"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You White?" "Race Science" and African American Achievement

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Racialized Research Perspectives in Education

Abstract

Using a CRT lens, which treats racism as central to American society, I urge educators and education researchers to consider that the progressive movement which reshaped schooling in the US also shares an origin story with the eugenics movement. Building on interview and observational data from a year-long ethnographic study, I argue that African American students' access to academic achievement is constrained by eugenics-era conceptions of race and intelligence. Teachers, administrators, and students at an affluent Silicon Valley public middle school often used language that reinforced the inferior status of certain groups, with an implied “natural” lack of intelligence, skill, or drive for learning. These characterizations have deleterious effects on the academic outcomes of African American and other minority students.

Author

• Amanda Frye, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo