The ways in which British Afro-Caribbean students used resistance or contestation to negotiate teacher-student power relations are illustrated, using data from an ethnographic study of school exclusions in five English secondary schools. Situated in their wider racial and gendered positions, students' resistance was a response to their experience of domination, alienation, and infantilism, and was related to racially disproportionate threats of school sanction and permanent exclusion. (SV)