The relation between academic race stereotype endorsement and academic self-concept was examined in two studies of seventh-and eighth-grade African Americans. Based on expectancyvalue theory, the authors hypothesized that academic race stereotype endorsement would be negatively related to self-perceptions. Furthermore, it was anticipated that the relation between stereotype endorsement and self-perceptions would be moderated by racial centrality. The hypothesis was supported in two independent samples. Among students with high racial centrality, endorsement of traditional race stereotypes was linked to lower self-perceptions of academic competence. The stereotype/self-concept relation was nonsignificant among youth for whom race was less central to their identities. These results confirm the supposition of expectancy-value theory and illustrate the interweaving of group and individual identity with motivational beliefs.
Keywords
stereotypes; motivation; racial identity; self-conceptIdentity development is particularly important during adolescence, when youth are distancing themselves from parents through increasing expressions of autonomy (Erikson, 1968). In exploring who they are as individuals, adolescents depend on cues from the social environment (Oyserman, Gant, & Ager, 1995). As Erikson (1968) noted, adolescents are "sometimes morbidly preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others" (p. 128). For racial and ethnic minority youth, the expectations of others may be shaped by stereotypes about racial differences in abilities. Thus, for these youth, identity development entails forging an understanding of how race-including the centrality of race for the individual, as well as the meaning ascribed to race by others in the society-is intertwined with personal identity. In this article, we explore African American adolescents' endorsement of racial stereotypes about academic abilities and the relation between these stereotypes and the self-perceptions of adolescents for whom race is more or less central in their views of themselves.
© 2009 The Association of Black PsychologistsCorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ndidi A. Okeke, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB # 3270, Chapel Hill, NC 27599; okeke@email.unc
RACE STEREOTYPES ABOUT ACADEMIC ABILITYBy age 4 or 5, children in North America are aware that race is a human characteristic that is fixed at birth and that membership in a racial group predicts some qualities of group members (Hirschfeld, 1996(Hirschfeld, , 2001. Although much research has examined children's implicit and explicit attitudes toward members of other races (e.g., Aboud, 1988;Baron & Banaji, 2006), relatively little research has examined the age at which children become aware of academic race stereotypes, whether or not children endorse them, and the resulting repercussions for children's views of themselves. These stereotypes would presumably have an important impact on children's identity development as ...