The proliferating discourses on the urgent need for “integration” reflect the crisis of the difference between “them” and “us”. (Bojadžijev 2020) Schools in gentrifying neighborhoods are particularly exposed to this crisis and therefore engage in celebrating diversity and managing “difference”. (Karakayali 2020; Blaisdell 2016). The interplay of the “fears and concerns discourse” (Foroutan 2016) and evidence-based knowledge about the contribution of the education system to social inequality tends to reinforce segregative strategies in schools and also among parents. Consequently, despite iconographies of diversity and its public celebration, public schools often function as engines of segregation. Drawing on critical perspectives on the governance of parenthood (Jergus, 2019) in the context of current education debates in crisis capitalism (Adler et al., 2025) the paper examines how intra-school segregation partly evokes parental action against institutional racism. A discourse analysis of Der Standard articles and reader comments on segregation in urban schools, traces hegemonic narratives. Discourse analysis reveals a broad ideological alliance across the political spectrum, in which arguments of freedom and social justice are mobilised to legitimise segregation strategies as expressions of “good parenting”. In contrast, counter-hegemonic positions are frequently dismissed as forms of “endangering children through political correctness” or as “socially romantic”. The prevailing “fears and concerns discourse” consistently constructs migrants as the source of the problem, rendering segregation seemingly inevitable and framing structural inequalities as solvable only at the expense of “the others”. By doing so, classes with merely migrant children are reflected as “dangerous classes” for the own children. However, institutional discrimination—and intra-school segregation in particular—produces differentiated effects across the entire school, shaping contradictory processes of collective subjectivation. Bei analysing qualitative interviews with parents, this paper explores processes of community building and experiences of resistance and collective subjectivation during the self-organised “Anti-Segregation Working Group” in a Viennese primary school. The “Anti-Segregation Working Group” was organised by migrant and non-migrant parents with the aim of opposing intra-school segregation. In qualitative interviews, parents involved in the working group reflect on the dynamics and experiences of acting against institutional racism and practices of othering. In particular, parents who describe themselves as privileged experienced confronting power relations within the school as “the hardest time in my life so far.” The paper interrogates the analytical potential of a “crisis of privilege” to contribute to the “de-migrantisation” (Bojadžijev/Römhild 2014) of middle-class “educational panic” (Bude 2011) within the context of neoliberal competition.

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