Stereotypes, Testing and the 'Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations'
by William A. Darity, Alan A. Aja, & Darrick Hamilton | HuffPost
Earlier this month a divided Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the University of Texas' right to use race amongst its criteria for undergraduate admissions, however limited that right may be. While the decision will be viewed as a small victory for supporters of race-based affirmative action, there is little reason to believe that the widely held claim that black and Latino students enter selective universities as comparatively inferior students will not cease to rear its ugly head. It is a pervasive stereotype that minority students must face from matriculation to graduation, a stigma with undoubted adverse psychological and economic consequence that follows them well beyond higher education and into the labor market.
This claim, reasserted in a study published in 2012 in the Journal of Labor Economics by two Duke faculty members and a graduate student (Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo, and Kenneth Spenner), anchors on a combination of black students' relative standardized-test scores and the authors' prior beliefs about the operation of affirmative action in admissions. It also should be noted that Arcidiacono has been a member of the research team for Project SEAPHE, a collective led by one of the chief architects of the war against affirmative action waged in California, UCLA Law School professor Richard Sander.
In their study, which was undertaken at the highly selective Duke University, the authors express concern about the pattern of students switching from majors in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics, which they view as more demanding majors, to majors in the humanities and social sciences, ostensibly less demanding majors. For black students, they argue, the tendency to switch from the "harder" majors to the "softer" majors is fully explained by the Stereotypes, Testing and the 'Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations' | NewBlackMan (in Exile):