Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (9 page)

When my children were growing up, we would often visit local museums and attend the interactive demonstrations designed for children. When the museum staff person would ask the gathered group of children a question, my oldest son would always raise his hand energetically to reply. Inevitably, someone else, almost always a White child, would be called on. While I realize that the small number of Black children typically present in the crowd meant that the odds were always in favor of a White child being called on, what was disheartening to me was my observation that after a while my son stopped raising his hand. What was an occasional experience at the museum for him is a daily experience for some children in classrooms where teacher behavior may be influenced by unexamined biases. Creating an opportunity to examine such biases through professional development can lead to changes in these everyday behaviors.

For example, after participating in a semester-long antiracist professional development course I developed, in which teachers were actively encouraged to examine their own racial socialization and the ways in which stereotypes impacted their classroom practice, the educators involved, most of whom were White, reported new actions they had taken to reach out to students of color and engage their parents in the learning process, often for the first time.
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One such educator offered this example:

Reaching out to this student communicated in a new and tangible way this teacher’s genuine concern and belief that her student was capable of succeeding.

Ironically, sometimes low expectations can be hidden behind an ostensibly positive response from a teacher, in the form of inflated grades. I recall a particular instance of working with an African American student when I was teaching at a predominantly White institution in New England. She was an older first-generation college student who had overcome many hardships to be in college. She was an enthusiastic participant in class discussion, who often made positive contributions to our dialogue. But when the student turned in a poorly written paper, I gave her a C on it. I knew she aspired to earn a PhD in psychology, and in my written feedback to her, I suggested that she work on her writing skills, not only to improve her performance in my class but to be better-prepared for graduate school. My intention was to encourage her, conveying both my own high standard and my confidence in her capacity to improve her writing with assistance and effort.

Despite my good intentions, she was upset with me and came to talk to me about her grade and my comments. My suggestion that she needed help with her writing was especially unsettling for her. “I just did a paper for another class and got an A on it,” she said.
How is that possible?
I thought to myself, given the quality of the writing I had seen. I knew the White male professor who had given her the A pretty well, and I felt comfortable enough in my relationship with him to call him up after the student left my office. I explained the situation and my puzzlement about the disparity in our grading of her written work. He agreed with my assessment that her writing skills were weak, but then elaborated on the many disadvantages she had overcome to be in college, and in conclusion said, “You know, she works really hard.” He had in essence given her an A for effort.

As our conversation continued, he spoke candidly about his reluctance to penalize the student for the inadequacy of her segregated urban high school preparation, and his desire not to be perceived as racially biased in his grading. I talked to him about my perception of the inherent racism in his essentially condescending—though well intentioned—awarding of a high grade. If he ordinarily gave honest feedback to more-privileged White students, to deny a Black student similarly honest feedback was to disadvantage her further. I argued that without honest feedback or high standards, without the demand for excellence, this student would not be able to accomplish what she wanted to accomplish. His high grade was in a real way an expression of
low expectations
, revealing a lack of confidence in her capacity to improve her skills with focused effort.

I never told the student about my conversation with the other professor. But her writing in my class did start to show improvement. And she did eventually go on to graduate school. Neither the conversation with the student or the professor was particularly easy to have—but both were important to me. It felt necessary for me to convey my high expectations to my student, and as it turned out, also to my colleague. In the end, I think they both appreciated it.

Just as low expectations can prevent honest and constructive feedback in the face of poor performance, they can also prevent the recognition of excellent performance from those from which little has been expected. Consider the example of Gwendolyn Parker, a Harvard graduate and writer, who as a child loved to write poetry. When given the task of writing a poem for a class assignment in high school, she did her very best and expected to receive an A. Instead she received a C- and was brave enough to ask the teacher about the low grade. His response clearly conveyed his expectations: “There is no way that you could have written this poem….I searched all weekend, looking for where you may have copied it from….If I’d been able to find out where you plagiarized it from, I would have given you an F. But since I couldn’t find it, you are lucky I gave you a C-.”
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The teacher was clearly angry, perhaps not just because he suspected cheating but because his assumptions of his student’s intellectual inferiority were being so blatantly challenged. Regrettably, Parker’s recollection is not the only such account that I have heard. Throughout my teaching career in predominantly White institutions, Black students have shared examples of instances where their competence and integrity have been questioned when their schoolwork exceeded the expectations of their teachers. As with Goddard, Terman, Yerkes, and Burt, subjective bias prevented the teachers from making the correct interpretation of the data before them—the excellence of the work.

Commenting on Parker’s experience and those of young people like her whose parents had migrated to the North to escape the Jim Crow segregation of the South, Theresa Perry wrote: “If in the South the struggle was for equal facilities, equal pay for teachers, classroom buildings, a local high school and materials, in the North the struggle would be against the assumption—no, the ideology—of Black children as intellectually inferior and against school assignments, assessments, and interactions based on this ideology.”
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Such an ideology was reinforced in the popular culture and, as we have seen, in the scholarly literature. No wonder it infused the schools. Without intentional activity to shift the paradigm, it is easily perpetuated from one generation of teachers to the next.

Well-entrenched assumptions about intelligence and racial and ethnic stereotypes do not just influence teacher behavior. They also impact student behavior over the years of their schooling. Particularly during adolescence, students who have internalized the negative messages about their own group are at risk for manifesting those stereotypes in school when they begin actively trying to define their own sense of racial/ethnic identity. Some African American students may have come to believe that high academic achievement in school is territory reserved for White students. Certainly the curriculum, devoid of Black role models, and the demographics of the tracking pattern in many schools, heavily skewed in favor of White students, would support that conclusion. Some African American students may actively choose to distance themselves from “White” behaviors, meanwhile embracing “Black” behaviors as defined by the popular culture as an expression of “authentic Blackness,” for example, behaviors that may run counter to school success. It should be noted that concern about “acting White” is not a universal phenomenon among Black adolescents. However, in those environments where it seems common, one must ask what factors have led to the internalization of those beliefs among Black students. Perry poses the essence of this question: “What are the institutional formations and ideologies of teachers and schools that construct and reproduce these beliefs about schooling?”
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It is a question that every teacher and administrator who has heard the phrase “acting White” used by Black children must ask.

The social psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues have identified another way that awareness of the assumption of intellectual inferiority can impact Black students, and that is the phenomenon of “stereotype threat.” As defined by Steele, stereotype threat is “the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype.”
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The studies that demonstrate this effect are elegantly designed and convincingly clear. For example, in one of their experiments, the researchers recruited high-achieving Black and White students from Stanford University, most of whom were sophomores, and matched them according to their incoming SAT scores. The Black students and the White students had presumably similar capabilities, based on similar SAT performance.

Then the researchers put these students into an inherently stressful testing situation. They gave them a challenging thirty-minute section from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) subject test in English literature, typically taken by college seniors applying to graduate school, and told them they were testing verbal ability. When the students’ scores were compared, what the researchers found was that, under this high-pressure test-taking circumstance, where all the students were in a way being pushed beyond their current levels of achievement, the White students at Stanford on average outperformed the Black students, even when they were evenly matched for SAT scores coming in. There was a performance gap, but why?

Steele and his colleagues hypothesized that when high-performing, high-achieving Black students who are very invested in doing well in school are put in a high-pressure test-taking situation, where intellectual ability is believed to be relevant to the task, they are likely to experience performance anxiety associated with stereotype threat—anxiety that might suppress the students’ performance. To test the hypothesis, the researchers manipulated the experimental design in a variety of ways. In the first example described above, a key condition in the experiment was the fact that they had introduced the test as “diagnostic” of the students’ intellectual ability. Under this condition a statistically significant performance gap resulted between Black and White student performance. However, when they gave the test with a different set of instructions—instructions that explicitly stated that the test was not a measure of intellectual ability but simply a laboratory task used to study approaches to problem solving—the difference in Black student performance was dramatic. In the “diagnostic” version of the experiment, Black students performed one full standard deviation below the White students. In the “nondiagnostic” version, Black and White students performed equally well. The racial stereotypes about Black academic performance were made irrelevant by reframing the test and the task in this simple way. Even though the same difficult test questions were used in both versions of the experiment, in the nondiagnostic version, the performance anxiety was reduced and the performance improved.
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Steele and other researchers have replicated these results over and over, in a variety of contexts, and found the same effect in other domains. For example, Steele, Steven Spencer, and Diane Quinn demonstrated that stereotype threat lowers the performance of talented female math students on a challenging math test, but when the same test was presented as one on which men and women were expected to perform equally well (thereby reducing the threat of a gendered stereotype about women’s performance), the women did indeed perform as well as the men on the difficult test and significantly better than the women in the “stereotype still relevant” test condition.
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Steele and his colleagues hypothesized that when equally prepared Black students failed to do as well as their White counterparts in the same room, they were thinking about their racial group membership and the associated stigma, and such thoughts were at the root of the performance anxiety. To test this idea, a new variation was introduced to the experiments. Researchers asked students to complete eighty “fill in the blank” word items just before they were given the challenging test items. Each of the words on the list had two letters missing. Some of the words had been pre-tested by the researchers and they knew that they could be completed to form “stereotype-relevant” words. For example, a student thinking about racial stereotypes might quickly fill in the missing letters for “_ _ ce” to spell “race” rather than “face” or “rice” or some other choice. Steele and his colleagues found that indeed the Black students wrote stereotype-related words more often than the White students, suggesting that race was on their minds before they took the test. This effect was particularly strong when students had been told that they were about to take a test measuring their intellectual ability. Black students in this diagnostic version listed more stereotype-relevant words than Black students who had received the nondiagnostic instructions prior to taking the test. The instructions did not seem to make a difference for White students, who made few stereotype-related word completions in either case.
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How does stereotype threat impede test-taking performance for Black students? In some of the experiments, computers were used to administer the tests, which allowed the researchers to study the test-taking behavior of the students in some detail. Steele writes, “Black students taking the test under stereotype threat seemed to be trying too hard rather than not hard enough. They reread the questions, reread the multiple choices, rechecked their answers, more than when they were not under stereotype threat. The threat made them inefficient on a test that, like most standardized tests, is set up so that thinking long often means thinking wrong, especially on difficult items like the ones we used.”
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