The Myth of Low Black Self-Esteem
What the popular “stereotype threat” hypothesis misses.
Over the past years, the political class has become obsessed with the concept of “misinformation.” But while there are certainly plenty of extreme people peddling plenty of ridiculous ideas on social media, I am struck by the persistence of a different kind of misinformation in the mainstream: stats and claims that stand on very shaky empirical ground, or have outright been refuted by social scientists, but keep getting repeated because they fit so neatly with some favored narrative. As Stephen Colbert put it in the inaugural episode of The Colbert Report, these stats and claims are a case of “truthiness”: They persist because, though they may be wrong, they feel true.
That’s why, a few weeks ago, our team at Persuasion decided to start a new series: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” The idea of the series is to critically examine intellectual memes that are prominent in our discourse even though they are wrong or misleading. Articles will examine everything from the claim that most Americans can’t put together $500 in an emergency to the notion that maternal mortality has increased over the past decade.
But as the first installment of the series, we are very proud to have a provocative essay by one of my favorite writers: John McWhorter, the New York Times columnist and member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors.
Yascha
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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. A 2020 study reported that “it was surprising to find no association between racism and self-esteem.” A fashion industry survey from 2017 found that black women show far greater self-esteem than white or Hispanic women (black women were over twice as likely as whites to, for instance, describe themselves as “beautiful”). And, in multiple meta-analyses, black middle school and high school students scored highest among demographic groups in measures of self-esteem.
Findings like that significantly call into question Steele/Aronson’s “stereotype threat” hypothesis. In real life, black students are not required to specify their race on most tests, making the hypothetical of the Steele/Aronson paper less relevant. And further study has suggested that eliminating “stereotype threat” would have only a minor effect on black students’ performance, if any, in contrast to the bold claims that seemed initially to come out of Steele/Aronson. It turns out that Steele and Aronson used a statistical tweak—“adjusted mean scores” rather than actual mean scores of SATs—which produced a deeply misleading graph and fueled a widespread misinterpretation of their data. Even Steele and Aronson were forced to walk back the more enthusiastic interpretations of their study. “We… regret any confusion that this common analysis may have caused,” they wrote. Meanwhile, the data on self-esteem is deeply challenging to their core hypothesis: how applicable is it to America’s most confident group?
The stereotype threat hypothesis has long been influential because it offers an explanation for the lag in grades and scores. However, there is another approach to this lag that far better incorporates the data on self-esteem.
Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major, in a 1989 paper, have explained that groups may differ in what they esteem themselves for. A stigmatized group may attribute their devaluation by the majority to racism, and as a result compare themselves only within their group rather than according to general standards, and also place value more upon things that their group already excels in. As I once heard someone put it about race and school, if you feel like you aren’t invited to the party, why would you want to go? You have your own party.
The idea of differing foundations for self-esteem neatly explains the widely reported phenomenon among black teens that excelling in school is thought of as “acting white.” As Stuart Buck documents in his grievously underread Acting White, this began, ironically, in the wake of schools desegregating. Although the Brown v. Board of Education ruling occurred in 1954, desegregation only happened in a major way starting in the late 1960s after a decade and a half of nationwide foot-dragging. And when it did, white students and teachers were often openly hostile to black students—including in the north—and it led to black students, as a matter of self-preservation, rejecting school as something “other.” This orientation set in as a self-generating cultural meme, passed down over generations, and surviving the openly racist conditions that initially sparked it.
Hence a new “local” set of standards. I saw this growing up in the 1970s. When I was around 12, in my all-black neighborhood, there was a guy who was considered quite the catch. He was handsome, a great athlete, and—this was said about him with the regularity of a Homeric epithet—he had a B+ average in school. Which isn’t bad, but still. It was a perfect example of what Crocker and Major discussed, an in-group standard of evaluation. The idea was that he had bridged the black and white worlds—there was a nod towards valuation of scholastic performance, but with the understanding that, “for us,” an A+ average is not necessary and perhaps would even be suspect as a possible indication of racial inauthenticity.
Some insist that the “acting white” phenomenon is a myth that “blames the victim,” but no one could believe this after reading Buck’s careful documentation—or a similarly excellent book by John Ogbu. It is worth considering the “acting white” problem not to cast blame but to analyze what can be done about it.
There seem to be two possible approaches to this in-group sense of self-esteem and how it may lead a black student to process “the school thing.” One is to devote ourselves to discouraging any sense that serious nerdery is inauthentic to blackness—to invite black students to the party, so to speak. Just making school easier is not only condescending but will leave black students ill-equipped for real competition later. Rather, mentoring programs, like mathematician Freeman Hrabowski’s Meyerhoff Scholars program for black STEM students, should be thought of as default rather than oddities. Also, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) make it clear how normal it is for black students to engage in all manner of scholarly activities. Hopefully the recent wave of big donations to those schools from people like MacKenzie Scott, Michael Bloomberg, and corporations such as Netflix, will be the beginning of a trend.
The other approach would be to just lean in to the idea that groups will base self-esteem on different things. Some might think of psychologist Howard Gardner’s popular idea of “multiple intelligences,” where “logico-mathematical” smarts are the equal of musical, “spatial-visual,” interpersonal and other intelligences.
All of that is great when it comes to evaluating people as individuals. But the real-world consequence of letting this approach pass as a way of evaluating a whole group of people—such as black Americans—is an ominously balkanized society where black people are valued, and value themselves, as athletes, entertainers, and (disproportionately) as television commercial actors. When white authors soberly counsel us to give in to this vision of society, it can seem faintly gruesome.
I prefer the first approach. It takes in the actual data and works to actually address the issue. The second one is… counterintuitive, and not in a good way.
John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, a columnist for The New York Times, and a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors. He is the author of, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
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The soft racial bigotry of low expectation is a sickness from those having obtained some higher socioeconomic status while lacking significant bottom-up struggle.
It's hardly unusual for people who say they have high self-esteem for it to be conditional and insecure. Are there studies that take that into account?