Carla Shedd: Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice

In Unequal City: Race, School, and Perceptions of Injustice, Carla Shedd emphasizes the idea that the paths youth take in Chicago every day matter a great deal; your address might define your future, and there may be unintended consequences because of race and place. Unequal City delves into the minds and lives of youth in Chicago to understand how often they face obstacles travelling to and from school, or even while they sit in classrooms. According to Shedd, the typical American adolescent learns as much from their way between their homes and schools as they learn in school about their identity, social inequality, and authority embedded in society’s social structure. Shedd discusses the observation that life in America is shaped by a well-established racial hierarchy, and Unequal City tries to make sense of how adolescents reconcile their position on this hierarchy with their perceptions of equality and their life experiences; what is normal for these youth is affected by their individual place in a larger social structure. Their emerging recognition of different kinds of discrimination, coupled with their sense of where they fall on the hierarchy of social and structural advantage, is a crucial step in their adolescent rite of passage. While this book was primarily designed to educate society on youth’s perceptions of social and criminal injustice—perceptions most often studied in adults—Shedd now hopes that her work will encourage researchers to broaden their exclusive focus on courts, jail, and police and begin to associate schools with these penalizing institutions. Shedd argues that schools, and the daily journeys taken by students to get there, influence how young people experience equality and inequality. …