A black woman in her 20s who recently completed a Ph.D. from a competitive
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university told me why she liked a certain faculty member: “He is maybe the only white professor I have had during my doctoral studies who didn’t automatically assume that because I was black, I was less than competent.”
Her comments are far from unusual. The idea of African-Americans’ intellectual inferiority is still taken for granted by many people, despite the illusion of openness toward and acceptance of all races in our society. For no American group has there been such a pervasive, persistent, well-articulated, and unabated assumption of mental incompetence.
Few respectable people will publicly assert that black people are intellectually second-rate. The visible, in-your-face manifestations of oppression have been mostly eliminated. But you can scarcely find a black student who cannot recall, or give you a litany of instances, where he or she has been automatically assumed to be intellectually incompetent.
Today the ideology of black intellectual inferiority is expressed not only in the interactions between students and faculty members, irrespective of political orientation, but also vividly and with considerable force in the media, which inserts itself into all aspects of our lives.
The problem is exacerbated by newspaper, magazine, and television stories that chronicle the extraordinary educational achievement of immigrants of color, particularly Asian-American people. The subtext is, “You can make it if you try.” After all, Asian-American people have come to this country and succeeded in the face of significant hardships -- not only academically but also economically. The unarticulated message is that African-American students don’t similarly succeed because they are intellectually inferior. In Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing, using a comedic approach, one of the black men captured that assessment, noting: “Either dem Koreans are geniuses or we blacks are dumb.”
In fact, the ideology of African-American inferiority is more robust today, in terms of its impact on students, than it was in the pre-civil-rights era, when unequal educational opportunity was an uncontested reality. But in those days, most, if not all, historically black schools and colleges were intentionally organized in opposition to the ideology of black intellectual inferiority. Besides promoting education -- an act of insurgency in its own right -- they were designed to affirm black humanity, intelligence, and achievement.
At such institutions, faculty members and administrators intentionally and systematically gave their students a counter-narrative about themselves, while passing on the African-American philosophy of education: freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. They also routinely promoted attitudes, behaviors, and practices that countered the identities of their students as members of an oppressed group.
Many African-American people who have grown up in the South recall their teachers saying, “Hold your head up high, throw your shoulders back, walk like you are somebody.” That exhortation was not simply the words of strict school marms. As an African-American woman reared in the Jim Crow South, I know intuitively that it was about asking us, children and youth, to carry ourselves as if we were free.
Several years ago, I referred to that exhortation in a talk and, afterward, a woman in the audience -- an African-American teacher from the South who was well into her 80s -- recalled the many times she had uttered those same words to her black students. She explained that she was telling them, in a subtle yet clear manner, not to carry themselves as if they’d been working in the fields. She was telling them not to allow their social location to be expressed in their bodies. A colleague of mine recounts a similar story about his son, who, after enrolling in a historically black college, walked and carried himself differently -- with a surer step and more confidence.
Southern black schools and colleges had rituals that captured the complexities of African-American students’ position in society, rituals that symbolically affirmed that black students were simultaneously members of American society, but also engaged in a struggle for full membership. One such ritual was the singing by the school community of both the national anthem and the Negro national anthem at formal events.
Historically black institutions were imaginary, “as if” communities -- capable of modeling possibilities and passing on a narrative that was oppositional to the dominant ideology of black intellectual inferiority. To say that those institutions were imaginary communities is not to imply that they were individual creations that only existed in peoples’ heads. Rather, they were intentionally and collectively constituted, designed to forge an identity -- through symbols, rituals, and cultural artifacts -- of black Americans as literate and achieving people.
Today, in contrast, many schools and colleges have become deritualized institutions. Regular assemblies and campuswide gatherings -- once common in virtually all segregated black educational institutions -- are now held at only a few public colleges and universities, like Morehouse College. Many educational institutions are simply assemblages of disconnected activities and events. Schools and colleges are not intentionally organized to create identities of African-American students as achievers -- or to inspire hope, to create optimism and sustain effort, or to buffer African-American students from daily experiences of racism. Few institutions have created a public narrative about race that is counter to the “narrative of openness and opportunity” -- one that talks about black achievement in the face of constraints and limits. Almost none have a well-articulated message about the intellectual competence of their students.
In spite of the complicated nature of the task of achievement in the post-civil-rights era, African-American students do achieve at high levels in some colleges and schools. A review of the places where African-American students have achieved challenges commonly held assumptions about black achievement, while allowing us to predict the environments in which black students are likely to succeed. For example, Xavier University in New Orleans sends three times as many black students to medical school as Harvard University does. Department of Defense, Catholic, and some independent schools report virtually no gap in achievement between black and white students, while politically progressive school districts in college towns, with high per-pupil spending and a very individualistic and competitive intellectual environment, report a significant gap in achievement between black and white students.
African-American youth succeed in educational settings that have a leveling culture, a culture of achievement that extends to all of its members. African-American children and youth succeed in higher-education institutions that in themselves -- or in special programs, like the Meyerhoff Scholars at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County -- intentionally craft a social identity for African-American students as achievers. Even institutions that don’t respond or pay attention to African-American culture seem able to counter society’s ideology about black intellectual incompetence if they have established a strong culture of achievement and view African-American students as full participants. That appears to be the case even when African-American students encounter individual teachers who do not see them as intellectually competent.
How can more colleges create such environments?
Colleges and schools desperately need to determine how to pass on to the next generation of black students the African-American philosophy of education. That indigenous philosophy, which emerged from African-American peoples’ ongoing struggle for education, from slavery to the civil-rights era, richly expresses what blacks were willing to do to acquire education. It also equates the very identity and humanity of African-American people with literacy and education. Not only have I heard white people wish that African-American people valued education as much as immigrants, I have also heard African-American people themselves say that we should be like Jewish people or Asian-American people and have schools on Saturday. I usually respond by saying that we should be like ourselves and have schools on Saturday or Sunday or in the evenings -- as we did when we ran native schools, Sabbath schools, penny schools, and freedom schools.
To transmit that philosophy of education will require that teachers and teacher educators, in collaboration with departments of African-American studies, acquaint themselves with the historical and literary records in which this philosophy is embedded. It is not an overstatement to say that we have professors of education who are preparing teachers to work with African-American students who have little knowledge of the history of African-American education and the black intellectual tradition.
Higher-education institutions and schools can also create organizations like film clubs, literary societies, study groups, debating clubs, and African-American history and culture clubs, and use those organizations to intentionally and regularly give students a counternarrative about themselves. Participation in those groups can also be the context for students to practice those behaviors that are necessary if one is to be an achiever: persistence, hard work, and a commitment to thoroughness and to doing one’s best.
Institutions must also provide students with intellectually challenging curriculums and hold them to high standards. To tell black students that they are smart, and to repeatedly teach content that is not intellectually challenging, reaffirms that students are not seen as smart or intellectually capable.
In addition, colleges and schools should establish a review process to assess whether and how their programs, policies, and practices reproduce the ideology of black intellectual inferiority, in explicit or subtle ways. Institutional administrators should pay attention to those campus offices that can reinforce the outsider status of black students, including financial-aid, career-services, and others. I once heard black students on a campus characterize their interactions with the financial-aid office as “hazing.” At another college, black students would go to the registrar’s office only if a certain employee was at lunch.
While admittedly an extra responsibility, black faculty members and administrators will need to create spaces on their campuses where black students can openly discuss how beliefs about the intellectual competence of black students are expressed and how, notwithstanding those realities, black students can maintain a relentless focus on academic achievement.
Black students, irrespective of class, background, and prior level of academic preparation, will have difficulty achieving in institutions that are individualistic, highly stratified, and competitive, and that make few attempts to build and ritualize a common, strong culture of achievement that extends to all students. Conversely, African-American students will succeed in institutions that have a strong sense of group membership, and where an expectation that everyone can achieve is explicit and regularly communicated in public settings.
If educators organize social and cultural groups designed to forge identities of achievement -- groups that are the context for a range of academic activities and that help students acquire those behaviors that are necessary for them to be achievers -- African-American students will, indeed, be able to achieve.
Theresa Perry is an associate professor of education and the vice president of university relations at Wheelock College. This article is adapted from Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students, by Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa G. Hilliard III, to be published next month by Beacon Press. Copyright © 2003 by Theresa Perry.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 18, Page B10