Ethnic Stereotypes, part one

Ethnic stereotypes, like the other forms of stereotyping that we have discussed, are rooted in assumptions about a group of people. We make those assumptions so we don't have to accommodate new information every time we encounter someone of a particular race. For brevity's sake I will focus on some stereotypes about black students in this post, and consider other ethnic groups in the next.

Many of the stereotypes we would encounter in the classroom are decades old, if not older. Stereotypes about black students in particular were a part of the American national myth, as well as a foundation of human interaction for centuries. Without even getting into specific stereotypes, we can look at the language we use to talk about everyday things for evidence of this history. White connotes purity, good, wholeness, cleanliness, positivity, whereas blackness is correlated with badness, evil, with wrongdoing, impurity, savagery, and with dirt: physical, metaphorical, and metaphysical.

I'm not here to argue whether or not those aesthetic connotations came from or created some of the racial disparities that have been playing out over the last 500 years of human history. what is important to take from this is simply the knowledge that racial stereotypes are OLD, and consequently will take (and have taken) a while to overcome.

Some specific racial stereotypes that you and/or students in your school will and have experienced have direct negative effects on their performance in school. Lets look at a few of them and their implications for students and teachers:

Black students are lazy, and don't want to work:

This stereotype has existed in the American mythos since slavery was en vogue among the founding fathers. It has made itself even more pervasive in society since the spread of welfare programs focus on many urban areas; the perception is that many urban blacks are on welfare because they are lazy and don't want to work, and it completely disregards the social and environmental issues that lead to mass joblessness in the inner city. In the classroom, it could seriously effect the way students' behaviors are received. For example: all of the students in Jon's math class are resistant to do homework. He is usually pretty laid back about it, but today he takes particular exception to two students' failure to complete the assignment. What separates them from the class? Their ethnicity. In an attempt to account for individual differences, Jon approaches them privately and says that he understands that culturally, blacks do not like to do work, but that he still has a high expectation of them, and that they need to overcome that tendency if they want to succeed in the real world, escape the ghetto, and not live on welfare.

Jon's assumption might not only alienate him from his students, but contrarily, it could cause him to stop encouraging those students to complete assignments as much as he encourages other students. When he looks back on it, his expectation that the stereotype exists would have been fulfilled. What he misses is that his expectation of the stereotype, caused the stereotype. If he had continued to encourage all of his students equally, not only might the entire class' behavior have changed, but he would have been given an example that worked to destroy that schema of stereotype for himself and for his students of any ethnicity.

Tricky, I know. lets look at another example.

Black people are criminally violent:

This stereotype is based in the idea that the African people that were brought (Stolen) to America were bestial, animalistic. It was reified by the hundreds of slave revolts through the duration of slavery in which blacks' anger and violence was unfathomable to white slaveowners. The same way every black person in the south was suspected of being a slave, he or she was also suspected of being a criminal. The stereotype is perpetuated today by simple statistics with complex origins. The high rates of crime in urban, low-SES areas are fueled and magnified in public media, as well as being incorrectly causally linked to the high number of minorities in those areas. Suzy teaches in a magnet school in Washington DC.When Suzy's class is taking a test, she suspects one of her students, a black student, is cheating, so she confronts the student. When he responds incredulously, she takes his defensiveness as a sign of guilt and tells him so. the student becomes to visibly upset, raising his voice, and demanding that she reconsider, and offer proof. She tells him to leave the room, but when he stands, he approaches her, still demonstrative, Suzy calls security and urges them to hurry, remarking that she is being threatened by the student.

Because of Suzy's expectation that her black students will be violent, she was quick to overreact to a situation about which any student would have been upset. She has disrupted the testing environment for all her students, and if any of her students are aware of the racial politics of school (as most of her students of color likely are) they have lost trust for her, suspecting that some level of racism motivated her original accusation (even if it was well founded) as well as the subsequent reaction. The student she accused has been suspended for one week, automatically failing that grading quarter. The information he missed is the information he could have used to pass the EOC; Suzy has just contributed to broadening the achievement gap. Heavy.

This video is a part of a series of lecture that encounter race. At about 3:25 the lecturer begins to address this notion of expected stereotyped violence from black students.

Both of these hypothetical situations suggest that it is not enough that we have an awareness of what cultural differences could be. We must be self reflective, seeing the intersections of our beliefs and those differences, and further, our beliefs about those differences. All of our actions have consequences. When we allow the black football player to slack in our class but give him a passing grade to keep eligibility, we are not only succumbing to stereotypes about black athleticism, we are perpetuating them, as well as creating a new generation of "dumb jocks" (another stereotype in and of itself). When we make careless comments about the eating habits of a black student (fried chicken, collard greens, chitlins and the like) we are demeaning a cultural tradition, as well as demonstrating to our classes that these behaviors and unfair, stereotyping beliefs are ok and normal. Teachers can have many ways of closing the achievement gap, and one surefire way is by not succumbing to a common stereotype that undergirds each of the stereotypes indicated above: that lower achievement is inherent and endemic to black students.

Consider other stereotypes about black students. how are they made manifest in the classroom? how can teachers' reactions to behaviors influence the perpetuation or destruction of those stereotypes? How do they affect the achievement gap?

In comments, feel free to suggest other stereotypes or stereotyped groups you would like me to address in my next post.