Achievement Gap In African American Culture

The achievement gap is the tested difference of performance between minorities and their counterpart on standardize test such as the SAT and rates of educational attainment. One central factor to the achievement gap is the belief in the black inferiority myth it most clearly affect the correcting of the achievement gap and was a huge part of creating the original gap. “If we are going to have this public conversation about African American student achievement, it will inevitable become a conversation that blames black parents, black students and the black community. The danger is that it will become yet another location for the recycling of the ideology of the African American moral, cultural and intellectual deficiency”(young gifted and black
This myth of cultural deficiency lead to a belief that African American culture is deficient because African Americans are intellectual deficient. This belief is held by society, when in fact African Americans have such a different culture then mainstream America because of their initially perceived intellectual deficient, which was used to deprive them of basic rights such as education. That societal belief of inferiority is then internalized this is recognized as the stereotype threat “ the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype”(young gifted and black 111). This threat then manifest in poor performance “ blacks performed a full standard deviation lower then whites under the stereotype threat of the test being ‘diagnostic ‘of their intellectual ability, even though we statistical match the two groups in ability level. Something other then ability was involved; we believe it was stereotype threat” (young gifted and black 114). The manifestation of this threat then led to lower African American achievement know as the achievement