Based upon ethnographic research conducted with 9, 10 and 11 year old children in a school located in one of the most diverse areas of the world, a neighborhood in New York City, this thesis considers children's role in everyday processes of racial formation and transformation. The thesis begins with a critical consideration of the ontological status of children and race and their tragic entanglement through “nature,” illustrating how accounts of children's racial lives relegate children to nature and become sites that reproduce race and difference as “natural” type or kind. This taken-for-granted assumption serves as the basis for all ideologies of difference and has a profoundly alienating effect on social relations, shaping how humans come to know or not know one another. This study examines how a bunch of children with various differences navigated and often undermined these hegemonic beliefs of a world populated by reified types and how their interactions speak to the limitations, contradictions and inconsistencies for expressing self and Other at the dawn of the 21^st century.

The thesis first explores the school's role in producing difference, describing and analyzing how multiculturalism and colorblindness were practiced and became part of the general constitution of racial subjects and subjectivity. The thesis then moves to examine the incomplete nature of this interpellation, revealing the point of struggle at which the kids' experiences were denied. These everyday experiences and social relations became the basis of an emergent ethos that I designate critical cosmopolitanism, a mode of being with, against and beyond difference. Through close analysis of the children's talk, I show how they subverted the most dehumanizing elements of ideologies of difference—most notably their essentialism and absolutism, their basis in blood, birth and bodies, and the very stability and notion that these types exist at all. I conclude by arguing that the children provide a more compelling alternative vision for living with difference than has been theorized in academia, one that emerged form the everyday-ness of multi-racial living. Lastly, I argue that these utopian but disorganized practices must be the starting point for any emancipatory pedagogies.