Black American Family Engagement and Success and the Formation of a Soft Racial Class

• In Event: 75.027 - Black American Students' Achievement in the Suburbs: Academic Success Through Family Engagement

Abstract

The central question this paper discusses regards school engagement by Black American students and their families in an affluent suburb and the cultural factors that interact with economic and other historic community and schooling factors and their effect on academic achievement. Informed by critical race theory, the research centered itself in the racially marginalized community to locate stories that counter the dominant narrative of disengagement and low achievement. The paper argues that the counter stories show evidence of the formation of a “soft racial class” characterized by a dual identity consciousness in Black American families and youth.

Findings and commentary of a long-term study that took place from 2004-2014, foregrounds the voices of Black American families’ stories regarding their students’ engagement and academic success and their negotiation through an affluent suburban public school system. This presenter was approached by community-based group of stake holders in the Black American community to lead a multi-racial research team, including community activists, to conduct a more nuanced empirical study of Black American schooling in Shaker Heights after John Ogbu’s renowned 2003 book was published. Included in this study are the voices of twenty-five Black American families whose children graduated over a 20-year period, including the Ogbu study years. Compelling counter-stories challenge the deficit view still prevalent in mainstream communities.

This story is important because, like many inner-ring suburbs and school districts with a history of affluence, there is a challenge by both the residential community and the school community regarding integration. Despite, the Shaker Heights community’s half-century history of actively seeking multi-racial and religious integration, their efforts to uphold their high academic standards while maintaining racial harmony, have not been entirely successful. The 1997 discovery of a Black-white achievement gap, where Black students averaged C/D and White students A/B grades, shook the community and schools. Both Black and White communities had assumed that shared affluence, opportunity and excellence would erase the pernicious effects of racism in the schools. Ogbu’s (2003) rendering of Black student and family disengagement threw salt in the newly acquired wounds, creating an atmosphere of academic tension, community dissonance and cultural mistrust.

From the Black American family counterstories there emerges a more complex picture of household perceptions, interpretations, values, and responses to education and schools. Families hold on to hope and inspiration while they continuously fight against structural racial and socio-economic barriers and perceptual biases held by generally progressive stake-holders in an institutional structure that sees itself as a supportive school. Using critical race theory to parse extensive interview data discloses evidence of a new soft racial class formation that spans the economic class structures in this and other suburban communities and the United States at large.

Author

• Vilma Seeberg, Kent State University