The Not-So-New South Suburbs: Asian Immigration and the Politics of School Integration in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Abstract

This article explores how middle-class Asian immigrants disrupted settled geographies and social relations in a high-tech Southern suburb. In a case study of controversies over the redrawing of the Chapel Hill school district attendance boundaries, it asks what middle-class Asian immigrants attempts to navigate the space “between Black and White” reveals about emergent racial and spatial relations in the New South suburbs and the possibilities for advancing more equitable schools and neighborhoods. The case study shows how Asian immigrants struggled to navigate the social, cultural, and educational barriers to organize a united and effective platform, highlighting how new immigrants have challenged old ideas about equitable education policies based on a Black-White binary. But it also showed how their tactics mimicked those of White suburbanites and their resistance to integration, as Asian immigrants rallied around policies that support suburban segregation and inequality and helped to reinforce settled structures of White privilege.