message-received

message received 77 diplomas in order to escape the drudgery of farm labor, using her work life as the example of what not to be, invoking a negative educational role model to help her children. Her exhortation is similar in content but slightly differ- ent to what Freeman (2005) described as Black teenagers’ tendency toward self-motivation for college by “avoidance of a negative role model” (p. 18). Whereas Freeman spoke of a low-SES, college-bound Black teenager having the agency to motivate themselves with examples of what minimal education does to a person’s quality of life, these parents used their own life stories and narratives of hard times to inspire their children to do better. Kim’s mother provides a powerful example of how this strategy was employed. Her main focus [for us] was graduating from high school. You know, so you just make sure that you get a high school diploma. She really, she really, she felt it was important. Because she wanted to go to school and couldn’t because she had to work in the fields and different things like that so, so she wanted us to make sure that we took advantage of it. In order for Kim’s mother to use this well-thought-out and persistent strategy she had to be consistent and “on message.” Rather than passively hoping her children would avoid her fate, she aggressively pushed education and empowered her children to believe that they could “do anything that [the children] want to do.” Kim told me that “education as far as college, that wasn’t a big thing in the house; just [the] high school diploma.” Like Lena and her siblings, Kim and her siblings were taught that education was prepa- ration for a higher quality of life through a more desirable vocation: work that paid more and taxed the body less. This level of education had visible, concrete financial and experiential pay-off, which is why the diploma became a goal that Kim’s mother wholly supported. Kathy heard similar things from her father and mother. Like Lena and Kim, Kathy’s parents inspired her to be a high school graduate as she was implored to work hard in school so that she could earn the right to work under more desirable conditions than they did. Her mother and father worked grueling hours in a rural Indiana industrial factory and wanted nothing more than for her and her siblings to not do the same. Well, my father, he always told us to make sure we finish high school because he did not want us in a factory . . . like him. And that’s what we did. Well, they just; they never really spoke about college. Again, they just always told us we would have to complete high school. We would have to get that diploma no matter what. That’s all they talked about, finishing high school.