Reading race in a rural context CYNTHIA LEWIS University of Iowa cynthia-lewis @ uiowa.edu JEAN KETTER Grinnell College ketter@ grinnell.edu BETTINA FABOS University of Iowa bettina-fabos @uiowa.edu This is an ethnographic case study examining how discussions of multicultural young adult literature among a group of white, rural teachers and researchers were shaped by sociopolitical contexts and participants’ constructions of racial identity. Focusing on the interactions of three teachers and ourselves, we used performance theory to help us understand how our ways of performing the self were shaped at the macro level by institutional and societal ideologies and the micro level by professional aæliations and identities. In analyzing data, we used qualitative coding procedures to arrive at key and illustrative events. These events were then analyzed using the tools of discourse analysis, which helped us to focus on the ideological underpinnings of the discourse. Our analyses revealed that as participants attempted to engage with the literature and bond with one another, we enacted personal, professional and group aæliations that served to sustain particular norms of whiteness even as we attempted to disrupt them. Introduction In February 1999, a European American third-grade teacher in Brooklyn transferred to a diåerent school after African-American parents in her school community expressed their strong disapproval of a book she had read to her class. The book, a picture book entitled Nappy hair, is the ®rst book written by the African-American children’s author, Carolivia Herron. Despite the national media’s tendency to aærm the teacher’s eåorts many scholars of children’s literature and education spoke in defense of the parents’ concerns about the book. They pointed out, for instance, that because racism shapes conceptions of black hair both within and beyond African-American communities, the subject is highly controversial. From this perspec- tive, for a white teacher to naively use the text without a deeper historical and political understanding of both the topic and her students’ community is deeply problematic. Our research is situated against this national backdrop, one which has under- scored the political nature of selecting, interpreting, and teaching multicultural lit- erature. In spite of an increased interest in multicultural literature for children and young adults, much of the literature taught in our nation’s schools is still written by and about middle-class European Americans (Yokota, 1993; Fang, Fu, & Lamme, 1999). Schools in rural communities, in particular, often lacking in racial, ethnic, or QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION, 2001, VOL. 14, NO. 3, 317±350 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education ISSN 0951±8398 print/ISSN 1366±5898 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09518390110029454