Most LGR Programs Do Not Have Coaches Who Share Demographic Similarities with Our Students, So What Do We Do Now

Cristina Thompson, the Co-Director of the Brown LGR program, recently posted a comment to my March 3rd post about diversity & LGR coaching. It was a great comment.

Cristina asked, “Who are our coaches?” The short answer is that with the exception of a couple programs during my two years at LGR (namely, Mount Vernon LGR, GWHS LGR, and Harvard LGR some semesters), most programs typically have few coaches who are African-American or Hispanic, like most of LGR’s students, and most new coaches seem to have only very faint ideas of what the FAFSA is. Cristina also asked many other questions about coaches, coach recruitment, and diversity by race/ethnicity and class, and I will leave these for you to reflect on and respond to (when midterms are done).

Her post reminded me that it is very important that coaches and students in LGR get to know each other and that coaches also get to know each other. The sharing of personal stories is important, first and foremost, because it allows for stories about college-going and the college application process. It’s also important because it cuts into overgeneralizations—stereotypes—that under-represented minorities have to overcome many obstacles to college and that white and Asian-American students have easy paths to college. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Chair of the African and African-American Studies Department at Harvard, recently said to The London Observer, “The black kids who come to Harvard or Yale are middle class.” It will shatter stereotypes in your LGR program to see, for instance, that a white coach is the first in her family to go to college and has a large financial aid package while a coach from an under-represented minority group is from a college-educated household and grew up in an affluent community.