Tatum Article & Discussion

This article by Beverly Daniel Tatum is based on a study in which 18 middle class Black college students share their experiences of growing up and attending schools in predominantly white communities. This study focuses on the impact of the family and the schools in helping these Black students develop a healthy racial identity. Each of the students' families were classified as race conscious, race neutral, or race avoidant/class concious. In addition this article presents Cross' concept of the five stages of Black racial identity development. These five stages are pre-encounter, encounter, immersion and emersion, internalization, and internalization-commitment.  Pre-encounter  Encounter  Immersion/Emersion  Internalization  Internalization-Commitment  The study dentitfies the students' racial identity development at each stage based on their interviews, and highlights five particular students' experiences. Based on these interviews the researcher notices key differences in young men and women, noting that "the men received some personal validation that the women did not" due to their desirability in interracial dating. Tatum concludes that "a same-race social network that includes Black males may be especially important for the maintenance of self-esteem for Black adolescent females" (Tatum 2004:132). Ultimately the study found that "many of these students' parents chose to live in these White communities in part because of what the schools offered, but doing so left their children with few Black peers and in an environment that was not geared towards producing positive racial identities for its Black students" (Tatum 133).  The study concluded that the teachers and counselors in these schools were inadequately equipped with the right frameworks to help assist Black students in getting more from the school environment; often times these teachers had low expectations for these students and were shocked when they met them or exceeded them.