2011;1-27.
The historical relationship between Black identity and Black achievement motivation.
William E Cross
UIID-AD: 1607
Abstract
We began by outlining John Ogbu's oppositional-identity analysis for low-income Blacks. We reviewed historical studies and contemporary social-scientific research that contests the efficacy of a culture/mindset perspective by exploring what spokespersons for the Hip-Hop culture would classify as a more structurally oriented perspective. Identity and dispositional factors play an important role in the Hip-Hop discourse, but are secondary to structural dynamics that elicit from otherwise "normal" Black youth an oppositionalism that is less a legacy of slavery and more an organic, predictable, "natural" adaptation to contemporary, Faustian-like predicaments. Ogbu's use of the term oppositional implies a mindset students bring to the situation, while the Hip-Hop discourse describes negative attitudes that develop in reaction to the way Black youth are treated in school. The Hip-Hop discourse depicts what is best labeled as highly evolved cultural mistrust (Terrell & Terrell, 1981). Ogbu's oppositional construct requires synchronization with research and the historical record. Over the last twenty-five years, historical evidence has been published that refutes any version of the intergenerational linkage between contemporary Black psychological problems and slavery. In summary, that low achievement motivation, as exhibited by some Black children in the present, can be linked to the legacy of slavery, turns out to be a conceptualization easily negated by historical fact. It is ironic that high, not low, Black achievement motivation was born of the slavery experience. Many of the chapters in this volume explore the state of Black America through a window framed by the mental health and academic readiness of Black children. In the language of the social sciences, the scholars represented here seek to formulate predicative models that guide progress. If one takes away anything from this interrogation of oppositional identity, it is the following: In the presence of protracted underemployment and unemployment of the adult residents of inner-city Black neighborhoods, the unequal funding of predominantly Black low-income schools, a hypersurveillance of Black youth that borders on harassment, and the lure of street life made possible by an economy that does not provide gainful employment for Black youth, it is more realistic to narrate ecologically sensitive predictive models of achievement constructed on the basis of contemporaneous factors than models that rely on ahistorical speculations about links to the past. While it is beyond the scope of the current work to identify and review all the interventions and research projects that are both ecologically sensitive as well as grounded in the realities of the present rather than myths about the past, these exemplars more than make the point that system-oriented approaches can be productive and useful. Let us explore "hope" as substantiated by these exemplars: Chicago's charter schools, mentoring programs, and Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men; the New York City Cash Incentive Program; the James Comer Schools; the Harlem Children's Zone, and, finally, Daphna Oyserman's Identity-Based Motivation Research and Intervention Program. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)
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