Living Between Stigma and Status: A Qualitative Study of the Social Identities of Highly Educated Black Canadian Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws on qualitative interviews to explore the commonalities, contradictions, and tensions in the identities and lived experiences of 16 highly educated and upwardly mobile Black Canadians who were born and raised in Canada or born in another country and raised in Canada. In contrast to both popular and scholarly discourses that essentialize Black people, the experiences and perceptions of study participants were characterized by polyconsciousness, ambivalence, fluidity, and hybridity. Most reported feeling a simultaneous sense of estrangement and belonging in a Canadian context largely perceived as Eurocentric and White centered. A sense of alienation from Canada led many to embrace their transplanted ethnocultural heritage as well as a transcendent Black racial identity. Despite the protective and empowering function that a Black identity can provide in the context of a society perceived to be racist, most participants shared a complex and conflicted relationship with Blackness. While many embraced essentialist and counterhegemonic constructions of Black identity, they also resisted the discursive constraints of this and other identity categories. Because of their academic and occupational accomplishments along with other factors, participants reported occasionally having to defend or justify their Blackness to racialized peers. Finally, many participants viewed middle-class ideals of success as a vehicle for improving the plight of the Black community as a whole. In this vein, these individuals attempted to use their educational and career success to challenge racial stereotypes, furnish youth with positive role models, and equip Black people to become agents of social change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".