John McWhorter at Persuasion:
The 70th anniversary, last month, of the Brown v. The Board of Education decision has had me thinking about a certain conundrum regarding black students and education. Part of what has remained as the enduring legacy of Brown is Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s “Doll Test,” which featured in expert testimony for the case, and showed that a majority of black children preferred white over black dolls. The idea resonated thereafter that black children have a confidence problem, with a hovering implication that this confidence problem affects their performance in school. That hypothesis seemed to be borne out in Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s “stereotype threat” paper, their seminal 1995 study that showed that black students’ scores on a GRE test of verbal ability went down when asked to indicate their race on the test—suggesting that their knowledge of negative stereotypes impacted their performance. That paper went on to be cited over 5,000 times and to inspire a host of education reforms.
And certainly you might think that racism would leave black Americans as America’s least confident people. However, the reality is more counterintuitive and interesting than that.
More here.