Disidentification

Last summer I volunteered at Beyond Sports Foundation as a mentor and tutor for athletically gifted, low-income high school athletes, from the inner city of Chicago.  The goal of the foundation is provide academic and social tutoring to these students, in order to obtain NCAA scholarships, their only avenue into college.

One of the BSF students and a tutor at the
Graduation Party for the Class of 2011 (in June)

I was home from school this past weekend, and while I was home I decided to go visit the students I had worked with. As I was talking to the boys, I asked them how school was, and I asked the seniors where they decided to go to college. One of the boys, who I spent a great deal of time working with this summer, told me he had not yet decided. At first I was very confused. The National Signing Date for a National Letter of Intent for football was February 1st, and most of the boys in the foundation had immediately committed. As we continued talking, he told me that he decided not to play football in college because the schools he was looking to sign with were not as good academically as schools he could get into based on his grades. 


Instantly, I thought about Claude Steele’s idea of “disidentification”, in the article Race and the Schooling of Black Americans.  I found it noteworthy that the one white student in the foundation was the one student in the foundation who still felt some connection to the academics of school. In the article, Steele talks about disidentification as the lack of a process in which Black students identify with school and academic achievements, resulting from the double vulnerability of Black students in school, where they risk confirming academic incompetence, thus the racial inferiority they are suspected of. As a result of this extreme pressure, at the first encounter with a modest academic setback, the Black students disidentify with academics and identify with something different to help boost their self-esteem (Steele, 1992). Steele claims the disidentification process only happens with black students, and this situation seemed to support his belief. 


While the 4 other seniors in the foundation, all Black, clung to their sports as the source of their identity and their path to college, this one White student believed academic success was more important than athletic success. The 4 other students used their athletic success as a way for them to succeed, but this one realized that doing well in school would get him farther in life. Academic success could help him get a career in which he could support himself and eventually a family, giving them the life he never had. He recognized his talent was above most other high school athletes, but not enough to go beyond college and provide economic security. He believed getting the best academic education possible would help him in the future, even if that meant giving up an NCAA athletic scholarship and finding other ways to pay for college. 

Some of the BSF students and tutors hard at work

This situation also reminded me of the “Star Power” game because in an attempt to get the best education, this one kid is trying to achieve something very difficult for someone in the lower class of our economically stratified country. He wants to reach a higher level of economic success than the one he was born into. However, the constraints that a low-income placed on his chance to go to college make it very hard to do so and easy to chose another path, such as athletics.