Social scientists continue to debate whether families’ avoidance of schools with higher fractions of racial outgroups results from racial animus or their use of racial demographics as a heuristic for school characteristics. I argue that racial segregation persists, in part, because families perceive school characteristics through a racial prism, whereby their racial biases, awareness of cultural stereotypes, and racial contexts contribute to racialized perceptions of identical schools. To explore this theory, I conduct an experiment with a racially diverse sample of 900 students and parents currently choosing schools, and externally validate these findings byanalyzing school application data from the same city. I find families interpretthe same data differently depending on schools’ racial demographics.