Success does not require rejecting your roots, said Anthony Abraham Jack ’07, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, quoted in a recent article by the Christian Science Monitor dealing with the career challenges of low-income first generation students from Ivy League colleges. The article spoke with several experts about the issue of low-income students making the transition to a different socioeconomic class as they entered their post-college careers.
“It’s really important that we don’t perpetuate this myth that if you are poor or black or Latino that you must go through racial erasure or socioeconomic erasure, that you must be cleansed by white wealth to make it in America,” said Jack, himself a low-income first generation student.