Overcoming Obstacles

Sanders, M. (1997). Overcoming obstacles: Academic achievement as a response to racism and discrimination. Journal of Negro Education, 66(1), 83-93.

The articles suggests that there is a correlation between the level of awareness of racism and the obstacles it presents and the academic performance of African American students. The article suggest that students who have a high level of awareness don't disengage in school but use their awareness to fuel their motivation. They did a study using 28 African American male and female students whose academic performance is evenly distributed from high achieving (3.0 or higher), mid-achieving (2.0-2.9 GPA), and low-achieving (less than 2.0 GPA). Each group had students from two parent households and single parent homes. Some students in each group are below the poverty and others are above. Each student was interviewed by the author of the article. The results found that students who had the lowest level of awareness felt that racism and discrimination was a thing of the past and that any failure was from a lack of effort not lack of opportunity. These students happened to be have lower GPA's. The students who had moderate to low awareness were aware that racism could make obstacle in education and occupation but their awareness was abstract and none had given an example of when they or anyone else had overcome these obstacles. These student had mid-achieving GPA's. Lastly the students with most racial awareness were mostly high achievers. These students stressed the need to do better than their white counterparts just to get half as far as them. These students saw racism as a challenged and came from families that stressed positive/ethnic socialization. So it is suggested that students who are more aware of racism and its barriers and have a healthy sense of racial socialization will perform better academically than students who have low awareness.

Strangely, the thing that caught my eye most in these interviews was the use of the term "the white man". This made me, a multi-racial female, extremely uncomfortable. I feel like by referring to the white race as "the white man" not only takes away their individuality but excludes women. I know that if this article were discussing the African Americans race they would not have referred to it as "the Black man". I just think it is ironic that while discussing the barriers that racism and discrimination presents for one group they are stereotyping another group. Besides that I thought this article was very beneficial. I consider myself to be highly aware of racism and discrimination in the education and everyday life and like the other high awareness students in this study, I use this awareness to fuel my motivation. I know not only will it be harder for me to succeed and achieve my goals because of obstacles but once I do achieve them it wont seem as significant as it would if I were white.