Blacks in Research

Preface

A version of this article, “Blacks in Research? How Shall We Be Portrayed?”, was delivered by the author as the 2013 W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture to the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Blacks in Education Special Interest Group (Black SIG). The title references a yearlong debate in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The debate was initiated by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1926 about the representation of the Negro and the responsibilities of the artist toward Black subject matter. More than 40 artists and writers contributed to the edition titled “The Negro in Art? How Shall He Be Portrayed?” In a similar vein, this article examines the portrayal of Blacks in research and urges a renaissance among Black intellectuals. Specifically, the article calls for Black and progressive other scholars to lead a national movement to present rarely highlighted positive data and research findings about the Black condition—especially those which challenge persistent negative reports and racist notions about Black people.

Introduction

The hallmark of science is replication—replication of what works. Yet, too much of the research and media commentary about Black people and the Black community is a litany of negativity (a recitation about what’s not working). The image of Black people in contemporary research is dismal and harmful at best, and more often-than-not outright defamatory and libelous.

To illustrate this point, I recall an occasion nearly 15 years ago when I was invited to a foundation-sponsored think tank to examine “urban education and minority student outcomes.” There were 20 experts in the field invited to attend (I was the one invitee who is African American; there was also one Hispanic/Latino at this convening on urban education). Toward the end of the first day, the discussion turned to increasing African American students’ college readiness and admission rates. As the day came to a close, one of the think tank participants stated that African American males’ college admission rates were low because they perform poorly (specifically, less well than African American females) on college entrance exams. No one questioned this assertion and a lively conversation ensued about policy and funding recommendations for improving African American males’ college readiness and admission rates. I recall being stunned that none of the invited scholars questioned the assumption about African American males or provided a reference to substantiate the claim.

That evening, I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. searching the College Board’s and Educational Testing Service (ETS) websites along with volumes of the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Condition of Education annual reports. At the time, copious data were available online with test data disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, and geographic region among other variables. The result of my post-midnight research indicated the following: African American males outscore African American females on every standardized college and professional school entrance exam (including the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, MCAT, DCAT, and LSAT). You name the test, African American males outscore African American females and some subgroups of other females. The next morning I was eager to present this information to the group and did so (so that we could restructure policy and funding recommendations around accurate data). I remember the group of experts being in disbelief about my recitation and then questioning the source and validity of the data I presented. I reminded the group that we had not questioned nor seemed alarmed by the negative and erroneous information cited the evening before. Nor had we asked any participant, other than me, to verify their claims with a reference citation. As habit would have it, I had stuffed the website printouts in my book bag which accompanied me to the session. So, I shared the charts containing the data which disconfirmed the previous night’s statement and deliberations. Sadly, the group was more irritated than enlightened by the new data which clearly challenged their assumptions.

This experience reinforced my observation that the constant and consistent recitation of negative statistics about Black people is deleterious to scholarly inquiry, misdirects policy formulation and funding priorities, and is (outright) libelous to Black people. In fact, much of what masquerades as research about Black people is really defamation. Webster defines defamation as the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government, religion, or nation a negative or inferior image.

Too little mining of existing data and too few research reports present the truth about Black people and the Black condition. Consider the following questions related to education, schooling, and larger societal issues:

This recitation is not meant to be a Jeopardy game of sorts (“Alex, I’ll take African Americans for $600.”). Nor is this about advancing a strengths-based or asset-based research perspective. Rather, I am urging a deep interrogation and interruption of the defamation of Black people in research. I am prodding us (as scholars, policymakers, and funders) to peel back the layers of negative statistics that we hear every day about Black boys and girls, Black men and women, Black families, and Black communities.

I want us to be suspicious each and every time we see that PowerPoint that begins with the listing of negative statistics about Black people. And, I want us to be nervous each and every time we report these data. I want us to make others uncomfortable about capriciously reporting these data. I want us to take the time to tease out as many pieces of empowering data and gather our own strategic data. I want us to approach our research (when we sit down to write) and when we attend our learned society meetings armed with empowering data so that we can fight this defamation.

The common practice of beginning scholarly presentations about Blacks with rosters of negative statistics reinforces at least three erroneous notions: (a) These negative statistics become synonymous with negative human qualities which are then attributed to the true nature of Blacks; (b) the persistence of negative statistics about Blacks communicates that we are a community beyond intervention; and (c) rarely does such study result in effective solutions.

Re-Situating the Black Image in Contemporary Research

Clearly, the call-to-arms to fairly present Black people to ourselves and the world is not new. Black people from scholar W. E. B. Du Bois (the father of American sociology) to publisher John Johnson (of Ebony magazine fame) to noted historical artist William Edouard Scott embodied a commitment to represent the breath, depth, beauty, and tragedy of the Black experience as a whole (and unfragmented) cloth. As you know, Du Bois’ work often captured this intention—to uplift Black folk in his research. Du Bois (1944) reflects this intention in his essay “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” when he chronicles,

I went to the East to visit my father’s father in New Bedford, and on that trip saw well-to-do, well-mannered colored people; and once, at Rock Point, Rhode Island, I viewed with astonishment 10,000 Negroes of every hue and bearing . . . I apparently noted nothing of poverty or degradation, but only extraordinary beauty of [every shade] of skin-color and utter equality of mien [demeanor]. (p. 35)

We know that the first three chapters of Du Bois’ (1899) The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study are devoted as he stated to “a study of the family, of property, and of organizations of all sorts. It also takes up such phenomena of social maladjustment and individual depravity as crime, pauperism, and alcoholism” (p. 9). Clearly, Du Bois did not barter away examining the functional in the Black community to focus exclusively on the dysfunctional (or what can be described as responsive to apartheid American society at the time). For instance, in his examination of Philadelphia slums, he stated,

a slum is not a simple fact, it is a symptom, and that to know the removable causes of the Negro slums of Philadelphia requires a study that takes one far beyond the slum districts. (p. 6)

Du Bois’ scholarship situated and balanced the Black condition in a worldwide context (note his book The World and Africa) and within America’s racially oppressive and capitalist frameworks.

In 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois initiated in The Crisis a yearlong debate about the representation of the Negro and the responsibilities of the artist toward Black subject matter. More than 40 artists and writers contributed to a symposium on “The Negro in Art? How Shall He Be Portrayed?” I borrow from Du Bois’ question to raise a similar query about how we (as Black scholars) will confront the fantasy of Blackness that exists in research. So I ask, Blacks in Research? How Shall We Be Portrayed? I purposely use we in the question for this reason. Too often, we (as Black academics and scholars) advance this grotesque image of Blacks in the research literature. How often have we begun our presentations with that same litany of negative statistics that we hear from our White colleagues? When we write or state “41% of Black children . . . or 52% of Black women . . . or 42% of Black men and families . . . or 80% of Black teens,” have we forgotten that we are talking about ourselves? Have we earned these degrees and in some cases the comforts of tenure, so that we can talk about the Black child like we weren’t one or write about the Black family like we don’t come from one? How might our research be different if every time we wrote a research article about the Black child we inserted the name of our niece, nephew, son, or daughter; and every time we wrote about the Black family we inserted the names of our mother, father, or grandparents?

We know from art history that the Black fantasy remains a well-established norm of American culture. In his book Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, Richard Powell (1997) makes a statement about the racist portrayal of Blacks in art that I believe is relevant to modern portrayal of Blacks in research and media accounts. Powell (1997) observes,

These images took the form of outrageous characterizations of blacks, their communities, and their alleged cultural practices. These grotesque beings were usually shown in impoverished settings with yard fowl, watermelons, and so on. Alternately backward, shiftless, ridiculous, childish, criminal, these characterizations faithfully appeared in . . . theatrical productions, popular literature, advertisements, children’s toys and other cultural documents. (pp. 24-25)

The Black research community has much to learn from Black artists about “imaging” Blacks to the larger world. Black artists and photographers employed their craft to make conventional claims to recognition and respectability. They used their art to lay claim to a position alongside, and yet distinguishable from, accepted categories of the great and good. For instance, the February 2012 issue of the American Art Review describes William Edouard Scott as follows:

[He] created paintings and murals throughout his life that focused on elevating the stature of African Americans. Generating artwork from Paris, Mexico, Haiti, and the American South, as well as Indiana, his artwork frequently interpreted blacks in positions of prominence, a bold and uncommon approach for his time. He rejected the conventional portrayal of African Americans as menial laborers or historical enslaved persons. (p. 82)

The imagery of Scott and Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance demanded that Black painters and photographers refute theories of Negro inferiority and display the bonds of affection and community among Blacks that were rarely acknowledged by White media. Black artists and writers led the way in creating a collective image of Blackness that launched Blacks and their voices into the realm of American public life. By contrast, the contemporary Black scholarly community has not yet crafted a new renaissance moment.

I believe that today (nearly two decades into the new millennium), too much research about Blacks mimics Al Jolson’s singing of Mammy in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. In it Jolson adopted the typical repertoire of minstrel performers who claimed that their posturing, on bent knee with outstretched arms and splayed hands, and other similarly extravagant gestures and dances duplicated authentic Black movements that they had witnessed. In many ways, contemporary research about Blacks is a “one-man Negro-stereotype industry” (Powell, 1997, p. 25) reinforcing racist representations of Blacks.

The scholarly community needs a larger body of research that furnishes audiences with images affirming a modern Black identity, reflecting the cultural values of Black America, and generating a sense of a national Black community. Too be sure, I am not suggesting that we substitute one fantasy (that elides the serious problems facing and infesting Black communities) for a utopian one. Rather, I am concluding that in so many ways, the Black artistic community has succeeded where the Black scholarly community has not in redirecting and centering the African American and Pan African perspective more prominently.

Having said this, we know that there are many, many Black scholars who have successfully tread the path of recasting Blacks in the research literature. And, were it not for you (and others before you), the state of things would be far worse. We know James Anderson (1988) who in his seminal text, The Education of Black in the South, 1860-1935, poignantly details the history of Black education advancement and through his research reveals lesser known facts about the Black education struggle when he writes about Black contributions to school building campaigns totaling $4.3 million by early 1932 throughout 15 southern states., Or, we can cite Vanessa Siddle-Walker’s (1996) book, Their Highest Potential that references Horace Mann Bond’s report about Teachers College–Columbia University awarding of 144 doctoral degrees to graduates of Black colleges between 1930 and 1960. Bond (an African American) who went on to become president of Fort Valley State University and Lincoln University was a graduate of Lincoln University, an HBCU in Pennsylvania. He earned master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago where his dissertation on Black education in Alabama won the prestigious Rosenberger prize in 1936. We can cite Al-Tony Gilmore’s (2011) history of Blacks and teachers unions which reveals that more than half of the American Teachers Association’s (ATA; the Black teachers union) presidents who held office between 1910 and 1951 earned undergraduate or graduate degrees from Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. William Taylor Burwell Williams who was president of ATA from 1910-1913 graduated from Phillips Academy in 1893 and Harvard in 1897.

As we continue to embark on this restorative and generative work, James Weldon Johnson’s assertion about Black writers applies to us. He wrote,

Black writers are helping to bring about an entirely new concept of the Negro, are helping to place him in an entirely new conception of the Negro, are helping to place him in an entirely new light before himself. (Gates, 1988, p. 338)

In a similar vein, Howard University’s Alain Locke argued in The New Negro (1925) that unless Blacks evolved an original (African centered) expressive tradition giving sympathetic treatment to the Negro, they would be relegated to the role of imitating the production of their White counterparts.

It is time for a Black intellectual renaissance. If for no other reason than the education and socialization of Black children hangs in the balance. Black parents’ frustration with the quality of public schools is at an all time righteous high. The NCES reports that only 47% of Black parents report being very satisfied with the school their child attends and in some districts like Los Angeles, 70% of Black parents report dissatisfaction with public schools and award a Grade of C or lower to the school their child attends. This pattern holds whether these Black parents are college-educated, high income, or poor. Steadily we see schemes like mayoral control, Teach for America, Broad-prepared superintendents, charter schools, and education management organizations (EMOs) such as Edison infiltrating majority-Black school districts and using the faces of Black children in their advertisements that claim they will cure what ails underperforming schools in too many Black neighborhoods across the nation. We scholars know that these schemes are not the answer. Rather equalizing state funding formula, providing all children with fully certified teachers, and diversifying the ranks of school leadership and the teaching force are among the proven solutions.

Regrettably, this is the largest generation of Black children that has not been taught by a Black teacher or been in a school with a Black principal. Largely, we are not reaching and teaching our own. According to the NCES (2013), approximately 7% of the nation’s teachers are African American. Nationally, 73% of inner city teachers are White and 91% of urban school teachers are White. Nearly 70% of inner city principals are White. This yawning diversity gap is especially notable now that the majority (50.3%) of the nation’s public school students are children of color.

I mention these statistics because educational research tells us that academic and social benefits accrue to African American and Hispanic/Latino students when they are in high-diversity staffed schools. In these schools, these students are more likely to graduate high school in 4 years, more likely to be placed in gifted education, less likely to be placed in special education, and less likely to be suspended or expelled.

Poverty status further confounds African American students’ access to qualified teachers. In schools where 50% or more of the students are on free/reduced lunch, these students are 70% more likely not to have a teacher (holding certification in the subject taught or a major or minor in the subject) teaching them. This pattern holds true across four critical subject areas: math, science, English, and social studies. How are urban school students (particularly the urban poor) to reach proficiency when they are saddled with uncredentialed teachers (many of whom are underprepared Teach for America participants trained in 5 weeks to teach the nation’s neediest students)? The nation cannot raise performance standards for students (via high stakes tests which many districts are requiring for grade promotion) and simultaneously lower the bar on who teachers students.

Conclusion

So many opportunities confront the world, the nation, and the Black community which require that the modern Black intellectual assume a greater presence and voice in the public space (whether that space is the Black church, Black social and civic organizations, or Black and other media outlets). The purpose of this voice must be to equip the Black community with empowering data and reports along with specific strategies for advancing our interests and well-being. Toward this end, the Howard University School of Education’s Journal of Negro Education (JNE) recently partnered with The Root.com. Dr. Ivory Toldson, the editor-in-chief of JNE, writes the weekly column in The Root titled Show Me the Numbers. The column has a threefold purpose: (a) to make scholarly findings reported in JNE accessible and relevant to lay readers, (b) to analyze the validity of research and media report about Black people, and (c) to set the record straight when claims are untrue.

You are well aware of the daily incidences of mis- and under-reporting positive data about Black people. I call your attention to a recent incident. In September 2012, The New York Times ran an article, “Life Span Shrinks for Least Educated Whites in U.S” (Tavernise, 2012). The article summarized Jay Olshansky’s research which examined the relationship between life span and education levels. The New York Times article concluded that life spans were declining for least educated Whites and summarized comparative data on educated and least educated Whites, educated and least educated Hispanics, and least educated Blacks. The only educated group that The New York Times article did not include was educated Blacks. When I emailed Olshansky about my concern about The New York Times article not including data about educated Blacks, he eagerly provided the data. His findings show that Black men increase their life expectancy by 9.7 years by earning a college degree and Black women increase their life expectancy by 6.5 years by earning a college degree. In omitting these data from their detailed reporting of Olshansky’s research, I believe The New York Times essentially communicated that educated Blacks do not exist.

As we move forward, I hope that we reflect on Du Bois’ (1944) freedom treatise. In it he proposed “scientific investigation and organized action among Negroes, in close cooperation, to secure the survival of the Negro race” (p. 70). He concluded the following about his freedom plan and the role of the social sciences in it:

Gradually and with increasing clarity, my whole attitude toward the social sciences began to change: in the study of human beings and their actions, there could be no such rift between theory and practice, between pure and applied science . . . the studies which I had been conducting at Atlanta [University] I saw as fatally handicapped because they . . . were so far removed in time and space as to lose the hot reality of real life; and because the continuous, kaleidoscopic change of conditions made their story old already before it was analyzed and told. I faced situations that called—shrieked—for action, even before any detailed, scientific study could possibly be prepared. It was as though, as a bridge builder, I was compelled to throw a bridge across a stream without waiting for careful mathematical testing of materials. Such testing was indispensible, but it had to be done so often in the midst of building or even after construction, and not in the calm and leisure long before. I saw before me a problem that could not and would not await the last word of science, but demanded immediate action to prevent social death . . . I realized that the social scientist could not sit apart and study in vacuo. (pp. 56-57)

In closing, Du Bois’ (1944) conclusion maintains for us today:

It is the duty of the black race to maintain its cultural advance, not for itself alone, but for the emancipation of mankind, the realization of democracy, and the progress of civilization. (p. 70)