Black Students’ Achievement Attitudes in Postracial America: Mirage or Reality?

• In Event: Same Story, Different Places: Examining Cross-Regional Variations in Black Students’ Educational Experiences

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there have been heated scholarly debates around the disjuncture between Black youth’s professed beliefs (abstract attitudes) in the American ideal that hard work and effort can lead to upwardly mobile opportunities, and their unequal academic performance in school. This disjuncture has been known as the attitude achievement paradox. One group argues that while Black youth’s expressed views about the role of education in upward mobility may resonate with the American ideal that hard work and effort pay off, such attitudes, according to these scholars, may capture Black students’ abstract attitudes, but not necessarily their concrete attitudes (or realistic assessments of the extent to which certain goals are attainable) (see Mickelson, 1990). For them, Black students’ persistent differing perspectives about opportunities, as well as outcome disparities, in comparison to Whites, attest to their arguments.

Most recently, however, another group of scholars has argued that Black students’ abstract beliefs about education is not necessarily a paradox, but instead reflect the hope that Black youth have about their possibilities in what these scholars would consider to be a “more egalitarian” American society (see Downey, Ainsworth & Quian, 2009). This group, particularly, asserts that those who argue the existence of a paradox often apply a race-laden framework when examining whether such a paradox is real. For them, racial advances such as the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States attest to their argument that the use of concrete attitudes to explain the paradox is not plausible.

This paper expands the debate around Black students’ attitude achievement paradox within a different sociological, historical, and geographical context in which earlier studies took place. It draws from survey data from 2000 Black students (1) in a predominantly black suburban context in the U.S. South, and (2) that were collected after the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008, what some refer to as the post-racial era (see Smith & King, 2009; Steele, 2008). These adolescents viewed society as not fair toward Black people, while still subscribing to the American ideal that hard work pays off, as well as the notion that education is important in whether one is able to move up economically. They also believed that Black people can achieve some degree of parity through education, although there may not be a one-to one parity. These students’ responses echo sociological data regarding disparities that Black people experience across a range of areas such as education, employment, and housing. This paper is significant in understanding broader issues around Black hope and progress, and the persistence of race, racism, and structural inequalities—specifically how these relate to the kind of future young Black people should be working towards, and what they can expect.

Authors

• Jerome E. Morris, University of Georgia

• Sara E. Woodruff, University of Georgia - Athens