Labeled 'learning disabled': Life in and out of school for urban Black and/or Latino/a youth from working-class backgrounds

This research is in response to the problem of overrepresentation of Black and Latino(a) students in segregated special education classes. The qualitative study reveals how working-class Black and Latino(a) urban youth labeled as having learning dis/Abilities (LD) describe the ways they come to understand their positionality in the discourse of LD through their lived experience. The research utilizes an eclectic theoretical framework culling from fields of Disability Studies, Critical Race Theory, LatCrit Theory, and Black Feminist Thought.;Working collaboratively with eight LD Black/Latino(a), urban working-class recent high school graduates as participant-researchers, a wide range of methodologies are used, including: dialogue, narrative writing, personal interviews, drawing, poetry, and collective memory work. Data from these multiple sources are used to co-construct autobiographical portraits in the form of monologues. In the first phase of analysis, each portrait is examined with a view to how individuals describe: their abilities and feelings toward learning, ways in which the label influences their sense of identities; and how it impacts life in and out of school. In the second phase, a cross-analysis using Collins's (2000) matrix of domination is employed to inform about how power operates among the discourses of dis/Ability, race, and class.;Participant-researchers emphasize their overall abilities and a strong desire to learn. They describe traditional schooling as a series of obstacles, finding neither general nor special education comfortable. Reactions vary to having the label of LD and being in special education, depending upon the age first labeled and the degree of segregation experienced. Many understand their lives as interlocking forms of containment—by neighborhood, school, and post-high school opportunities (or lack of) in terms of access to college and jobs. In simultaneously contemplating the discourses of dis/Ability, race, and class, participant-researchers reveal instances of how these subordinate, exacerbate, and compound each other.;Contemplating LD as it intersects with race and class provides more complex, nuanced understandings of the phenomenon. Furthermore, through foregrounding traditionally subjugated voices absent in professional literature, this study contributes to growing knowledge about the largest number of students in segregated special education settings. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.