Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools

by Natasha K. Warikoo

An illuminating, in-depth look at competition in suburban high schools with growing numbers of Asian Americans, where white parents are determined to ensure that their children remain at the head of the class.
 
The American suburb conjures an image of picturesque manicured lawns, quiet streets, and—most important to parents—high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, allowing many white Americans to safeguard their privileges by using public schools to help their children enter top colleges. That’s changing, however, as Asian American professionals increasingly move into wealthy suburban areas to give their kids that same leg up for their college applications and future careers.
 
As Natasha Warikoo shows in Race at the Top , white and Asian parents alike will do anything to help their children get to the top of the achievement pile. She takes us into the affluent suburban East Coast school she calls “Woodcrest High,” with a student body about one-half white and one-third Asian American. As increasing numbers of Woodcrest’s Asian American students earn star-pupil status, many whites feel displaced from the top of the academic hierarchy, and their frustrations grow. To maintain their children’s edge, some white parents complain to the school that schoolwork has become too rigorous. They also emphasize excellence in extracurriculars like sports and theater, which maintains their children’s advantage.

Warikoo reveals how, even when they are bested, white families in Woodcrest work to change the rules in their favor so they can remain the winners of the meritocracy game. Along the way, Warikoo explores urgent issues of racial and economic inequality that play out in affluent suburban American high schools. Caught in a race for power and privilege at the very top of society, what families in towns like Woodcrest fail to see is that everyone in their race is getting a medal—the children who actually lose are those living beyond their town’s boundaries.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Race, Sociology, Asian American, Politics

240 pages, Hardcover

Published May 18, 2022

About the author

Natasha Kumar Warikoo is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is an expert on the relationships between education, racial and ethnic diversity, and cultural processes in schools and universities. Her most recent book, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities (University of Chicago Press, 2016), illuminates how undergraduates attending Ivy League universities and Oxford University conceptualize race and meritocracy. The book emphasizes the contradictions, moral conundrums, and tensions on campus related to affirmative action and diversity, and how these vary across racial and national lines. Natasha’s first book, Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City (University of California Press, 2011), analyzes youth culture among children of immigrants attending diverse, low-performing high schools in New York City and London. Balancing Acts won the Thomas and Znaneicki Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s International Migration Section. Both of these projects involve extensive ethnographic research in the United States and Britain. In 2017-2018 Warikoo will be a Guggenheim Fellow, studying racial change in suburban America.

Natasha’’s research has also been published in scholarly journals (American Journal of Education; British Education Research Journal; Educational Researcher; Poetics; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Ethnic and Racial Studies (also here); Review of Educational Research; Sociological Forum), edited books, and newspapers (Education Week, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post), and she has won grants and awards from American Sociological Association, the British Academy, National Science Foundation, Nuffield Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. Her recent articles can be accessed for free here.

At Harvard, Natasha teaches courses on racial inequality and the role of culture in K-12 and higher education. She serves as co-chair of the School Advisory Council of her children’s public elementary school in Cambridge, and has been actively involved in the political process in Cambridge.

Prior to her academic career, Natasha was a teacher in New York City’s public schools for four years, and also spent time working at the US Department of Education and as a fellow with the Teachers Network Leadership Institute. Natasha completed her PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and BSc and BA in mathematics and philosophy at Brown University. She lives in Cambridge with her husband Ramesh Kumar and their three children.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting and well-written book about a somewhat narrow topic – Asian Americans and white Americans at suburban well-resourced schools. I thought Natasha Warikoo did a great job of describing her interviews with her research participants and applying critical analysis to develop themes such as: white parents criticizing Asian American parents for their parenting styles when it threatens white children’s success, Asian American parents distancing themselves from the “other” Asian American parents who white parents criticize, and white parents focusing on non-academic extracurriculars so that their children can get ahead. One aspect of this book that I enjoyed is that it is both academic and highly readable. It’s not full of jargon and I felt like I was reading this book for fun and not just poring through a boring academic text.

I also highly appreciated that Warikoo both was adept at conveying her research findings and at the same time did not shy away from naming the centering of whiteness and some of the subtle racism white parents practiced toward Asian American parents, even though these white parents often identified as liberal. Warikoo’s research has many important implications for race relations and what happens when the dominant racial group is challenged. I can definitely see how some white people and white parents will get defensive and angry reading this book (as you may observe from a couple of the reviews on Goodreads already… anyway!) I feel like it’s tough to critique racism in and of itself but as a researcher I can imagine it’s even more intimidating to name some of the racism practiced by your research participants, who may feel upset toward you for portraying them in that way.

I think this book is narrow in scope on purpose, though it’d be interesting to read more about the ways in which both Asian American and white parents practice racism and exclusion against Black, Latinx, and Native American children and their families. Then we can take action to prevent that. Warikoo names the exclusion of these racial groups a few time in the book, but I couldn’t help but want a little more especially given the news stories about how some Asian Americans are aligning with white supremacy by supporting affirmative action.

Anyway, in sum I read this for a book club at my job and enjoyed it. I’m probably partial to this book because I attended a well-resourced, academically-rigorous high school that was predominantly Asian American and white (I actually started my Goodreads account 14 years ago when I was a freshman at that high school, whew!) Reading this book made me reflect on my own academic journey and the many privileges I had that propelled me to where I’m at now professionally. I liked that Warikoo did not stigmatize Asian Americans’ parenting styles because even though my parents were/are imperfect in many ways, I now can view how they pushed me with appreciation because they did instill in me a rigorous work ethic that’s benefitted me in many ways. So… if you may be interested in this book, I’d recommend it for sure. Perhaps great to read alongside The Asian American Achievement Paradox .

[Diya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I would have enjoyed this book more if it didn't remind me of my time in high school so much haha. On a more serious note, I think it was a really good exploration of the cultural repertoires of White and Asian American students and parents that affect their experiences in school in the US. It was also written in a straight-forward, fairly brief manner, so I think it's a good starting book for anyone who wants to read more books relating to sociology.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between 3-3.5 stars

A topical book following the Supreme Court ban of affirmative action. Warikoo's prose reads like a fiction book--she features interviews of parents and kids in Woodcrest High School like the exchanges you'd see more in fiction narratives than in a sociological purview. I did appreciate that this writing style permitted Warikoo to address her own positionality as an Indian American parent also wanting the best for her children, and we see lots of examples of how she compares her own parenting style to those of the parents she interviews.

In many ways, this book was a sociological comparison of parenting styles between Asian (to be discussed) and White parents. Some takeaways:

- Warikoo argues that the disconnect between Asian and White parents can be attributed to their respective culture's prescriptive pathways toward success. While Asian (Chinese and Indian) parents are used to hyper competitive, test-based, STEM heavy school systems where extracurricular tutoring even takes precedence over school, White parents' focus on the "well-rounded" varsity sports playing child stems from their own experience navigating the college process in the US.

- There was a large section about both groups of parents' anxieties about their children's mental health and wellness. White parents worked hard to lobby schools to reduce the homework load and succeeded (see Nice White Parents the podcast). Asian parents tried to distance themselves from other parents by painting themselves as valuing their children's autonomy more and not forcing them to have good grades. Either way, Warikoo argues that the children of both groups have been fed the expectation of performing well academically since they were young, so their parents can stop saying it explicitly and the kids would still be doing fine.

- White liberals are out here saying the wildest, most racist things while claiming, "I'm not racist; I voted for Biden in 2020!" Like, not them shaming Asian immigrant families for moving to Woodcrest for the good schools when they themselves literally did the same thing, just 10 years earlier. Also, just because your kid is good at kicking a ball around on the field doesn't mean that they should feel special in their math class and should be able to go to an Ivy League college. Sometimes, that just means that Timmy spent too much time on the field to master the trigonometry needed to understand cosine functions, and that means that maybe he shouldn't be in honors pre-calc.

- Asian parents always defended themselves against the allegations of being tiger parents and distanced themselves from "other Asian parents." In this approach, they implicitly accept that the White parents' vision of success is the norm to which they should compare themselves.

Some reflections based on my own experience attending a highly rated public high school on the East Coast and subsequently, an Ivy League college:

- Warikoo says this too, and I'll say it again: all of this conflict between White and Asian parents is just another instance of global elites fighting each other for a share of the capitalist pie. While discussions of race are certainly necessary and in this case, many White parents are blatantly just spreading anti-Asian sentiment (against these "savant" Asian kids who are just born good at math when...no, their parents just decided to invest in that instead of soccer camp when they were younger), I would argue that race alone is not a sufficient differential in this debate. Both groups in Woodcrest High are incredibly privileged and economically well-off to afford to send their kids to their respective extracurricular activities. And then these kids in the Ivy League are going to get funneled to the same consulting and finance firms in New York, all in search of the glory to increase their shareholders' profit. The people in power are clearly happy to distract these highly privileged groups with racialized in-fighting from the real problem, which is that they're being exploited.

I think about this a lot after attending my Ivy League university. The university is so proud of the ethnically diverse population it's attracted, but so what if the Middle Eastern student they recruited is actually the son of an Arab oil tycoon and oligarch? Can we really think that these types of very privileged students are that different from the rich European types if they all went to the same Swiss boarding school for high school?

- I did find it annoying that Warikoo used the term Asian but only meant the Indian and East Asian/Chinese parents. She completely leaves out other Asian groups, which makes sense: Indian and Chinese Americans are in the upper quartile for income, while other groups like Southeast Asians comprise by percentage the largest group of people living under the poverty line. There could have been more commentary about how this could be attributed to historical immigration patterns: Chinese and Indian parents came to the US mostly as skilled workers, while Southeast Asians arrived in the US later and often as a result of US-caused wars, resulting in much more economic diversity among Southeast Asian immigrants. So what about the Viets and the Hmong kids who don't have the same resources as their East/South Asian peers? I find that, as a Viet, I'm not subjected to the same stereotypes (of being supernaturally good at math, cut-throat, etc.) and am just forgotten altogether. It seems that the most vocal American racist vitriol only comes out when a group of people present a perceptible threat to the White status quo, and Southeast Asians, for instance, just haven't made it there yet.

- In many ways, the narrow scope of this book made it more frustrating to read, thus the deduction in stars. Warikoo acknowledges her shortcomings in the conclusion (the privilege, the necessity of including race in the discussion, the fact that they're only able to have this highly pressurized, well-resourced school district because of the exclusion of Black and Brown students), but these shortcomings are so significant that they shouldn't have been shunned to the conclusion. This type of discussion is what plagued the anti-affirmative action movement, famously led by a Chinese Canadian student who felt more entitled to an Ivy League school than Black and Brown students because he had a perfect SAT score. The hyperfocus on White on Asian racism completely obscures the connection between anti-Asian and anti-Black racism. To me, there was a lot of opportunity for a more powerful critique and encouragement of coalition building between all groups that the White elites want to tamper down. Discussions of equity between Asians and White people is empty without the inclusion of Black and Brown folks.

I'd direct the same critiques to the debates around my public magnet high school's changing admissions policy. I found a lot of Asian parents and kids just saying the most blatantly racist things about Black and Hispanic students (that the lottery system is letting in dumber students who would bring drugs and gang conflicts into the school, etc.). They're buying into White supremacist ideas all while claiming their own victimhood over the stupidest thing (oh no, my child will have to attend their base school in one of the most highly rated public school districts in the country!!!).

Overall, an interesting read, but not super necessary if you've had this experience yourself in a majority White and East/South Asian public school. The whole message boils down to White and Asian elites wanting their children to win over the other group, all on the exclusion of Black and Brown students.

[Neko~chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched but nothing groundbreaking. I grew up in this environment and I can say that this book is correct about basically everything. But I thought the analysis was fairly shallow—1st or 2nd tier off the initial. I would’ve enjoyed more theorizing basically.

Also this was cited in a TNY article about the “softness” of second- and third-gen immigrant parents so I thought this was gonna be more about that, but I feel like the contrast is a less-studied phenomenon

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explores some interesting questions around the sociology of the competition between well-off White and Asian kids in suburban schools, and highlights some interesting original research and calls out some shibboleths, most significantly:
"When Asian Americans surpass their white neighbors in significant numbers, the whispers of judgment can morph into broader anti-Asian feelings. These fears, though cloaked in liberal identities, are not unlike the fears of working-class whites who blame immigrants for their declining fortunes, a narrative fueled by recent political rhetoric. ... Rather than depict immigrants as rapists and drug dealers as Donald Trump did to stoke anti-immigrant sentiments, they portrayed immigrant Asian parents as unreasonably focused on academic pursuits and lacking in attention to children’s emotional well-being in the right ways."

However, I'm left questioning some of it because the author also makes some clearly false assertions:
--that "in one recent year just sixty-seven high schools in the United States sent any students to Harvard, out of the over twenty-six thousand high schools in the United States."
--"Most US schools spend more per pupil on sports teams than they do on math education." Maybe this is true if you exclude things like teacher salaries, but if you do that, it's a really cooked-books comparison.
--"Tests like the SAT have been critiqued for decades for their systematic exclusion of African Americans and for their biases, whether conscious or not, in favor of those with resources." In reality, tests like the SAT are the less biased toward privileged kids than other aspects of college admissions.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Shockingly bad read. The author failed to do the most basic fact checking when interviewing parents for this book. The author draws conclusions out of thin air, and makes blanket statements that are not accurate, illogical, and often times irrelevant. Stereotypical racist undertones flow through the author's descriptions of how families parent their children, drawing the simple conclusion that if "Whites" and "Asians" (yes, she clumps all families from the entire continent of Asia together, and all Caucasians together) have different parenting styles, than the "Whites" will do everything they can to push down the Asian children to bolster their own. This strange analysis of one wealthy suburban school misses all of the important factors that go into this school's successes and challenges. This book fuels poor race relations in a very dangerous way, and can only lead to a misunderstanding of cultures and motives among families in suburban towns. I recommend not wasting your time on this uninformed and biased take on suburban culture.

[Natalie Ramos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently being in the education system, this book was extremely interesting to read. The complexities between how different people viewed education and what lengths parents went to make their children ahead of the game was astonishing. This book also focused on how certain parents tried to establish a narrative that their children actually have choice in their education when it doesn't really seem so. In this age where affirmative action is under threat, reading this book and internalizing only the narratives of the white and asian americans of a rich affluent area was startling. The students in these books had all the opportunities in the world and the parents gave them all the opportunities in the world and yet they complained of unfairness and inequality. If you are interested in a dual perspective of education based on race I would definitely suggest this book!

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty quick read, and an interesting one as well for those who want to better understand American racism. This sociological study focuses on one American suburb to illustrate the tension between whites and the Asian Americans (largely Chinese and Indian). Warikoo does a nice job historicizing the redlining and white flight that generated such communities while also showing the newer form of white flight that is increasing as larger numbers of Asian Americans move into white communities and change the dynamics of academic competition. For anyone who thinks that the impending US Supreme Court Case is grounded in some meritocratic reality, this book is for you!

[Mira · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few sociology of education books I’ve read like a novel, Warikoo’s study of Asian American and white parenting logics in an affluent suburb is a highly readable account of cultural conflict, alternative parenting repertoires and the quest to be a good parent, setting your child up for success *and* happiness. Having taught at a Boston suburb where the Asian American population was increasing and teachers often were skeptical of their parents’ academic focus, the book feels like it could have been written about my former school.

[Naomi te Wildt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like a novel, accurately described students course loads and stress levels in public high school, but seemed to rely heavily on qualitative interview data the author collected about “whites” and “Asians” with very little consideration of different backgrounds except for whether they/their parents/their grandparents were immigrants.

[Winnie Ha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as research for a class project (when I googled books about going to school in the suburbs, this was the first book that came up). For me, this was a really quick read that made me feel really seen and helped me make sense of some of my own experiences going to a relatively competitive suburban high school dominated largely by white and Asian American students.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really helpful read after the affirmative action decision.

[Lauryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my sociology class! Really interesting and insightful stuff

[KC Comal · Rating 3 out of 5]

No surprises, lots of racist tropes reinforced, broad generalizations and over all not much analysis.

[Brinda Gurumoorthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you went to Ridge high school (or any high school in an affluent suburb) read this! Or even if not