Theresa Perry - Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African-American Students

CONTENTS

THERESA PERRY

CLAUDE STEELE

ASA G. HILLIARD III

This book is a unique kind of collaboration. We come together as three scholars, with different disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives, to explore in new ways an issue of urgent importance and national debate: the experience and achievement of African-American students in schools.

We have written our essays separately. Each is the work of a single author, with a single voice. But we present our work together because we believe that we share key perspectives and purposes. We present our work together because we believe that juxtaposing our pieces one against the other will open up a space in the national conversation on this issue that is new and needed.

We share a general view that African-American students face challenges unique to them as students in American schools at all levels by virtue of their social identity as African Americans and of the way that identity can be a source of devaluaton in contemporary American society. We believe, as we all argue, that the contemporary conversation about African-American achievement ignores these social facts in ways that seriously distort the debate. And we all believe and argue that a proper understanding of the forces acting on African-American students points to a variety of educational practices that we know can mitigate these obstacles and promote excellent achievement.

Theresa identifies dilemmas of achievement facing African-American students as members of a group subject to an ideology of intellectual and cultural inferiority, and traces, historically and thematically, an indigenous African-American philosophy of achievement capable of addressing those dilemmas of achievement. Claude brings the perspective of empirical psychology to the question of achievement, identifying a phenomenon of stereotype threat that in a general way can be show to affect the achievement of people who are members of groups subject to stereotyped appraisals of their abilities; he, too, suggests that positive remedies follow from a proper understanding of this phenomenon. And Asa, after arguing against explanations that ignore the lived reality of ethnic identity in the United States, show us in detail teachers and programs who do not fail to produce excellence in academic achievement, regardless of the background of the students.

We do not agree on all matters, and we speak for ourselves. But we believe that readers who read our work together will see the connections between the pieces and hope that our collective work encourages both a new kind of national conversation and new research from a variety of potentially productive directionshistorical, psychological, and educational. Our children deserve both.

THERESA PERRY

Sylvia was strikingly beautiful. She had dark chocolate skin, coal black hair. She was built, too. The fact that she was smart had undoubtedly eluded her as she made her way through one of the citys public high schools. Her beauty and shapeliness hadnt. She was now a go-go dancer at one of the night spots in her Midwestern town. The story goes that one night, as she came down from the stage where she was dancing, she spotted the admissions counselor for the Educational Opportunity Program at one of the citys large private universities. I want to go to school, she said. He responded, Youll have to come and see me in my office to talk about how you can apply for the program. Five years later, this woman, who had graduated sixty-ninth out of eighty from what was then known as one of the worst high schools in the city, would have to decide between acceptances at the masters of public health programs at Yale, Harvard, and Boston University. She chose Yale, and upon graduation she became the first director of minority health care for her state.

I knew Tanya as a student when I taught at one of the two Black Catholic high schools in Birmingham, Alabama. My most persistent image is of her alternately checking out her pimples and fixing her hair, both with the aid of a small handheld mirror. I also knew that her family was often on the run from her abusive father, packing up in the night and going somewhereanywhereto get away. Thirty years later, at a reunion of graduates of the Educational Opportunity Program, now a professor of communications at a community college, she speaks, still with her southern accent, about how the program saved her life. She reminds us that at the time when her father was abusing her mother, nobody was talking much about domestic violence, especially in our southern Black community.

When Janice was about to go to law school, her oldest sister was about to go off to prison. Wethat is, most of the program staffhad put money together (I think it came to five hundred dollars) so she could buy clothes for law school. I got a nerve to be trying to go to law school with no clothes, she said, even as she excitedly showed us the clothes she had bought. She did attend and graduate from a top-twenty law school. She is now a practicing attorney. We now know that she could have also become a world-class runner, as we have over the years watched her consistently win track meets in her age group. But running was not then on her radar screen or ours, except as an activity she was attracted to as she tried to emulate the life and style of one of the program staff. At the same thirty-year reunion, the lawyer/runner reminisced about the wonderful events that came with being a member of the programs prelaw society. And more than once she reminded us that it was not simply the prelaw society, but the Third World Prelaw Society.

He was steadfast, hardworking; he wanted to be a doctor. His first-semester grades would have convinced most students and college faculty that, for him, being a physician was nothing more than a pipe dream. A summer at the New York City Department of Health working with a research team; participation in the Harvard Health Careers summer program (all arranged by program staff), along with supplementary instruction in math and science; a healthy dose of program rhetoric (You guys are going to be the leaders of this community); and five years later Jeremy enrolled in Harvard Medical School. His is now one of the largest community-based health clinics in his city. As he had always dreamed of doing, he is providing excellent health care to Latinos in the city, to his people.

There are the brothers, one a gynecologist, the other a history professor; Dwayne, the brilliant and compassionate assistant principal of an alternative high school; Gloria, by most accounts the most effective and the most progressive state legislator; John and David, entrepreneurs, one local, the other national. I could go onbut you get the point. The program these young people participated in, the Educational Opportunity Program, normalized high academic achievement for students who were mainly African-American, all first-generation college students, some of whom before entering the program did not have the skills, behaviors, beliefs, or identities required for high academic achievement. What was there about this program, this carefully constructed environment, that made it possible for program staff to routinely participate in the transformation of students into high academic achievers? How did the program help students redefine who they were and who they wanted to be? And perhaps most important, what were the tacit understandings, embraced and enacted by program staff, of what it would take for the mainly African-American and all first-generation college students to be high achievers?

I write this essay not only because of my experience as one of the individuals who worked in and helped to shape aspects of this program, but also because there are schools and programs all over the United States in which African-American youth routinely achieve at high levels. At these institutions, being working-class or poor, having parents who have not gone to college, being poorly prepared academically, being African-Americanthese variables are not impediments to academic achievement. Why are these institutions able to promote academic achievement among African-American students while so many other institutions are not? This is one of the questions that I will attempt to address.