GODS OR VERMIN: ALTERNATIVE READINGS OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE AMONG AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS

This article draws upon Black intellectual history and upon my experiences with Black students on a predominantly White university campus to show how, within the context of a specific community, African-descended students seize upon different ideas about the African American experience in order to promote their academic strivings. I focus on two divergent readings of African Americans' past that are rhetorically deployed by different groups of academically successful students. The first reading of the African American past is prevalent among those whom I refer to as race-conscious high achievers- African American students who embody and discursively reproduce a historically rooted ideology of Black uplift that motivates them in their quest for high grades. The second reading of the African American past is prevalent among those whom I refer to as ethnic-conscious high achievers- African students who draw an ethnic distinction between African Americans and themselves and who use stereotypes about African Americans as the foil against which they construct themselves as academic strivers. The fact that both of these idealized groups locate themselves within the Black student community even as they hold disparate views of African Americans' intellectual legacy points to the community's complexity as well as to its malleability as a conceptual tool in the hands of those who consider themselves members.