| Abstract: |
Nationally, educators suspend Black students at greater rates than any other group (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2016). This disproportionality is fueled by stereotypes casting Black students as "troublemakers" (Okonofua, Walton, & Eberhardt, 2016)--a label the students too often internalize as part of their identities. Decades of theory and evidence suggest that when one's identity is threatened in a particular domain, it helps to have opportunities to reflect on other sources of self-worth beyond the threatened aspect of the self (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Steele, 1988). The authors report on the impacts of a self-affirmation intervention, delivered as four brief 15-minute student writing exercises, intended to mitigate the racial suspension gap by helping Black students cope with negative labels placed on them by their school and society. They posit that by engaging with the self-affirmation intervention, Black students build psychological resources to manage identity threats and contend with internalized racial oppression (David, Schroeder, & Fernandez, 2019; Okonofua, Walton, & Eberhardt, 2016). They further hypothesized that Black students who were suspended prior to the seventh-grade intervention would be particularly at risk of being stereotyped as troublemakers, since Black students with prior infractions not only must contend with stereotypes concerning their racial group, but also are burdened by a history of disciplinary incidents, which together conspire to place them at an even greater risk for being labeled as a troublemaker (Okonofua & Walton, 2015). |