PALO ALTO, Calif. - — While The Bell Curve, that new book of stale old ideas about IQ and black people having less of it than white people, stinks up the air, people like Claude Steele try mightily to spray intellectual truth. Steele, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has found, in stunning ways, that African-American college students are being hammered by "stereotype vulnerability," negative self-images that make them prone to perform poorly compared with white students, particularly in math and science.
In one study, Steele's research team told African-American students to take a "diagnostic" verbal proficiency test that would measure "intellectual ability."African-Americans scored only two-thirds as well as white students.
Steele gave the same test again but told the students that while it would be a challenge, it was just a laboratory problem-solving task. "We told them, `Relax, give us your best shot,'" Steele told a conference of African-American columnists. In that test, the scores for African-American and white students were equal.
In another verbal test, where everyone was told that the test was not a measure of ability - "This test is just a game" - half of the students were asked just before the test to note their race in a questionnaire. The other half were not. The African-American students who were asked to declare their race scored only half as well as white students. The African-American students who did not declare their race actually scored slightly higher than white students.
"When a black student sits down to take a test, he or she can sense that their intellectual abilities are under suspicion," Steele said. "That apprehension is a very underestimated factor in test performance. Stereotype vulnerability creates a loaded situation in which students often perform poorly and thus confirm low expectations or choose to not achieve anything at all in that domain."
Not only is it loaded, but the situation has exploded in the academic world. Seventy percent of African-American students do not complete college within six years, compared with 45 percent of white students, and of African-Americans who graduate, their grades are two-thirds of a grade lower than those of white graduates. While 83 percent of African-American students attend predominately white universities, 65 percent of the graduates in math and the sciences come from historically African-American colleges.
"For a long time, I always assumed the problem stemmed from a lack of preparation," Steele said. "But I was surprised that even when you control for preparation, the differences still exist. ... When you give white students the test, then tell them at the last moment, `Oh, by the way, this just happens to be a test in which Asians do better than whites,' white scores plummet."
Because of his findings, Steele set up a randomly chosen, 250-student study at the University of Michigan to boost performance in English, physics, chemistry and writing. The students were given a "challenge" curriculum that did not handicap them with any assumptions of their abilities. Of the students, 170 are white, 40 are African-American and 40 are students of other colors.
Currently, Steele said, African-American student performance, particularly for those who had high college entrance exam scores, is much more on par with the performance of white students.
Steele said such findings have convinced him that universities should move to eliminate "remedial" programs that target African-American students, because those programs automatically signal to incoming students that they are inferior.
He said frustration with challenging material is far less crippling than alienation.
"We have to recognize, contrary to the people who believe in IQ, that ability is an expandable capacity," Steele said. "But the nature of racism has made it a very hard concept to sell. In 1963, when I went to college, you knew you could not go here or go there. But it also made you dedicated to nailing that exam.
"Today, you have many colleges saying, in essence, to black students, `I'm not racist, but slow down, don't take so many courses, or don't take courses that are too hard.' That will always have black students questioning their own ability. The pressure point in the civil rights movement was voting rights. Now it's standardized tests."
Derrick Z. Jackson is a columnist for The Boston Globe, 135 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, Mass. 02107.