African American Culture And Education

Culture and Education

Researchers have also found that culture plays a crucial role in determining (differential) educational outcomes, but not in a way that Fordham and Ogbu have argued. For some groups, culture becomes an additional burden that students have to learn to navigate through and (re)appropriate; for others, culture reinforces their advantages. In her study of low-income African American and Latino youths of New York City, Carter (2005) finds that these youths use the discourse of “acting white” to draw symbolic boundaries, but not in the way Fordham and Ogbu predicted. While the “acting white” thesis has no impact on the youths’ educational attitudes and aspirations, they do exhibit three different patterns of understanding and

Like Carter, they find that African American students in general aspire to do well academically and believe in the role of education in their chances of social mobility. Moreover, African American students exhibited higher levels of pro-school attitudes and positive peer pressure—peer pressure to do well academically. What hinders these students from achieving as much as their white and Asian peers is not their cultural orientation, but how the institutional setting of schools reinforces discriminatory racial status beliefs and therefore, subject their students to racial status beliefs. These status beliefs are materialized through stereotypes and how teachers as well as racial minority students themselves subject black and brown students to such stereotypes. Steele and Aronson (1995) found that African American students experience “stereotype threat” in educational settings—they are aware of the negative stereotypes (status beliefs) attached to their racial and ethnic backgrounds, and in their anxious and burdened efforts to dispel such stereotypes, end up underperforming on standardized tests. Therefore, African American (and Hispanic/Latino) students are not culturally detached from education and academic achievement. Rather, they are aware of how their underachievement

Scholars I have mentioned above have found that all racial and ethnic groups value education, good jobs, academic and occupational success, and want to achieve social mobility—no group is “culturally more disposed to” be unsuccessful and poor. However, they differ in what constitutes a good job, good grade, and success based on structural limitations they experience in their daily lives (like neighborhoods, institutional discrimination, etc.) and these differences ultimately lead to differential socioeconomic