Othermothering

All kinds of alarms were going off in my head while reading this study. In an ideal world, race shouldn't matter at all in terms of equal treatment. But here on Earth, here in America, here in this study, race does matter.
But it doesn't matter simply because of race/color. Race/color matters because of what it can be associated with. I think this ties in very well Berger and Luckman. Race/color is an objective reality in the same way that an “institutional world” is. “It has a history that antedates the individual’s birth and is not accessible to his biographical recollection. It was there before he was born, and it will be there after his death” (BL). Therefore, I think that the African American students and faculty involved in this study recognize this in each other and that is why they are drawn to one another more so than they are drawn to white faculty or students. Though they themselves did not personally experience all of the history that belongs to African Americans, it is a part of each of their pasts and their futures regardless of their individuality.
The study also addresses a gap between white faculty and African American students. Though they may both be from American cultures, the white faculty and the African American student can simply not share the racial commonality, so there’s much more opportunity for misunderstanding and miscommunication. Of course, as the study also shows, sometimes commonality is found in other areas and a rich bond is formed.
One other thing that I thought was really interesting was the notion that some African American professors pushed their African American students harder simply because they are African American. I think that I understand the reasons why they would do this, but I tend to reject this idea, agreeing that “imposing higher standards on them because of their race not only unfairly made the course more difficult but also reinforced the stigma that they should be treated differently than their White peers.”