (Kahne & Middaugh, 2009), or the “civic empowerment gap” (Levinson, 2012). This set of scholarship has been critiqued for having a narrow understanding of youth political knowledge and participation (Clay & Rubin, 2020; C. J. Cohen & Luttig, 2020; Mirra & Garcia, 2017, 2020; Sinclair et al., 2022). As Mirra and Garcia (2017) argue, it is important to challenge the “normative ideas that inform policy, practice, and research in civic education” (p. 139). Because even though “all schools teach citizenship,” it is important to ask, “What kind of citizenship?” (Westheimer, 2015, p. 97). Scholars have challenged the normative deficit framing of racially minoritized youth by underscoring the continued centering of whiteness in civic and social studies curricula (Duncan, 2023; Sánchez Loza, 2023; Vickery & Rodríguez, 2022; Woodson & Love, 2019). For example, in writing about Black students, Woodson and Love (2019) argue, “new conceptualizations of civic achievement and civic empowerment are needed if we hope to identify the community spaces and practices where Black kids feel empowered and in fact empowered to participate in the process of their own becoming” (p. 95).
Given these criticisms, scholars have argued for a more expansive understanding of racially minoritized youth’s political knowledge, socialization, and participation (Clay & Rubin, 2020; C. Cohen et al., 2018; Gadsden et al., 2019; Rubin, 2024). Clay and Rubin (2020) argue that racially minoritized youth witness “civic lessons” regularly through their lived experiences as racialized subjects. In working toward a more dynamic way of empowering racially minoritized students, C. Cohen et al. (2018) advocate for a “lived civics” approach that embraces their bodies of knowledge. Although scholars have a growing understanding of racially minoritized youth’s resistance to marginalizing schooling environments in their suburban schools, less is known about how they go from “complaints to action” (Kwon, 2008, p. 60).
Few studies have documented youth’s activist efforts in suburban contexts (Oto, 2023; Taines, 2012). In examining youth’s activism outside of Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Oto (2023) examines educators’ efforts to control their students. Oto’s analysis brings attention to adult-youth power dynamics coupled with educators’ interests in protecting their school’s image instead of being in solidarity with youth’s calls for racial justice. The lack of focus on documenting youth activism in suburban schools and communities is, in part, attributed to normative understandings regarding political participation and suburban schools. For example, in writing about the power of youth organizing, Rogers et al. (2012) write, “Affluent and suburban communities, on average, provide youth with access to more after-school activities and community organizations than low-income urban neighborhoods.” (p. 47). Yet, while many suburban schools do provide more after-school activities, one cannot assume that racially minoritized youth participate in them, and if they do, it is important to examine whether they consider them nurturing and empowering spaces.
Existing studies find suburban schools tend to foster environments in which racially minoritized youth do not feel emboldened to speak their truths (Checkoway et al., 2017; Rodriguez & González Ybarra, 2022; Sánchez Loza, 2021, 2023; Shirazi, 2018a; Wray-Lake & Abrams, 2020). As such, Sánchez Loza (2021) has examined the “hostile civic spaces” (p. 382) that racially minoritized youth in suburbia navigate. For example, Sánchez Loza’s (2023) research in two predominantly white suburban high schools in politically conservative communities in Ohio points to the disconnect between how white educators and students’ espoused commitment to neutrality reflected a promotion and defense of right-wing thinking. In this context, “neutrality is determined by whether it affirms or challenges conservative political worldviews” (Sánchez Loza, 2023, p. 574). As a result, the context for racially minoritized youth to learn about issues they care about is often mired in a culture of false equivalencies that protects and advances white students’ and teachers’ status quo views, bolstering whiteness and failing to foster spaces for critical conversations on social justice issues, much less considering the possibilities of how to enact change. For example, in their study of Latinx youth in suburban Colorado and Illinois, Rodriguez and González Ybarra (2022), examined how in the lead-up and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Latinx youth felt silenced by classroom experiences where white classmates espoused racist, sexist, and xenophobic rhetoric that often went unchecked by educators who believed it was important for “both sides” to share their perspectives.
Student Voice and Racially Minoritized Youth
Scholars have noted the academic and social benefits youth receive when educators in schools work to create positive environments for students’ voices to be considered (Hipolito-Delgado et al., 2022; Holquist & Walls, 2023; Kahne et al., 2022; D. L. Mitra, 2008). For example, in their analysis of student records and survey data collected by the Chicago Public Schools, Kahne et al. (2022) found that grades and attendance were higher in schools where students felt educators were responsive to their school-based critiques and needs. Additionally, in their survey analysis of Black and Latinx youth who participated in student voice programming in Denver Public Schools, Hipolito-Delgado et al. (2022) found that youth developed their sociopolitical identities through programming, which in turn shaped their sociopolitical actions in and out of school. Yet, despite the benefits of student voice initiatives, challenges and tensions exist in working toward embracing student voice in efforts to bring about equity and justice in schools.
Student voice scholars have also documented how racially minoritized youth have helped push for change to school-based practices and policies, particularly on issues related to equity and justice (see, for example, Bertrand et al., 2023; Chang & Gamez, 2022; Deolindo et al., 2024; Domínguez et al., 2022; Salisbury et al., 2023; Welton et al., 2022). In interviews with racially minoritized youth, Deolindo et al. (2024) explore how opportunities for youth voice surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic. In building upon D. Mitra’s (2006) pyramid of student voice, which entails “listening, collaboration, and leadership” (Deolindo et al., 2024, p. 34), these authors propose a different way to understand the opportunities for youth voice initiatives to flourish. Deolindo et al. (2024) focus on youth-adult collaboration to highlight the “potential of authentic reciprocity among and between youth and adults” (p. 47). A throughline across this set of important scholarship highlights possibilities and challenges as it relates to the role of adult power as youth assert themselves in their advocacy. Like critical civic education scholars, student voice scholars also examine issues related to adult power. For example, Domínguez et al. (2022) call for the need for relational power between educators and young people as a way to work through some of the challenges in working toward more dynamic ways to enact student voice in school decision-making.
However, scholars have noted that power in schools is hierarchical, with school administrators holding significant power over their staff and students (Domínguez et al., 2022; Holquist & Walls, 2023; Rodela & Bertrand, 2021). To this point, Rodela and Bertrand (2021) argue that too often, youth and their families are “positioned as outside the core visioning process” (p. 469), and schools “often side-step student agency and change” (Rombalski, 2020, p. 9). In addition to the exclusion youth face in school leaders’ decision-making process, students also face resistance and performative allyship (Chang et al., 2023; Domínguez & Bertrand, 2023; Holquist & Walls, 2023; Salisbury et al., 2020). By performative allyship, I rely on Domínguez and Bertrand’s (2023) definition, which speaks to one who is performing “their ally identity only in public and/or visible spaces to reap personal or social benefits, yet fails to do the behind-the-scenes work to enact social change” (p. 560). In their interviews with school leaders, Domínguez and Bertrand (2023) examine how their performative allyship worked to reinscribe institutional power and derail youth-based efforts to enact changes in their respective schools.
Theoretical Framing
I frame and make sense of participant experiences and perspectives by engaging with scholarship on fugitivity and critical youth studies. This theoretical framing facilitates an analysis to examine participants’ grievances and activism and the mechanisms that shape and work to stymie their pursuits for a more equitable and just school.
Fugitivity
I draw from Black critical theorists’ work on fugitivity to highlight youth’s refusals (see, for example, Campt, 2017; Coles et al., 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013; Player et al., 2020; Sojoyner, 2016). Coles et al. (2021) define fugitivity as “the act of escaping the status quo through various methods of refusal and disengagement to challenge racism detrimental to the social and educational lives of historically and more contemporarily marginalized students to create and imagine freedom” (p. 105). As such, fugitivity should not be understood as a point of arrival, but instead as a movement toward what is possible (S. Best & Hartman, 2005).
Fugitivity facilitates a nuanced understanding of participants’ agency, more specifically, how they resist, refuse, and fight for educational justice in their school. Fugitivity allows me to understand the “refusal to be refused” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 96). As Campt (2017) argues, “practicing refusal highlights the . . . creative practices of refusal—nimble and strategic practices that undermine the categories of the dominant” (p. 32). Further, naming these creative and strategic refusal practices also highlights structural and relationship-based tensions among youth and with educators at MHS. I lean into these tensions as it is important to learn about how youth work through these dynamics. For this area of focus, I rely upon Sojoyner’s (2016) conceptualization of educational enclosures. Sojoyner (2016) makes sense of enclosures as “anything that is meant to limit the freedom of movement” (p. xiii). As he notes, this entails physical barriers along with “unseen forces” that are representative of social mechanisms that construct notions of race, gender, class, and sexuality; and just as important as the imposition of the physical and unseen, enclosure embodies the removal/withdrawal/denial of services and programs that are key to the stability and long-term well-being of communities. (p. xiii)
In this study, Sojoyner’s work on enclosures helps bring a nuanced approach to understanding the interplay between the social forces that work to disrupt youth’s efforts to hold their school accountable on issues related to equity and justice. In so doing, my use of enclosures also allows me to shed insights into MHS’s struggles to fulfill its espoused commitment to equity.
Critical Youth Studies (CYS)
CYS scholars note that the introduction of “critical” to youth studies is intended . . . to identify the critical theoretical notion that the study of youth is political; the context of being a young person has everything to do with how agencies of power work, and how this work affects young women and men. (Ibrahim, 2014, p. xvi)
As such, this study aligns with others that understand age as a socially constructed category, departing from biologically constructed understandings of young people that contradictorily label them as apathetic or lazy, but also naïve, dangerous, and rebellious (A. L. Best, 2007; Gordon, 2010; Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2014; Lesko, 2012). Such ascriptions take on added significance for racially minoritized youth who are all too often denied the protections of innocence afforded to white youth and instead regarded as problems that need to be “fixed” (see, for example, Akom et al., 2008; Coles, 2023; Hagerman, 2017; Meiners, 2016). CYS embraces an asset-based approach that, “goes beyond traditional pathological approaches to assert that young people have the ability to analyze their social context, to collectively engage in critical research, and resist repressive state and ideological institutions” (Akom et al., 2008, p. 2). As such, CYS allows for a nuanced understanding that centers youth as the unit of analysis since it is important to understand youth “as political subjects in their own right” (Kwon, 2013, p. 19).
While CYS scholarship examines a variety of issues (e.g., popular culture), I focus on the interplay between adults and youth—more specifically, issues related to power and control (A. L. Best, 2007; Clay & Turner, 2021; Gordon, 2010; Kwon, 2013, 2019; Wray-Lake et al., 2025). As Quijada Cerecer et al. (2013) contend, “Critical youth studies offers a necessary criticism of adult-centered institutions . . . that purport to educate young people and protect them from the realities of real life” (p. 217). The study of inequality in the lives of racially minoritized youth in schools needs to consider the role adultism plays in their lives (Bertrand et al., 2023; Clay & Turner, 2021; Gordon, 2010; Lesko, 2012; Oto, 2023). By adultism, I mean “the ideology that adults are superior to youth—as connected to intersecting forms of oppression, such as racism” (Bertrand et al., 2023, p. 2571). In their work with Black and Latinx youth activists, Clay and Turner (2021) examine how adults co-opted their efforts through what they call “managerialist subterfuge.” Clay and Turner examine how adults sought to manage and control youth by limiting “the progressive political imaginations of young people” (p. 413).
Methods and Data Collection
I employed a critical ethnographic approach (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022) at MHS, spanning from Spring 2021 to Spring 2023. I collected data on average three days a week. Fieldwork entailed participant observations in and out of classrooms, formal and informal interviews, and the collection of documents. Throughout the data collection process, I wrote reflective memos to help me make sense of my thoughts, data, and interpretations. Additionally, while employing the same methods associated with traditional ethnography, my approach to critical ethnography worked to counter practices that have been criticized for being voyeuristic and exploitative by going beyond documenting the everyday experiences of people by grappling with questions of power, positionality, context, and reflexivity to consider the possibilities of justice-oriented change (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022).
Research Site Snapshot
MHS is located in the predominantly white and middle-class suburb of Meadowland. This demographically changing community, alongside other suburbs outside of Des Moines, are some of the fastest-growing in the nation and have accounted for half of Iowa’s population growth since 2010 (Fleig, 2020). With a population of more than 60,000, Meadowland’s racially minoritized population constituted approximately 15 percent of the population. With a student population of approximately 2,000 students, 62 percent of MHS’s students were white, with 38 percent being racially minoritized (Latinx, 17 percent; Black, 10 percent; Asian, 6 percent; multi-racial, 5 percent). As a well-resourced high school, MHS offered its students several academic and extracurricular opportunities (e.g., AP coursework).
Fieldwork
Upon receiving district approval, fieldwork began during Spring 2021. I worked to build rapport to identify potential student participants. Given my focus on learning from racially minoritized youth with interest and knowledge on social justice issues, I recruited twelve students (ten female & two male) to participate through purposeful sampling (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). Each participant completed an assent form, and their parent/guardian then provided their approval by signing a consent form. Because data collection started virtually (Google Hangouts) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators provided me with a link to observe their classroom sessions and after-school club meetings. Given my focus, educators recommended that I spend time observing an English course, Identity in Literature, which had a reputation among students and educators as a class that focused on social justice issues. I also spent time in two youth-led after-school clubs, Resist and Ignite. With a focus on fighting for racial justice, students in Resist were dedicated to advancing racial equity in and out of MHS. With a similar focus, Ignite focused on helping white people understand their role in working toward racial justice. By observing Identity in Literature’s classes along with Resist and Ignite weekly meetings, I built relationships with youth who actively participated in conversations and activities related to social justice topics. This process entailed a commitment to getting to know students through conversations and being present in their lives, which in turn allowed me to earn their trust and understand students’ interests and knowledge on the topics related to the study. As shown in Table 1, student participants primarily came from immigrant and refugee working-class and middle-class families. Participants spanned different grade levels, were mainly academically high-achieving, and were heavily involved in extracurricular activities. Students were asked to select a pseudonym; if they opted not to, I assigned one to them to maintain anonymity.
Participant Demographic Snapshot
Starting in the Fall of 2021, data collection shifted to in-person. I then relied on student participants to guide me to additional spaces they considered important to nurturing their sociopolitical identities and activism. As a result, my observations expanded to classrooms such as those in English and Science as well as out-of-class places, like the Student Equity Team and the World Cultures Club. During classroom and club meetings, I often sat in different locations and walked around when students were in small group discussions. As a participant observer, I participated in classroom conversations and small group discussions. In the context of Resist and Ignite, I not only contributed to conversations but also worked with students to help them brainstorm, provide feedback, and strategize on some of the activities they engaged in (e.g., book club sessions). Being with youth in these spaces helped me gain a more holistic understanding of how racially minoritized youth’s sociopolitical identities and activism were fostered, which impacted how participants made sense of how to advocate for issues important to them.
I conducted formal and informal interviews with student participants to build rapport and obtain in-depth insights into the context, culture, and strategies they employed in and out of the classroom. Formal, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with students began in Summer 2022 and concluded in Spring 2023. The interviews were audio-recorded and took place online via Zoom or at MHS, based on participants’ preferences. The goal of the semi-structured interviews was to gain a sense of how student participants believed they came to develop their political identities and learn more about what drove their interests and how they strategized on issues of interest to them.
Finally, I collected and took photos of a range of documents, such as student handouts, flyers, and protest placards. These documents captured varied forms of engagement and reflected MHS’s efforts to engage students, helping bring a rich understanding of participants’ interests, identities, and perspectives vis-à-vis my research questions.
Data Analysis
To answer my research question, I triangulated participant observations, informal interviews, semi-structured interviews, documents, and reflective memos (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). I conducted three rounds of coding using qualitative data analysis software (ATLAS.ti) and categorized data thematically, beginning with broad categories of analysis (open coding) before funneling down (focused coding) to more concrete findings (Emerson et al., 2011). For example, my initial codes focused broadly on how youth were supported, how they worked with one another, and making note of the issues that drove their activism. These initial codes were revised with each round of coding, eventually yielding more specific codes, such as ghosting, gaslighting, accountability, and solidarity. I constructed reflective memos during analysis to help provide clarity and narrow down the findings of the study (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). During this process, memoing helped me make sense of the data and grapple with its relationship with fugitivity and critical youth studies. More specifically, I looked at the themes I identified (e.g., activism, gaslighting) to analyze how they reflected youth being political actors or how their grievances and activism reflected acts of refusal amid an adultist schooling environment. Finally, I also engaged in member-checking with participants to help refine the focus, scope, and validity of my analysis. I relied on informal interviews with student participants to talk to them about themes identified in the early stages of the analysis, along with presenting the findings of the study at a Resist after-school meeting.
Positionality
Research is a power-laden and tension-rich process that speaks to the necessity for researchers to reflect upon their role and relationships with participants throughout the arc of fieldwork. As Boveda and Annamma (2023) contend, “positionality statements do not explicitly contend with the power dynamics that accompany embodied privileges” (p. 306). Instead, positionality statements often read as a listing of researcher identities or are used to justify the researcher’s credibility in studying a particular group of people or community (Boveda & Annamma, 2023; de los Ríos & Patel, 2023). Boveda and Annamma (2023) argue that it is important for researchers to craft positionality statements that discuss their positioning. They define positioning “as an active verb where researchers reflect and address where their locations lie in relationship to interlocking systems of oppression; fields of study; and, most importantly, researcher participants over time” (p. 306).
The relationships I cultivated with the youth of this study were facilitated, in part, because of my identities and experiences growing up as a child of Mexican immigrant parents in a predominantly white and lower-middle-class suburban community. I embraced the opportunities my identities afforded me, as they helped me build rapport with youth and better understand some of their experiences. With that said, I also reject essentializing assumptions of what researchers think their insider status affords them. Notwithstanding the commonalities I shared with participants, I was also different from them. As a straight cisgender Mexican American man, my identities and experiences growing up and attending schools in a suburban community outside of Chicago were simultaneously similar and different. For example, most of the participants were immigrants, refugees, and girls. I do not share those identities. It was therefore important for me to embrace the stance of a learner, as it helped in relationship building over time. Additionally, while participants and I came from minoritized communities, it was important not to lose sight of the unique particularities each participant experienced as Asian, Black, and Latinx people. Moreover, just as I was interested in learning from participants, they too were interested in learning about me—that required being present, centering their bodies of knowledge, and positioning them as experts. While this process may appear linear, it is not, as it requires constant reflection and check-ins with participants.
Finally, questions related to relationality and accountability shape my thinking on positionality (Malone et al., 2023; Rodriguez, 2025). As a university professor, it was important for me, as an outsider coming into the lives of the youth of this study, to show up in ways that reflected my solidarity with them by being present, vulnerable, and accountable. Throughout the study, I worked with students and some of their teachers by attentively listening, strategizing, and advocating with and alongside them on the issues they deemed important in and out of the classroom. For example, as students in Resist worked on an anti-hate speech policy, I provided feedback and offered suggestions on things I thought they should consider thinking more about during the different iterations of their policy proposal. During this process, I worked particularly hard to reflect upon my age and gender. Despite my experiences and knowledge, I did not want to impose my will upon the youth of the study. Therefore, it was important to check in with students to see if they wanted my input, and when working together, I made sure students felt seen and heard. Additionally, despite being a majority-female club, some of the male students in Resist took up space in ways that silenced their female peers. During presentations with school officials, they often took on the speaking roles despite at times not being active contributors to the policy work. It was therefore important for me to participate in conversations or build upon Ms. McFadden’s efforts, as the club’s sponsor, to promote an equitable environment where students felt supported. During the second year of the study, Clarissa and Nina shared their struggles with some of their male peers. Their concerns spoke to the gendered politics in Resist that taxed students like Clarissa and Nina in ways where they did not feel like their perspectives were taken seriously, and whose overall vision for Resist differed from that of their male peers. Therefore, my role in these moments was not just to listen but to advocate.
Findings
The first finding identifies a culture of ghosting and gaslighting that youth believed reflected a racially hostile schooling environment and shallow equity commitments. In turn, the second finding examines how this schooling culture shaped and drove participants’ activism and their desires for adult accountability and solidarity. Finally, I explore the tensions participants grappled with in their activism, particularly given the capital they possessed as “good” students.
Understanding the Culture of Ghosting & Gaslighting at MHS
“So, what are you going to do with our stories?” Paulina, a Latina student, asked this question during an after-school Resist meeting. During the first year of the study, Resist members hosted members of a mental health organization who wanted to learn from students about how they made sense of MHS’s efforts to support their mental health. Midway through the meeting, as students shared their stories and perspectives, Paulina interjected and posed the question above. Paulina’s question served as a refusal, as it reflected a wariness of speaking about their experiences with seemingly no substantive changes to their everyday lives. Paulina’s question also reflected a response to an environment where educators came and went. Some asked for students’ perspectives and did little, while others ignored the stories Paulina and their classmates shared. Paulina’s question is an entry point through which to understand participants’ fugitive practices, particularly their refusal to accept an adultist culture that ghosted and gaslighted racially minoritized youth. This environment, in turn, reflected MHS’s racially hostile schooling environment and shallow equity commitments.
I define ghosting as the way adults renege on their supposed commitments to young people by ignoring and/or not acting upon their concerns and questions. I view gaslighting as the actions taken to critique, deny, and place blame on youth for voicing grievances and seeking action. An example demonstrating the relationship between ghosting and gaslighting is reflected in how Brandy, a Black student, expressed how she perceived the schooling environment at MHS. During the first year of the study, Brandy posted the message seen in Figure 1 on a school wall.
Brandy’s Message.
Brandy wrote, “The worst type of tragedies are the ones that leave your heart with aching pain, but you have to sit silent because you were told not to make a scene.” Brandy’s message highlighted how youth were told to be quiet, which, in this sense, was a manifestation of gaslighting. Brandy went on to write, “What’s socially accepted at [Meadowland] is disgusting, and the more you try and sweep it under the rug the more the hatred will grow.” By posting this message, Brandy rejected the status quo by calling out how MHS worked to undermine rather than support students like her. Brandy’s fugitive logic drove her critique of the oppressive racial terrain at MHS. Brandy’s writing and Paulina’s question reflected an awareness and a desire to dismantle MHS’s racially hostile environment. Their critiques served as refusals to acquiesce to the everyday adultism they experienced at MHS.
In my interview with Sofia, an Asian American student, I asked her to walk me through how she made sense of MHS’s support for equity, given her experience with activism at the school. Sofia shared: We don’t have a lot of range when it comes to actual change within the school. I know we’ve met with different people within leadership, and it seems like their hands are always tied. But if the people that are supposed to be in charge of it have their hands tied, then we really have no hope.
By “range,” Sofia referred to the power and latitude school administrators chose not to exercise. Whenever youth voiced their needs, as she put it, school leaders’ “hands are always tied.” Sofia continued by adding: You have to overwork to prove that you’re right about an issue that you’re seeing before you were even allowed to have jurisdiction to talk about it. I understand it’s a delicate topic for some people—I think it’s the political ideologies of the people at our school—there would be a lot of pushback if anything major were to be attempted.
Sofia recognized the constraints at her school, as she observed there would be “a lot of pushback if anything major were to be attempted.” Sofia’s perspective shed insights into how adultism impacted her ability to advocate. As a keenly observant political actor, Sofia recognized how adult power operated at MHS. In exercising their adult power, educators worked to enclose youth’s fugitive practices and desires for change. Sofia understood the power educators at MHS exercised by having young people, as she put it, “overwork to prove that you’re right about an issue” before they “were allowed to have jurisdiction to talk about it.” Sofia believed that she and other youth had to go above and beyond to convince educators, knowing that the likelihood of action would be unlikely, given the track record they had developed of ghosting and gaslighting students.
Throughout the study, many of the participants were active in helping craft an anti-hate speech policy proposal for the school district to enact. These efforts arose after white students directed the N-word multiple times at Black students at MHS and other schools within the district. In what was perceived as insufficient or non-existent responses to these racist acts, students in Resist mobilized to combat hate speech. During the first year of the study, students worked on a series of drafts of what their policy could look like. Throughout the school year, students sought to work with educators by inviting several school and district administrators to receive feedback and persuade them to enact their proposal into a district policy. The district’s former director of equity at one point attended one of Resist’s after-school meetings. In my formal and informal interviews with participants, they shared their disappointment with the meeting. John, a Black student, described the meeting as “ridiculous.” He went on to share: I couldn’t believe that was real. It’s hard to believe that was a real thing that happened. We were talking about hate speech and how that impedes students’ education, and bringing up examples and showing the dangers of it, and he was like, “I think we should put this on the same rank as profanity.” We’re like, “What are you talking about? What?”
John and other students in Resist wanted the district’s former equity director to take on this work by being a partner and advocate for their policy position. John was in disbelief as he and other students went into the meeting expecting a supportive response. John operated under the assumption that the equity director, given the focus of the position, would be invested in combating hate speech. Instead, students’ calls for change were undermined. The equity director gaslighted students by downplaying their concerns by creating a false equivalency that conflated the use of hate speech with profanity.
Relatedly, Lila, an Asian American student, shared her criticisms of the district’s former equity director. During our conversation, she shared: Our meeting, I’m sorry to say, was almost joke-like; it was laughable. I was very upset after it because we did spend a lot of time preparing. During the meeting, we gave a full rundown of the policy. We had people show up in support, only for him to take it as cursing. He said there’s a lot of cursing going on. I don’t even know how this connected, but somehow . . . he was equating slurs to cursing, and he wanted to focus on cursing more. And we, as Resist, were trying to probe this idea with him—that they’re not on the same level.
Lila voiced frustration over the hard work she and other students had put in to prepare for their meeting, only to again be gaslighted. Lila understood that to accomplish their goal, she and her peers could not solely rely on expressing their grievances and desire for change. Lila believed that they needed to put forth a specific plan of action and make sure that their meeting was well attended. Yet, as Lila noted, the false equivalencies made were used to avoid engaging substantively with the serious issue of racism at MHS.
Lila spoke more about this disappointment, dichotomizing it with the initial excitement she and other students had about the initial hire of the former district equity director. Lila shared: It was hard for Resist because this DEI position was new in the district. They hired someone from a racial minority group, and so we were excited. We were like, “This is exactly what we need.” Here’s somebody who can understand what some kids are going through or understand the importance of it. It was so disheartening to see that when we finally got somebody in that position, it didn’t feel like they were doing anything, or they were almost backtracking us. In one meeting, they were talking to us about budgeting issues, and I was like, “I’m sorry, it sounds like a serious problem, but you do realize that us writing this entire policy with this educational plan is saving you a lot of money.” We said we were willing to work with them on this stuff in the future, so you don’t have to spend your limited budget, which we’ve heard about like ten times now, on this stuff. Tell us what you need done, and let us, as Resist, take this on throughout the year.
While Lila and other students were excited about the hire, they were quickly disappointed by the lack of support they received. The adultism Lila and others experienced in this meeting was reflected in how the former equity director, as Lila put it, was “backtracking” to stem their efforts. Based on what Lila shared, students were left to believe that this person was not interested in working toward the changes Resist had pushed for all year. Despite this climate, students rejected the excuses being made not to act and continued to pursue their desires for a more equitable and just MHS by continuing to work with educators to build a culture of accountability and solidarity.
Calls for Accountability and Solidarity
Before the start of a Resist meeting during the first year of fieldwork, students discussed the use of the N-word by a white teacher while learning about Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Sofia was present for this incident and told the group what happened in her class. Students were angry and horrified, and they wanted to do something. As students in Resist went back and forth trying to make sense of what happened, some were surprised because this teacher had a positive reputation among students, which prompted Aaliyah, a Black student, to say, “I can’t praise fish for swimming.” Aaliyah’s criticism reflected a demand for high expectations and accountability. Her perspective also served as a refusal to allow individuals supposedly committed to equity to be let off the metaphorical hook. In this finding, I highlight participants’ activism to analyze their efforts to cultivate solidarity and accountability with educators at MHS, one through professional learning (i.e., youth-led book club) and the other being efforts to enact an anti-hate speech policy.
Youth-Led Book Clubs
Students in Ignite facilitated yearly book club discussions during the fall and spring semesters. Ignite’s book club sessions reflected students’ efforts to create spaces to collectively work with peers and educators to dismantle inequitable schooling practices and policies. In one of their discussions of Ijeoma Oluo’s So, You Want to Talk About Race during the first year of the study, students generated a list of desires and questions related to improving their school. Students spoke about the need to support the creation of African American Studies programs and a substantive multicultural curriculum at MHS. They also asked the questions seen in Figures 2 and 3 below:
Ignite Book Club Questions.
Ignite Book Club Question.
These questions reflected desires for greater educator introspection and raised questions about existing equity efforts at MHS. These questions served as entry points for educators to sit with difficult but necessary topics that racially minoritized students wrestled with in school. These questions also reflected students’ awareness of the need to address systems that exacerbated inequities. As such, these questions provided a structural critique of MHS as an adult-led institution. For example, the question posed in Figure 3 above, “How do we get districts to commit with resources, longevity, and persistence to social justice and equity, not just equity theater,” asked educators to reconsider their approach to equity and justice at MHS. By posing this question, youth expressed a desire that spoke to a long-term commitment and need for resource allocation instead of educator-driven piecemeal solutions that students considered to be nothing more than “equity theater.” In addition to facilitating solution-oriented conversations, Ignite’s book club meetings also served as opportunities for educators at MHS to reflect upon their classroom practices.
In a different Ignite book club meeting, Shalini, an Asian American student, facilitated a conversation on Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Shalini asked teachers if they had any questions they wanted to start with, which prompted a teacher to ask students to talk about how they can improve their lack of cultural understanding to prevent incidents in the classroom. Sofia started the conversation by sharing how schools did not honor holidays like Diwali. Sofia shared, “There’s been times when I’m dealing with something, or a cultural thing is going on at home. I need to spend more time with family, and I ask that I don’t have time to do this for today, and the response is, ‘Everyone else has no problem meeting the deadline.’” Sofia explained that this type of response from teachers was discouraging as it conveyed that her culture was not important. The response Sofia received also served as a reminder of the power educators possess to place value on what they deem important. In this case, Sofia’s request for additional time because of her family’s celebration of Diwali was viewed as not important and as an excuse not to submit work on time. Yet, Sofia would go on to share how MHS and other schools forget that students who celebrate Christmas often do not have to worry about asking for extra time on assignments because schools have days off during that holiday. Sofia and Clarissa continued to speak about the need for teachers to have a more dynamic understanding of students’ cultural identities. Clarissa remarked, “Sofia and I have grown up here. We have these different identities, and we can’t have strictly a collectivist or individualist identity.” She continued by adding: Some of the things the book is saying I do agree with, teachers should be aware of student backgrounds, but it’s also important to understand students are going through a set of multiple things, and to take it into account. I learned to celebrate things from home and school. I learned to change and adapt.
Here, Clarissa conveyed a desire for educators to have a more dynamic understanding of what she and other peers go through at MHS. Clarissa believed that if educators understood the precarity of their schooling experiences, they would be more understanding and would have to consider the structures at MHS that force racially minoritized youth to “change and adapt.” Ms. McFadden, a white educator and one of Ignite’s sponsors, responded by affirming Clarissa and then directed a comment to colleagues. She said, “Students shouldn’t need to adapt. I also hear y’all say, ‘Just because I have Brown skin doesn’t mean I have a collectivist culture.’” Here, Ms. McFadden empathized with students and called on her colleagues to understand that racially minoritized students do not represent a cultural monolith, and they, as educators, needed to reject assimilationist practices.
Building upon what Clarissa shared, Sofia added, “My parents have lived here for many years. I’m more socialized here, and I probably wouldn’t fit in in India. I don’t think there’s much of a divide between how I act at home and at school.” A white teacher jumped in and asked, “What can we do as an institution to make it known on these times, these holidays, traditions the students are having, and let’s honor those?” The students and teachers in the room did not have time to respond to this question, as Clarissa then shifted the conversation by asking the teachers in the room, “I have a question for the teachers. How do you experience structural racism in your classrooms? Especially the teachers that teach an advanced level of your class and a general level, and you see a disparity between Black students and white students.” Clarissa spoke about how she often is one of the only Black students in her classes, and as she did, teachers listened and nodded. Clarissa’s shifting of the conversation also served as a moment that refocused the gaze back to the educators in the room. Students like Clarissa were all too familiar with sharing their stories and ideas about how to improve their conditions. To change the narrative, Clarissa sought to expand the conversation by shifting the spotlight onto teacher practices by having them reflect and talk about what they could do to better serve students in ways that did not always rely on having students offer them solutions.
A white teacher spoke about their time at MHS and noted the demographic changes they had seen throughout their career. This teacher then added, “For me, the racialization that happens here at Meadowland is that we have not been a school system that has dealt with diversity. It’s left imprints.” While having racially minoritized youth share their stories and solutions during these meetings was important, the discussions often sputtered when it came to working toward enacting solutions. While it should not be the sole responsibility of those who participated in Ignite’s book club discussions to solve the problems that racially minoritized youth experienced, it did highlight the need for more systems-wide conversations and actions. Further, although beyond the study’s focus, the justice-oriented educators at MHS that I interacted with noted the difficulties in working with and advocating for issues that racially minoritized youth raised.
For example, in a different Ignite meeting, Ms. Stevenson, a white educator and the club’s second sponsor, shared, “I don’t think the district will support any initiative to help teachers get culturally responsive,” to which her colleague, Ms. McFadden, asked, “What do we do to resist?” In response, Ms. Stevenson believed it was up to their school’s leadership to act, “We need brave leadership who are comfortable in their own self-identity. Teachers are afraid because of the backlash.” Here, Ms. Stevenson offered a critique of school administrators that she perceived as not doing enough to lead on these issues and doing the self-work to be reflective of their power and identities. Moreover, this lack of leadership, coupled with the chilling effect of the hostile sociopolitical rhetoric and policy terrain at the state level, further exacerbated an existing environment these educators perceived to be mired in inaction.
Anti-Hate Speech Policy
Racially minoritized youth were fed up with the use of the N-word, other hate speech, and the lack of action from school administration. In the early months of fieldwork during Spring 2021, a large group of students, with the support of the club sponsors of Resist and Ignite, held an all-day retreat. When introducing the agenda for the day, Cecilia, a Latina student, shared, “This is something we chose to be here for. We want to follow up and implement change . . . surface-level solutions aren’t tackling real problems.” This group of students spent an entire school day researching and strategizing about what issues they wanted to tackle, ranging from hate speech, school discipline, lack of sufficient counseling services, and the need to diversify honors and AP courses. Ultimately, their work was not taken up by school administrators. Student efforts were derailed when some administrators at MHS felt attacked and voiced concerns over the lack of consultation. At the start of the following school year, students in Resist took on the labor this group had started and focused on trying to enact an anti-hate speech policy, not just for MHS, but for the entire school district.
Students involved with Resist formed a working group to develop this policy. Through this process, disagreements arose, which often focused on how to best persuade adults to support their efforts. Through these conversations, youth struggled with how to navigate a sociopolitical environment mired in adult power that often worked to dismiss their concerns. In one meeting, youth discussed how to best move forward and struggled to figure out the best path to achieve their goals. The exchange below exposed some of those dynamics.
I have red flags in terms of y’all not having control of what they do with that document. I would hate for you to do something and then have them take it out later and make it whatever they want.
If we have more contact with someone in there, that might give us what we need instead of being loud about it.
I don’t know if the most efficient way to get it through is to do it at a school board meeting.
I think we’re downplaying how much students care about this. It would be a great opportunity to introduce the impact of student voice.
I completely agree. I just don’t know about the course of action.
As students working on this policy provided an update, Ms. McFadden entered the conversation to share her concern that they should not completely trust the school and district administrators involved in the process. She wanted students to consider how they would continue to play a role if this policy were to be considered by school officials, as well as school board members.
Some of the students shared that they should present their proposal during a school board meeting, which Lila, an Asian American student, felt might make too much noise, given the uproar conservative politicians and parents were making at school board meetings and how the voice of a few people often rang louder than the majority. Based on conversations Javier, a Latino student, had with a school board member supportive of their efforts, he felt that the group should proceed and present their proposal to the school board. Aaliyah shared that perhaps they underestimated the amount of interest from students and that if needed, many were ready to attend a school board meeting to demonstrate their support. In the end, the group decided to punt the decision for a later date and to continue checking in with a school board member who had been supportive of their efforts. The conversation’s focus on how to best proceed occurred often. Youth worked in earnest with adults to receive feedback and to persuade them. By doing so, it reflected a recognition of who possessed power at MHS. Yet, although youth’s efforts reflected their refusals to the existing schooling landscape, they struggled with how to best proceed. While their struggles were shaped by adultist structures and practices, youth also navigated a tension-rich environment given their status as “good” students.
Expending Capital as “Good” Students
“So, are we going to go on the attack?” Javier posed this question during a Resist meeting during the second year of the study. Javier’s question reflected his frustrations with the lack of progress on their anti-hate speech policy proposal. The proposal had lost momentum as most of the students behind the idea had graduated. Those who were active took it upon themselves to carry on but were stymied on multiple fronts. Educator resistance and skepticism continued, and Resist’s student leadership struggled to build capacity within the smaller number of students involved in the organization. During the second year of the study, Javier and John co-led Resist. As the school year progressed, Javier’s desire to be more confrontational became more pronounced and differed from John’s approach. Those dynamics played out during one of their meetings.
As students tackled their agenda items, I noticed that on a Google document, which was projected on a screen so that everyone could follow along, Javier typed two questions underneath one of the agenda items. Underneath the agenda item, “Anti-hate speech policy,” Javier typed “Go full ATTACK Mode?” and “Go through rules and regulations with Dr. Salim and Ms. Leiter?” John began the conversation on their anti-hate speech policy proposal by providing an update on where things stood, given the work he had done with Dr. Salim, the district’s new equity director, and Ms. Leiter, a district administrator. He shared with the group: My idea was to continue to work with Dr. Salim and Ms. Leiter by going through rules and regulations, and work with them during the year, and pass it on to someone else next year. That was my thought process. Their suggestion in the last meeting was to reform the MTSS (multi-tiered systems of support) aspect.
Although students in Resist sought accountability for those who engaged in hate speech, they rejected a punitive approach and sought an approach they considered to be non-punitive. Their inclusion of MTSS, a common three-tiered intervention-based framework used in schools to improve student learning and behavior outcomes, was their effort to incorporate a non-punitive approach to accountability. In response to John’s update, Javier proposed, “Going forward with the original policy and push the school board to pass as much of what we submitted. Going full attack mode and presenting it to the school board. Why? Because we have student representatives on the board. The next step is demanding and holding them accountable.” After repeated attempts to work with educators, Javier was ready to stop working with them, while John was still committed to working with them, as he believed that was their only choice. Clarissa entered the conversation and expressed her support for Javier’s position. She added: This year, in the span of two months, I was harassed two different times. I filed a form, and nothing happened at all. Even if nothing comes out of it. Yelling—maybe not yelling—but being passionate about this. They should know what’s happening. It’s bringing the spotlight to how the current policy works, and no action.
In referencing the “form” and “current policy,” Clarissa referred to an existing policy that MHS students could use if they wanted to report hate speech. As students would come to learn, it was a policy that not many of them knew about, but also one that they disagreed with because it was a general bullying policy. As Clarissa noted, even when students like her followed existing adult-sanctioned protocols to investigate potential acts of hate speech, as she noted, there was “no action.” Clarissa’s comment provided a first-hand account about the need to act urgently, given how the existing policy was failing students.
While John wanted to continue working with two district administrators by addressing their revisions, students like Javier and Clarissa no longer wanted to pursue that option. Javier then asked the small group of students present, “Can we have a show of hands, who wants to go with the full attack mode?” The group seemed divided on what their approach should entail, and some students expressed not fully understanding the policy proposal. Rather than continuing the conversation of what Resist should do, John then proceeded to pull up the MTSS component of their proposal to offer clarification. As he went over different aspects of MTSS, John expressed worries about how slow things had gone whenever he met with different school and district administrators. He then said, “The problem is that they keep having suggestions.” Clarissa responded by sharing, “They should deal with it. We’re 15 to 18 years old. The only reason we’re working on this is because we’re concerned. It’s their job. We shouldn’t be bending to their will.” Despite his frustrations, John was not willing to break free from his efforts to work with adults. Clarissa’s refusal to continue to do work that she perceived to be under the purview of educators working for MHS and the district not only signaled frustration with the lack of action and the ghosting and gaslighting they had experienced, but it also raised an important question regarding the responsibilities and power educators had to serve the needs of their students.
In my interview with Javier, we spoke about what prompted him to take a more confrontational stance. He shared: I’ve reached a point where I’m quite frankly fed up with the lack of support from, I’d say, 99% of people, which has led me to be fed up, being like “fuck it.” It’s either I drop everything, and I know that there’s people dependent on it, and I’m dependent on it myself, so I can’t—I know I can’t do that. So, what I’m doing is I’m taking this into my own hands. I’m not only going on the attack mode with the anti-hate speech policy—that’s just one of the tools that I’m using.
Like Clarissa, Javier was frustrated with the lack of support. He felt compelled to act on his own, even if that meant departing from what some members of Resist wanted to pursue. He added: Either Resist supports it, or if Resist doesn’t, Resist will go its way with it. I will take my aspect of it and what I like. I’m already meeting with administrators. I’m starting to force people to either work with what I have modified to a point where they would like it. What prompted me to be on the attack is not only the lack of support, but just a lot of things that are going on at the state level, prompted me to go on the attack mode not only on the school level, but on a more citywide, if not statewide level. That’s really what prompts me to be on the attack.
Javier’s sense of urgency was also driven by what was happening politically in Iowa. While fieldwork occurred shortly after the passage of H.F. 802—a law targeting “divisive” instruction on issues related to race and gender—Iowa’s conservative-led state legislature passed additional pieces of legislation during the second year of the study, impacting public schools and minoritized student populations (e.g., book bans, attack on transgender and gender-diverse students). Javier’s perspectives provide insight into what drove him to embrace a confrontational stance and reject an approach that some students like John embraced, which sought to work with adults by attending to their concerns and questions. Moreover, the conversation during the Resist meeting noted above spoke to the tensions within youth organizing spaces, particularly in how students lead and make decisions. The conversation also reflected a broader analysis of students who were positioned as academically successful, “good” students who struggled with how much to push back. Javier, John, and Clarissa were academically successful students, yet based on the perspectives shared, Javier and Clarissa’s frustration with a lack of action, coupled with the broader political climate outside of school, drove them to embrace an approach more willing to confront adult power.
In my interview with Lila, she spoke about the ups and downs of developing and trying to get the school board to enact their anti-hate speech policy. During our interview, she shared, “A lot of this work comes from having a reputation that you build up over time, and in some ways, the only way as a student you’re going to get that attention is by having a respectable reputation.” Lila’s reflexivity highlighted her self-awareness in talking about how she believed MHS operated. As an academically successful student who was highly involved in school-related activities, she worked actively with different teachers and administrators. She knew her context well. As a student who was rewarded not just for her brilliance but also for her ability to play the game of school, Lila was caught in a precarious position as she acknowledged that being “respectable” was what got things done. The prospect of losing that reputation scared her.
It can, perhaps, be easy to chastise Lila for not being more confrontational in the way some may want youth activists to behave. Later in my conversation, Lila offered a perspective that helped complicate her statement about respectability. Lila shared, “Now, on the other side of that, I think for most of my life I was scared. I was scared that they would find some reason to change my grade or impact my life in the future.” Lila’s perspective reflected a bind that she and other participants in this study had to wrestle with in their activist efforts. As racially minoritized students with “good” reputations, many of the participants hoped to leverage their relationships with educators at MHS by working with them to combat the racially hostile schooling environment they and other students had to navigate. Yet, Lila and other students realized these relationships only got them so far, as many of the educators were unwilling to take up the work they believed needed to be tackled. In so doing, reflecting a schooling context invested in enclosing the fugitive possibilities that many of the youth sought.
In an AP English Class, students discussed Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Ms. Anderson, a white educator, asked students to make connections between the text and their everyday lives. In this student-led Socratic seminar, Nina, a Black student, shared, “In my representation of the cave, you can internalize things, and you can become your own puppet master. You police yourself. You’re hyper-aware of what you do.” Nina’s perspective aligned with the feeling many other racially minoritized students experienced at MHS, a symptom of the racially hostile schooling environment discussed earlier. It also provides additional context that informed why Lila held the viewpoint she shared in my interview with her. Nina punctuated her statement by adding, “Once you realize you’re in a cage, you recognize the system you’re in is designed to keep you submissive and restrained. The goal is to dismantle this entire building. It’s rotten to its core.” Nina’s statement pointed to the precarity that racially minoritized youth experienced at MHS, particularly for youth who had been rewarded, as Lila put it, for their “good reputations.” Nina’s fugitive logic helps explain why many racially minoritized students struggled to critique the existing reality at MHS. MHS’s racially hostile environment and its shallow resolve to adhere to its espoused equity commitments made it difficult for some students to voice their criticisms and join those who were fighting for change at MHS. Although Nina, like many participants, believed in the importance of working alongside adults, her comment ultimately comes down to one of refusal. She recognized the system was “rotten” and something else needed to be built.
Discussion
Although educators have documented the academic and social precarity that many racially minoritized youth experience in predominantly white suburban schools (Drake, 2022; Kelly, 2020; Rodriguez, 2020), less is known about how they engage in activism to combat oppression in their daily lives at school. The findings of this study bring needed attention to how racially minoritized youth in predominantly white suburban schools organize and fight for equity and justice.
The first finding challenges assumptions that well-resourced and equity-oriented suburban schools are better positioned to meet the needs of racially minoritized youth. Despite espousing pride in diversity and a commitment to equity, participants spoke to a different reality. Through the perspectives shared by participants, this finding highlights how MHS’s racially hostile schooling environment was maintained by adultist practices that reflected a regressive ethos that sought the subjugation of racially minoritized youth. Efforts to subjugate youth entailed efforts to ghost and gaslight them when they pointed out and worked to address the racial hostility of MHS. Participants resisted by engaging in fugitive practices premised on refusal (Campt, 2017; Coles et al., 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013). Racially minoritized youth’s refusals conveyed a need to divest from adultist practices. Moreover, this finding builds upon existing scholarly criticisms about how many schools have a shallow and performative commitment to equity and will rely on “good” intentions to rationalize their inability to combat inequity and injustice in their schools (Chang et al., 2023; Domínguez & Bertrand, 2023; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Shange, 2019). Educators need to sit with racially minoritized youth’s criticisms and desires for change to better understand the impact, or lack thereof, of their efforts. As Shange (2019) notes, it is important to “disentangle intention from impact” as it forecloses the possibilities of “emergent political worlds” (p. 15). Despite having the opportunity to leverage the power of youth-based spaces such as Resist and Ignite, many educators proved unwilling to collaborate with youth. This reality spoke to the real constraints participants had to navigate, which in turn drove their efforts to cultivate support from other educators at MHS.
In working to make MHS a more equitable and just place for racially minoritized youth, the second finding highlights participants’ activist efforts toward cultivating accountability and solidarity. As keen political observers, youth understood that they could not accomplish everything on their own, which reflected why their activism also entailed building community with educators. Schools like MHS stand to benefit from scholarship that points to how educators and school administrators can leverage student voice initiatives by not just creating opportunities for youth to express themselves, but to be accountable to them (Deolindo et al., 2024; Domínguez et al., 2022).
The third finding spotlights participants’ struggles with how to participate in school change. While the youth of this study were persistent in their efforts, these were also students who were positioned as “good” academically successful students. While some participants, like Javier and Clarissa, embraced a more confrontational approach with school staff, other students, like Lila and John, were hesitant to do so. Scholarship on refusals and enclosures (Campt, 2017; Sojoyner, 2016) helps point to how racially minoritized youth resisted. Although engaging in a confrontational approach is useful in working to dismantle systems of injustice, Campt’s (2017) work on refusal also speaks to more subtle ways that youth can resist. Here, we can think of participants’ efforts to work alongside educators in their book club conversations. While minoritized across multiple fronts, most of the youth of this study benefited from being seen as “good” students, which raised important questions of how they needed to build more relationships with students from different identities and communities to be stronger as a student body, but potentially to be pushed in how they made sense of their political approaches to bring about change. As Kwon (2019) argues, there is a need for research to examine “participation as an empowering form of youth political agency, and how such agency may not necessarily be enacted as social practices of opposition, but as entangled in relationships of power in this political moment” (p. 918). As scholars continue to understand racially minoritized youth’s political participation in efforts to improve their schools, the “entangled” relationships youth have with one another and with the educators in their lives is unavoidable. This reality requires continued research to further understand the possibilities of solidarity, but also the points of departure young people should feel emboldened to take when they perceive their work to be undermined.
Implications and Future Research
As racially minoritized youth continue to diversify predominantly white suburban schools, educators need to consider the implications of whether their existing practices and policies work toward meeting their needs. The findings of this study point to how MHS worked against its espoused commitment to equity by ghosting and gaslighting racially minoritized youth when they voiced their grievances and engaged in activism. As a result, MHS’s racially hostile schooling environment and shallow equity commitments set the conditions for “hostile civic spaces” to flourish (Sánchez Loza, 2021, p. 382). As Sánchez Loza (2023) notes, white youth and educators possess a great deal of power and enact it to hide behind a discourse of neutrality while at the same time advancing right-wing politics that work to other and minimize the experience of racially minoritized youth and other minoritized student communities in white suburban schools. Educators stand to learn from racially minoritized youth if they listen to the hard truths they might have about the shortcomings of their school. In the context of classrooms, teachers can work toward nurturing youth’s sociopolitical identities by embracing asset-based approaches that incorporate their identities and lived experiences through their curricular practices (C. Cohen et al., 2018; Gadsden et al., 2019; Rubin, 2024).
Additionally, given the positive impact student voice initiatives can have on the lives of racially minoritized youth, school administrators and classroom teachers can work toward cultivating empowering relationships that go beyond seeking their input and work alongside them to combat existing school-based inequities and injustices (Deolindo et al., 2024; Hipolito-Delgado et al., 2022). Given the power educators possess, they must be willing to acquiesce some of that power to foster more equitable relationships that honor youth as legitimate actors to partner with.
Additionally, while this study looked at the challenges and tensions participants faced in determining how to best push educators at MHS, additional work is needed to examine challenges within youth activist communities. Although it is important to engage in asset-based practices, it is important not to shy away from youth’s areas of growth. As Clay and Turner (2021) note, it is important to examine tensions within youth activists to better understand power dynamics. For example, there is a need to understand how students’ identities shape how they build community with one another as they fight against injustices in their school. This dynamic is important and stands to advance how scholars understand what solidarity looks like among youth in predominantly white suburban contexts. Furthermore, given that this study took place amid an increasingly polarized sociopolitical environment, it is important to learn how racially minoritized youth mobilize in resistance to these legislative efforts alongside the existing injustices they experience in their schools. While scholars have devoted attention to youth resistance in political conservative contexts (Castillo et al., 2025; Castro et al., 2024; Terriquez et al., 2020), additional research is needed to further understand the similarities and differences across contexts and how this current sociopolitical moment is shaping youth’s learning on issues important to them and their efforts to advocate for equity and justice.
Conclusion
This study brings needed attention to racially minoritized youth’s efforts to bring about equitable and just changes to their suburban high school. Although much is known about youth activism in the context of urban schools and communities, this study invites scholars invested in understanding the academic and social lives of racially minoritized youth to also consider learning with and from them in the context of suburban schools and communities. While findings speak to our existing understanding of what racially minoritized youth experience in urban schools, for youth in predominantly white and politically conservative settings, it is important not to lose sight of the spatial dimensions that shape youth’s political participation. The premise of this article stemmed from students like Clarissa, who were fed up with the unjust realities of their school and their efforts to fight for a just future. The activism the youth of this study engaged in highlighted the forces that worked against them, along with the related tensions in working to articulate and fight for a future premised on a commitment to justice, accountability, and solidarity.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Taylor Masamitsu, Linn Posey-Maddox, Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, Katy Swalwell, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and encouragement throughout the different iterations of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Note: This manuscript was accepted under the editorial team of Kara S. Finnigan, Editor in Chief.
Author
GABRIEL RODRIGUEZ is an assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Room 343 College of Education, 1310 S. Sixth St., Champaign, IL 61820; email: