A case study of the practices of a white teacher working in an urban elementary school with a large majority of African American students shows the problems caused by detached and unreflective teaching practice. The study emerges from a joint ethnographic research and classroom-based educational project at the school. The teacher worked with university-affiliated members of a college-school collaboration. A person-in-context conceptual frame was used to construct a contextualized and data-driven understanding of the teacher's racial identity in the school context. The teacher did not recognize, confront, and take responsibility for the significance of race and racism in his classroom. He focused on supposedly nonracial factors, such as parenting, economics, and environmental influences, as the key issues challenging his students. His language about students was marked by low expectations and inattentiveness to student strengths. Neither his disciplinary nor pedagogical practices were effective. This teacher participated in the cultural practices of his school and classroom in a way that produces and maintains separateness from, and oblivion and indifference to, race in a highly racialized context. (Contains eight references.) (SLD)