Race and Ethnicity (Essay Sample)

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Race and Ethnicity
With the terms race and ethnicity being generally defined as significant differences in physical features and cultural practices that distinct one group from the other, they are usually known to be problematic and they can make a group to feel inferior from the others. This may lead to discrimination and this may cause the ‘inferior’ to perform poorly even if they are capable of doing well. Our major focus here will be on education to find out the reasons for the achievement gaps why black students in college usually do not perform well like their white counterparts despite having the capacity to perform well. There are some factors which have been identified to cause these achievement gaps some of them being poor motivation, lack of enough preparation, low expectations of students and lack of interest in school. However, various scholars such as Lisa Deplit, Claude Steele and Devin Browne have conducted researches to prove that race and ethnicity is one of the major factors which contribute to these achievement gaps.
Lisa Deplit clearly states that ‘There is no achievement gap at birth’ while trying to emphasise that every student is capable. She states that the reason why African-American students to not achieve their potential is the hindrance of the society by seeing blackness as being inferior and curriculum that is not making sense to them. These students have different ways of expressing themselves thus when teachers encounter these differences they see the child as incapable of learning and that is never the case. These results in the students being blamed of failure due to their lack of capability rather than deficiency in the teachers. Deplit admits that there are things that cannot be changed such as poverty in the community but states that blaming poverty for poor teaching is an invalid excuse. In addition she writes that teachers do not acknowledge where black students come from or the knowledge they contribute to class due to lack of care and concern. This makes the students to have low morale thus leading to poor performance. Teachers are supposed to clearly communicate their expectations to these students and hold them accountable for their performance.
In Claude Steele‘s Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students, he states that when capable black college students perform poorer than the white counterparts the reason has got less to do with preparation or weaker abilities. It has got much to do with the stereotype threat about their capacity to perform well. Steele and another scholar Joshua Aronson went ahead to conduct some experiments using verbal tests to determine if it was indeed the stereotype threat that made the performance of black students to be poor. The main stereotype here was that the abilities of black students were lower than those of the white colleagues. This is what they found. When the verbal test was presented to the students as a measure of their ability, black students performance was less well than of white students and when they were told at the beginning of the test that it was not about determining the level of their intellectual abilities, the results of the test between these black and white students was almost the same. ‘Other than poor quality schooling, acknowledging that students can perform poorly in school due to stereotype threat is very important while addressing the achievement gap’. Steele said. It is therefore necessary that teachers address both.
Devine Browne examines the reason for the Latino educational gap why these Latino students living in the United States perform poorly in tests and have lower graduation rates than others like Asians who also live in the US. In her interview with Andrea, a six year old girl, she concluded that many of the Latino students do not understand English very well. After the passing of the English-only initiative the state lost many of its bilingual classes and teachers. Thus, the students did not understand much of the lessons and this caused poor performance. This brought negative attitude to the Latino students about school and they viewed lectures as boring. This also contributed to high dropout rates among Latino students living in America.
Taken together, the reasons why students of colour have lower success rates are several, the major one being negative stereotypes. As Steele calls it ‘stereotype threat‘ he recognized that a person experiencing stereotype threat uses much of their cognitive resources in trying to deal with this threat instead of the task at hand, causing poor performance. When these students have this false belief that they are less capable than white students, they will never perform well unless this stereotype is dealt with. As Lisa Delpit says ‘We
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