Introduction: The Future of Diversity

Abstract

In the early 1990s, two social psychologists conducted an experiment to see whether our society’s negative racial stereotypes affect the learning experience of students in our educational institutions. They selected a group of black and white Stanford undergraduates and gave them a test made up of items from the advanced Graduate Record Examination in literature. The students had been statistically matched for ability, and since most of them were sophomores the GRE-based test was intentionally chosen so that it would be challenging and difficult for them. The psychologists—Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson—wanted to see whether there were differences in the way students of similar academic backgrounds but from different racial groups experienced a test that is supposed to be scientific and “objective.” In particular, they wanted to see whether simple cues provided in the testing environment would be seen as innocuous or significant, and how these cues would affect the students’ performance. The cues they provided casually were intended to refer indirectly to negative social images; their goal was to see, in short, whether negative social stereotypes were mere words, or if they had the power of sticks and stones. What they found was startling. When the test was given to the students as an abstract test of ability (that was the cue from the examiner), the black students in the group performed far less well than the white students.

Satya P. Mohanty has taught at Cornell since 1983, where he is currently Professor of English. He is one of the founding members of the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project (2000-) and has been the Director of the national FMS Summer Institute since 2005. His scholarly work deals in part with the relationship between minority identities and social justice.