Blacks and High Self-Esteem: A Puzzle

The article Inferiorization and 'SelfEsteem' (Adam, 1978) is a provocative one. Its central observation is quite interesting?that over time, research find? ings related to the self-esteem of blacks have changed and these changes parallel the development of new ideologies concerning reaction to oppression. While early research concluded that blacks had more negative self-pictures than whites (see Dreger and Miller, 1960; Proshansky and Newton, 1968), more reeent socialpsychological studies fail to find consis? tent differences in self-esteem between the races (Rosenberg and Simmons, 1972; Baughman, 1971; McCarthy and Yancey, 1971; Powell and Fuller, 1973; St. John, 1975). Similarly according to early, liberal, post World War II ideology, an environment of oppression and segregation was seen as necessarily psychologically devastating and therefore to be eradicated. More recently, the champions of the oppressed emphasize the resiliency of minority group members and often view discussions of impairment in family structure and in personality functioning as racist. Blacks are encouraged to internalize the Black is Beautiful credo and to fight actively against discrimination rather than to permit degradation of the self. However interesting such an observa? tion of a parallel between research and ideology, the author's conclusions, based upon it, seem erroneous and informed by his apparent bias?that is, he seems to believe that the oppressed must have lower self-esteem no matter what the studies show. At worst, he appears to conclude there was an ideologicallymotivated conspiracy to suppress the