Racialized Identities

Race and Achievement among African American Youth

Na'ilah Suad Nasir

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804779142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

As students navigate learning and begin to establish a sense of self, local surroundings can have a major influence on the range of choices they make about who they are and who they want to be. This book investigates how various constructions of identity can influence educational achievement for African American students, both within and outside school.Unique in its attention to the challenges that social and educational stratification pose, as well as to the opportunities that extracurricular activities can offer for African American students' access to learning, this book brings a deeper understanding of the local and fluid aspects of academic, racial, and ethnic identities. Exploring agency, personal sense-making, and social processes, this book contributes a strong new voice to the growing conversation on the relationship between identity and achievement for African American youth.

1

Identity as Possibility and Limitation

VICTOR WAS ONE OF THOSE STUDENTS who defied categorization—and he liked it that way. He was a tall, medium-brown-skinned, African American young man, his hair twisted into the beginnings of dreadlocks, with a ready smile. Victor was a charmer, so he always made our mostly female research team feel welcomed. He had big ideas; Victor was a theoretical thinker, who expressed pride in his academic accomplishments and delivered stinging critiques of the educational and social systems that he saw as perpetuating inequality. He had a wide range of friends—both students who were leaders in the school and high academic achievers, and students who barely went to class and smoked marijuana to get through the school day. He was smart, but he often chatted with his friends rather than participate in class.

When we first got to know Victor, in his junior year, he was considered one of the school’s top students. He had represented the school at a national student government meeting in Washington, D.C., and was enrolled in advanced placement (AP) history. He planned to attend college. By his senior year, however, Victor had failed several classes, his attendance was spotty, and he doubted the relevance of college to his life. When asked about his declining performance, Victor noted that he was tired of struggling against the perceptions society and other people had of him. He spoke candidly about his effort to craft a sense of who he was racially. He felt that his peers and the world expected him to be “gangster” and “hard,” to dress a certain way and to listen to a certain type of music. Yet the persona they expected did not feel authentic to him.

Victor was hamstrung both by a system he felt was rigged and by the challenge of figuring out who he was when the messages that he had to be hard were all too prevalent. His identity as a student and as an African American male were limited by the ideas he perceived in the world around him, with severe consequences for both his educational trajectory and his identity.

The idea that the racialized structure of our society and the prevalence of discrimination (in multiple forms) matters for the identities of African American and other minority students is not a new one. Indeed, it dates back to at least the 1930s, when Kenneth Clark conducted the first racial identity studies with black and white children by measuring students’ preferences for black and white dolls (Clark and Clark, 1939). For African American students the relation between racial identity and school achievement is still very much in the forefront in both lay and scholarly conversations about school achievement and learning. Theories of “oppositional identities” (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; O’Connor, Horvat, and Lewis, 2006; Ogbu, 1987, 1992) dominate the research literature on African American students and debates about race and schooling in the United States. These theories purport that African American students see school as associated with being white and thus disidentify with school in an effort to preserve their blackness. However, to argue that Victor has an oppositional identity with respect to school doesn’t capture the nuances and complexities of the self he constructs in relation to the school and neighborhood contexts that he navigates.

Victor’s struggle illustrates a fundamental developmental challenge for all young people in our society; that is, they must construct a sense of identity that incorporates their experiences and perceptions from the multiple settings in which they engage. This integration has implications for their motivation to engage in formal learning settings, and for their educational and life trajectories. However, this identity work is historically situated. The ideas about what it means to be African American and a student that Victor feels the world asks him to respond to run counter to a long tradition in the African American community of viewing education as integral to racial progress.

The Legacy of Schooling as Identity Work in African American Education

The connection between education and identity has long been attended to in the African American community. The historical record speaks to the fervor with which enslaved Africans, and later newly freed slaves, sought to learn to read and write; this intense desire to learn was tied to a sense that education was an avenue through which one could nurture and actualize human potential. That is, through education one could engage in society more centrally, be viewed as a full human being with rights and privileges, and have greater access to determining one’s future—one could become a new kind of person. Anderson (1988) recounts the zeal with which African Americans sought out education after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, when black ex-slaves looked to education to disrupt social and economic inequality. He quotes Harriet Beecher Stowe speaking in 1865 of the recent ex-slaves: “They rushed not to the grog-shop, but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling book as bread and teachers as a necessity of life” (5). Anderson also quotes Booker T. Washington, speaking in 1900: “Few people who were not right in the midst of the scene can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young and none too old to make an attempt to learn” (5).

It is clear from these comments that learning and schooling were primary goals for newly freed ex-slaves. In 1894 Frederick Douglass also conveyed in a speech this burning desire for learning and highlighted how learning and schooling were tied to issues of identity and person-hood for ex-slaves:

But if man is without education although with all his latent possibility attaching to him he is, as I have said, but a pitiable object; a giant in body but a pigmy in intellect, and at best but half a man. Without education he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope. The little light that he gets comes to him as through dark corridors and grated windows. The sights and sounds that reach him, so significant and full of meaning to the well trained mind, are to him of dim and shadowy importance. He sees, but does not perceive. He hears, but does not understand. The silent and majestic heavens fretted with stars, so inspiring and uplifting, so sublime and glorious to the souls of other men, bear no message to him. They suggest to him no idea of the wonderful world in which we live, or of the harmony of this great universe, and hence, impart to him no happiness.

Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is easy to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness and to defeat the very end of their being. They can neither honor themselves nor their Creator. Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted; and, on the other hand, no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education. (Douglass, 1894)

Scholars and historians have highlighted the importance of learning for enslaved Africans, even as they risked severe punishment and death to pursue it. This seeking of education was not just about gaining access to material resources; it was also about being seen as fully human, as an educated person. Implicit in Douglass’s speech is an appeal that African Americans be viewed as full humans, and Douglass’s status as an educated man is central in that appeal. The connection between humanity and education was very much about identity—with respect to both how African Americans viewed themselves (as upstanding citizens who sought out opportunities to be educated) and how they were viewed by white Americans.

In the African American tradition, schools and education have played two roles with respect to identity. The first is an inward role that involves supporting African American youth in conceptualizing themselves both as members of a strong, resilient people with much to contribute to this country, and as potential scholars, academics, and powerful students. The second is an outward role, whereby being educated tells others something about who African Americans are and speaks to the potential in African Americans as a people (and at the same time speaks to the atrocities of enslavement and oppression).

Issues of identity and learning are deeply tied to the idea, articulated by Douglass, of realizing full humanity through education. At its best, education should involve helping one to actualize one’s innate potential and to become equipped to enact one’s unique contribution to society and the world. W. E. B. Du Bois (1903), in a statement about black colleges, speaks to the complex mission, involving identity, of education for African Americans:

The function of the Negro college, thus, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all of this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which centers of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it. (66)

Du Bois makes the case that the role of the Negro college is both about supporting learning and social uplift and about developing men (and presumably women) to know themselves and the world around them. He reiterates the point that the goals of educating young people and helping them better understand who they are and how they fit into the world are critical to supporting the learning and development of African Americans.

Thus the connection between education and identity has a long history in the struggle for African American education; this historical context is an important counter to current conceptualizations of African American identity being in opposition to schooling. I find it fascinating that the current struggles and debates regarding education and identity in the African American community, set in a climate of increasing disparity in access to educational resources, resonate in many ways with similar tensions and debates in the early part of the twentieth century. And yet, clearly, there are also aspects of how we think about African American identity, and how that relates to educational and identity processes, that are rooted in the ideologies and practices of the current time.

Defining Learning and Identity

It is important to be precise about my use of the terms “learning” and “identity” because in the recent literature on learning and identities, scholars have argued for the interrelationship of these two processes (Nasir and Cooks, 2009; Wenger, 1998). Since these processes are viewed as having implications for one another, I need to be clear about how I am defining them in distinct ways.

By learning I mean shifts in ways of understanding, thinking about concepts, and solving problems and closely related shifts in ways of doing or participating in activities. Current perspectives on learning view it as involving not simply transmission from the teacher to the learner (as a behaviorist perspective would view learning), but as involving cognitive processes of problem-solving, transfer, reflection, prior knowledge, and the development of expertise (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000; Sawyer, 2006). Scholarship over the past ten years has also highlighted how, in addition to involving cognitive processing, learning is deeply intertwined with social processes and ways of participating in learning activities (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000; Greeno, 2006; Lave and Wenger, 1991). This work has highlighted the fact that learning always involves an interplay between individual cognition and a socially and culturally organized learning setting, where learning is, in part, indexed by changing relations between people and increasingly sophisticated use of available tools for problem-solving.

By identity I mean a sense of self, constructed from available social categories, taken up by individuals and ascribed by cultural groups and social settings. This definition builds on symbolic interactionism (Goffman, 1959; Mead, 1934), sociocultural perspectives (Holland et al., 1998; Wenger, 1998), sociological perspectives (Stryker, 1987), and developmental psychology approaches (Erikson, 1959, 1968; Marica, 1966, 1980). Identity is a concept that also captures the interplay between social and cultural institutions and norms, and individual learning and developmental trajectories. Identities take shape as a part of a cultural process of becoming—a becoming that is guided by our ever-evolving sense of who we are and who we can be.

These definitions preserve the distinction between processes of learning and processes of identity and define each in ways that honor the culturally bound and context-dependent nature of each.

Guiding Assumptions

My exploration of learning and identity processes is guided by several critical assumptions that form a foundation, of sorts, upon which the data in the following chapters build:

• Although learning and identity processes deeply inform one another, they are conceptually distinct.

• Learning and identity are always cultural and social processes, linked in fundamental ways to the contexts in which they occur.

• Racialized identities are important to consider in a highly racially stratified society such as that in the United States, where strong and long-held racial stereotypes exist, as well as tremendous racial disparities in all aspects of society.

• Racialized identities are related to the complex process of racial socialization, which occurs in family and school contexts.

• Identities, including racialized identities, are fluid and shift in relation to setting, salience, and local definitions and opportunities.

Each of these guiding assumptions serves as an orientation to the data that follow and situate the core concerns in this book in relation to several relevant strands in the research literature. In the following pages, I describe in more detail each assumption and draw on relevant research and theory.

Although learning and identity are processes that deeply inform one another, they are conceptually distinct. There has been much theorizing from a sociocultural perspective about the implications that learning and identity have for one another (Boaler and Greeno, 2000; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wortham, 2006). For instance, Wenger (1998) conceptualizes learning as an aspect of identity and identity as a result of learning. For Wenger, both learning and identity have to do with shifting relationships to people and objects in a particular setting and involve membership in communities of practice. This perspective reconceptualizes learning from an in-the-head phenomenon to a matter of engagement, participation, and membership in a community of practice, and engages in a substantive discussion on relations between identity and learning in practices.

Research on the learning and achievement of minority students has also highlighted (or implied) the relation between learning processes and identity processes (Conchas, 2001; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Levinson, Foley, and Holland, 1996; Mehan, 1996; Ogbu, 1987; Osbourne, 1997) and has noted the powerful role that the social context plays in which identities are made available to whom—identities that can constrain or enable opportunities for learning and success in school (Davidson, 1996; Ferguson, 2000; McDermott and Varenne, 1995). However, we must also be clear about the conceptual distinctions between learning processes and identity processes. One example of research that makes this distinction is the work of Boaler (1999) and Boaler and Greeno (2000). In a study of reform and traditional math classes they explored how students’ identities as mathematics learners varied with the structure of the classroom, the curriculum, and the nature of the mathematical tasks that students were required to perform. These researchers argue that the ability of students to do the math is not by itself enough to support strong mathematical identities; rather, mathematical identities are tied to understanding and engaging authentic involvement in mathematics and students being able to see themselves as effective mathematics learners in the classroom. In other words, students can master the practices of the traditional mathematics classroom and learn the math competently without taking on the identity of themselves as mathematical thinkers or “math people.” Thus, these researchers argue for the distinction between processes of learning and processes of identity. Similarly, Herrenkohl and Wertsch (1999) distinguish between mastery (akin to learning) and appropriation (akin to identity). In their view, one can master skills without appropriating them. The theoretical task at hand, then, is to understand with greater nuance the relations between learning and identity processes, while also preserving their conceptual distinctions.

Learning and identity development are always cultural and social processes, linked in fundamental ways to the contexts in which they occur. Research in the sociocultural (Cole, 1996; Engestrom, 1999; Rogoff, 2003; Wenger, 1998) and ecological (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1993; Lerner, 1991; Spencer, 2006) traditions supports a view of identity and learning as being deeply informed by social context. In these theories, social context influences learning and identity through the organization of activities in which people participate and through the values, norms, and expectations conveyed in those activities (Nasir, 2004). For example, in the cultural practice of basketball, learning happens as players work together to improve their game and engage in practices structured by the coach and high-stakes performances in games. In game play, it is expected that players will play certain positions or roles, and one norm is that players receive extensive in-the-moment feedback on their play.

Social context includes both immediate contexts, such as homes or classrooms, and more distal contexts, such as institutions and society (Bronfenbrenner, 1993). Many have noted the multilayered quality of context, which can be conceptualized as a set of concentric circles made up of increasingly broad levels of context (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Lewin, 1935; Cole, 1996); this idea that context is multilayered and deeply influences individuals has a long history in the scholarly literature (Bourdieu, 1977; Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1986; Cole, 1996; Lewin, 1935, 1951; Ogbu, 1987; Vygotsky, 1978; Gallimore, Goldenberg, and Weisner, 1993).

Learning and identity processes are situated within cultural practices (Cole, 1996; Saxe, 1999; Wenger, 1998), which are defined as reoccurring, goal-directed activities that involve two or more people (Saxe, 1999). Examples of cultural practices include eating dinner at the family dinner table, playing games, standing in line at the grocery store, or engagin...