In the article “To Label or Not to Label: The Special Education Question for African Americans” by Moniqueka E.
Gold and Heraldo Richards, the authors explore the negative impacts of labeling African Americans with a special
education disability label. The authors suggest that “labeling African-American students in special education is not
advantageous and can even be counter-productive.” They proclaim that African-Americans are over-identified in
special education. Other research shows that the population of students I work with, Native Americans, are also
over-identified. The authors also assert the word disability is connected to deficit thinking and tantamount to saying
the student doesn’t have the ability to learn and that although the concept of labeling was developed to assist
educators in working with students with disabilities, adding another label with a negative connotation to African
Americans is counter-productive and may impact their belief in their ability to learn. In addition, researchers
including Blanchett, 2009, found that African Americans with a disability were more apt to be placed in more
restrictive educational settings. Cultural differences and differing learning styles may be misinterpreted during the
referral processes of identifying students that may have a learning disability causing over-representation of African
Americans. Personal biases of the referring teacher and test biases may also impact results of evaluations of African
Americans for the special education evaluation process leading to a disability label. Labeling can also lower the
expectations of African American students. Once a student is labeled, less is expected, so less is learned creating a
cycle of underachievement. Students generally meet their teacher’s expectations and if a student is identified as
having a disability, the teacher in most cases, expects less, thus causing the student to perform less. The authors
suggest that labeling African Americans for special education categorization purposes stigmatized African American
students.