How Stereotypes Sabotage Minority Students

The perceptions that individuals have about members of various racial and ethnic

groups -- racial stereotypes -- are thought by many people to be an essential element of intergroup relations. Those attitudes play an important role in shaping the overall environment in which students attend college and, as such, are important to understanding academic outcomes.

For example, according to Stanford University professor of psychology Claude Steele’s hypothesis of “stereotype vulnerability,” minority students are afraid of living up to the myth of intellectual inferiority. As a result, they reduce their efforts to protect themselves from the psychologically painful prospect of trying hard and still doing poorly (thus proving themselves intellectually inferior).

We developed the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen to provide comprehensive data that would enable researchers like Steele to test such theoretical explanations for minority underachievement in higher education. Specifically, the survey sought to measure the academic and social progress of college students at regular intervals and to capture emergent psychological processes hypothesized by researchers -- while controlling for differences in students’ social, economic, and demographic backgrounds.

In the end, we surveyed 3,924 students -- 959 Asian-American, 998 white, 1,051 African-American, and 916 Latino students -- at 28 selective colleges and universities in the fall and winter of 1999. The survey consisted of face-to-face interviews that compiled detailed information about the neighborhood, family, and educational environments that the students experienced before entering college. It also assessed students’ attitudes, aspirations, and motivations at the time of entry.

We followed that baseline survey with a shorter telephone survey conducted during the spring term to gather information from the same students about their social, psychological, and academic experiences since arriving on campus. We plan to follow the first-year surveys with additional telephone interviews conducted during the spring of each of the next four years. By combining retrospective data captured in the baseline survey with prospective information compiled in years one through five, we are seeking to create a longitudinal database stretching from childhood through college graduation, and beyond.

To gain insight into the stereotypes they hold, we asked the students in the baseline survey to rate people of different races according to various traits. The scores went from 1 to 7, with higher scores reflecting increasingly negative stereotypes. The trait dimensions were: hard-working/lazy, peaceful/violence-prone, intelligent/unintelligent, prefer to be self-supporting/prefer to live off welfare, easy to get along with/hard to get along with, stick with tasks/give up easily, tend to treat members of other groups equally/tend to discriminate against members of other groups, and rich/poor.

We found that black, Latino, Asian, and white people see themselves and each other as tending to discriminate against members of other groups; this could have ramifications for intergroup relations on campuses by stifling interracial contact and increasing racial tensions. In an interesting turn of American racial ideology, black, Latino, and Asian students all perceive themselves as more hard-working than white people. Otherwise minority-group members have generally favorable stereotypes of white people, and white people have favorable stereotypes of themselves.

Stereotypes of black people aren’t as negative as we expected; however, it is clear that black people are rated most negatively on traits that are consistent with American racial ideology. White, Latino, and Asian students are all likely to perceive blacks as violence-prone and poor. They also rate black people more negatively than themselves in traits like lazy, unintelligent, and preferring welfare dependence.

Stereotypes of Latino people follow a similar pattern. They receive their most negative ratings in relation to tendencies to be violence-prone and poor, and both white and Asian students perceive Latinos as more likely than their own groups to be lazy, unintelligent, and to prefer welfare dependence. As expected, Asian people are typically stereotyped as hard-working, intelligent, preferring to be self-sufficient, and tending to stick to tasks.

We also asked the students, “What do you think should be more important to blacks in the United States: being black, being American, or should both identities be equally important?” Similarly, we asked whether it was more important for Latinos to be Latino, American, or for both identities to be equally important. And we found that American-identified black and Latino students are more likely than their counterparts with the strongest racial identities to stereotype their groups as tending to be lazy, unintelligent, hard to get along with; to give up easily; and to discriminate against others. Many of these traits are the ones most closely associated with achievement, and the pattern of results outlined are consistent with earlier results that suggest that American-identified blacks and Latinos may be more concerned with confirming negative group stereotypes and, therefore, their poor academic performance is the result of stereotype threat.

Our research therefore suggests that black and Latino students must overcome the stereotypes that others have of them, in addition to those that they have internalized about their own group. Many of these stereotypes reflect traits that are inconsistent with academic success and are, therefore, potentially influential in producing stereotype threat, particularly for those who identify themselves as American. For those who identify most strongly as members of a racial group, the concern is more likely to be with not “acting white” and, therefore, adopting an oppositional cultural orientation.

When considered in light of racial identity, then, the persistence of negative stereotypes has the potential to sabotage academic achievement of a large segment of both the black and Latino student populations.

Camille Z. Charles is an assistant professor of sociology and Douglas S. Massey is chairman of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania. This article is adapted from The Source of the River: The Social Origin of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities, published this month by Princeton University Press.

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 18, Page B10