In Racialized Identities: Race and Achievement among African American Youth, Na'ilah Suad Nasir reframes the scholarly analysis of race and academic achievement among African American youth by considering the interplay between learning and racial identity formation. Nasir's goal is to move beyond scholarly interpretations that emphasize the relative lack of resources in majority black schools or the low levels of academic achievement among black students. Drawing on ten different sociological studies, she explains how black students create different kinds of racialized identities and how these identities in turn play out across a variety of learning settings. As she explains in her introduction, “I hope to challenge in multiple ways common assumptions about African American students and the overwhelming focus in research on individual students’ pathology rather than on the ways that our society organizes for the success of some and the failure of others” (8).

This is a book, in other words, that analyzes how the fluid process of racialization interacts with the real and very messy world of adolescent education. The book is organized into thematic chapters that use detailed and lively vignettes to illustrate how identity formation and learning work together. For instance, chapter 2, “When Learning and Identities Align,” describes how afterschool activities like track, basketball, and dominoes can provide not only positive learning environments for black students, but also social contexts that support and nurture an affirmative black racial identity. The camaraderie of the afterschool activities, combined with a nurturing environment where students are challenged to improve, helped black students feel good about themselves in settings that also reinforced a positive racialized identity. Achieving in these activities did not generate tensions over what it meant to be authentically black, which Nasir views as significant in promoting a strong learning environment for black youth. While Nasir finds extensive evidence for this kind of positive learning environment in certain afterschool programs, the evidence becomes much thinner when she turns to learning in the classroom, where black students are forced to defend academic achievement as a legitimate part of their racial identity.

As Nasir shows in three particularly strong chapters, ideas about race and academic achievement among black youth are incredibly complex and defy simple characterization. In chapter 3, “Wrestling with Stereotypes,” she documents how black high-school students struggle with negative stereotypes. Interestingly, her findings here are contradictory, as some black students describe their daily struggle with managing stereotypes, and at the same time report that for them personally, race had little direct influence on their own experience in the real world. To take one example, the interviewer asked a black student named Antonia,

In the space of a few short sentences, Antonia claims first that race does not matter at her school, and then that the white and Asian students are scared of the black students – in other words, that race matters very powerfully. Instead of shrinking away from challenging student answers like this one, Nasir uses them as evidence that ideas about race are slippery and complicated, that they depend on an individual's personality and the broader social context, and that ideas about race can change rapidly and can even coexist as opposing beliefs within the same individual at any given moment.

Nasir argues that some black students take up racialized identities as “school-oriented and socially conscious” that equate being black with the long history of the black freedom struggle (87). Not all black students, in other words, view doing well in school as a loathsome version of “acting white.” On the other end of the spectrum are black students that Nasir characterizes as “street-savvy.” For these students, being black means being “gangster” or being connected to “the street,” speaking African American vernacular English, and, for males, wearing baggy jeans, oversized T-shirts and caps. While some “street-savvy” students view academic success as antithetical to their identity, most simply see schoolwork as disconnected from who they really are.

What is especially interesting to consider is the role that school administrators and teachers play in shaping these two very different racialized identities. In one case study, Nasir found that teachers and administrators labeled students as either having academic potential or not, and then tracked students into different classes accordingly. She argues that this school reified the division between academic high achievers and those destined to failure. The following chapter, “Caught between Worlds,” explains exactly why this is so dangerous. Here we meet three students who simultaneously embody elements of both the “street-savvy” and the “school-oriented and socially conscious” racialized black identities; however, the high school they attend tries to force them into one category or the other. In one instance, administrators promoted a student named Victor into an AP history class because they viewed him as a high academic achiever. But Victor struggled in the class and without sufficient support soon failed it, an experience that ultimately undercut his own self-confidence as a student and directly threatened his graduation. Nasir wants readers to see at first hand that there is no monolithic “black” identity, nor a single way that black students respond to school and to formal learning. Instead, Nasir asks readers to recognize that these very complexities represent the starting point of analysis for scholars who wish to address and improve black education in America. In conclusion, she returns to evidence for the positive learning environments found in afterschool sports and clubs that support creative learning and foster a sense of racial pride. She wants educators to reflect on the challenges of racial identity formation for black students, and to build learning environments that explicitly support and nurture a positive black identity.

Some readers may find that the organization of the book into separate, and at times unconnected, chapters drawn from different research projects disrupts the narrative flow of the argument. At times, Nasir's focus on the relationship between racial identity formation and learning seems to privilege these processes as explanatory factors, but readers may wonder what other factors are affecting students’ academic success in school. Incidental references to family disputes, pregnancies, and financial strains suggest that trying to isolate the processes of learning and racial identity formation is, to some degree, futile. Overall, this book offers an excellent addition to a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship on race and education, and is well suited to both undergraduate and graduate students of sociology, African American studies, and education.