Communicating across cultures: discursive challenges and racial identity formation in narratives of middle school students

Abstract This article examines the ways in which discourse and social context lead to identity construction in relationships between Black and White students in a large (Grades 6–8) urban middle school. Looking at issues of cross‐cultural communication through focus group discussions among Grade 8 students at this school provides an opportunity for the emergence of three dominant themes in the social lives of these students including cafeteria seating preferences along racial lines and how this dynamic influences cultural understandings, academic tracking practices and their effects on relationships among the young people in this study, and the positioning of students by commonly accepted stereotypes. Ways to achieve greater understanding across racial boundaries are discussed and implications are drawn for promoting critical counter‐discourses that oppose deterministic and one‐dimensional representations between adolescents.