Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities: Social Categories, Social Identities, and Educational Participation

Chapter 7. Women of Color in College: Effects of Identity and Context on Contingent Self-Worth

Chapter 7 Women of Color in College: Effects of Identity and Context on Contingent Self-Worth Julie A. Garcia and Jennifer Crocker T he performance of women and minorities in secondary school has received considerable attention from social scientists, policymakers , and educators. Educational achievement predicts many life outcomes, including lifetime earnings and health. Consequently, social scientists, educators, and researchers want to understand factors that promote or prevent school achievement, particularly for minority students. At the postsecondary level, students of color graduate from college at lower rates than white students. For example, 66.4 percent of whites, 54.9 percent of blacks, and 60.2 percent of Latinos who enrolled in college in the 1995–1996 academic year had either completed their education or were still enrolled in college five years later (Horn and Berger 2004). Women of Color in the Academy: Effects of Identity and Context on Contingent Self-Worth A number of researchers have suggested that the value placed on school, or identification with schooling as an important personal goal, accounts for group differences in school achievement. Students who value education and identify with school persist more in academic environments (Vallerand and Bissonnette 1992). Consequently, researchers have suggested that disidentification with school contributes to the lower educational attainment of women in domains such as mathematics, science, and engineering, and students of color more generally (Crocker and Major 1989; Major and Schmader 1998). 160 Researchers have offered a number of reasons why students of color might value education less and disidentify with schooling. Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu (1986) offered the controversial hypothesis that African Americans view academic achievement as “white,” and their peers pressure them not to “act white” by working hard and doing well in school. Claude Steele and his colleagues offered an alternative hypothesis, that negative stereotypes about their intellectual ability cause women and students of color to disidentify with school, or with certain domains of academic achievement, and this accounts for their underachievement (Steele 1992). Other researchers have suggested that people devalue or psychologically disengage from domains in which they personally perform worse than others (Tesser 1988) or in which their group fares worse than other groups, to protect their self-esteem from upward comparisons (Crocker and Major 1989; Rosenberg and Simmons 1972). Despite the persuasiveness of this line of reasoning, evidence that students of color do not value education or disidentify with school is scarce. Most research indicates that African American students value school as much as white Americans. We suggest that school achievement among students of color is lower not because they care too little about school but because they care too much—specifically, that they identify with schooling in a way that undermines their achievement. We argue that students of color invest their self-esteem in school achievement, that they do so particularly in academic settings that activate negative stereotypes about their intellectual ability, that students who are more identified with their gender or ethnicity are especially likely to do so, and that investing self-esteem in academic achievement has counterproductive effects on stress, effort , and academic achievement. Investing Self-Esteem in School Achievement A number of researchers have argued that minority students invest their self-esteem less in school than white students. This conclusion is based on two types of evidence. First, despite the fact that black students on average perform worse in school than white students, their self-esteem is at least as high as that of white students (Demo and Parker 1987; Rosenberg 1965, 1979). Second, school achievement is a weaker predictor of self-esteem for black students than for white students (Osborne 1997). However, the weaker association between school achievement and global self-esteem could be due to disidentification with school or to increased valuing of other domains, such as religion, as a source of self-esteem (Crocker, Luhtanen et al. 2003). In a survey of 795 college freshman, Crocker and her colleagues found that African Women of Color in College 161 American students based their self-esteem on academics just as much as white students (Crocker, Luhtanen et al. 2003). Context, Identity, and Valuing of School Although Jennifer Crocker, Riia K. Luhtanen et al.’s (2003) survey data suggest that black and white college students do not differ in how much they base their self-esteem on academic success, we suggest that these data actually underrepresent the degree to which students...