The evidence for this line of thinking is everywhere. At Detroit's public, all-black Paul Robeson Academy, students start the day by standing up and proclaiming: "I feel like somebody. I act like somebody. Nobody can make me feel like a nobody!" Last fall, the organizers of Denver's Black Arts Festival described their mission as, in part, "building self-esteem" in young people. And newspaper profiles of black leaders invariably point out that these people possess self-esteem -- taking for granted that it is an odd quality for an African-American to have.

Early academic research seemed to support the notion of low black self-esteem. Almost everyone remembers the work of psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, who from 1938 to 1977 conducted experiments showing that black children preferred white dolls over black ones. The Supreme Court footnoted the work in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which the court pronounced that the assignment of black children to segregated schools "generates a feeling of inferiority ... that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be overcome."

Since then, however, psychological studies of black self-esteem have offered increasingly mixed results. And the latest study may prove to be the nail in the theory's coffin. In a recent issue of Psychological Bulletin, an African-American psychologist is offering what some in the field take to be the final word on the issue. Blacks don't have less self-esteem than whites, her findings show. In fact, they often have more.

Bernadette Gray-Little, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writing with graduate student Adam Hafdahl, performed a complex review of every piece of research available on black self-esteem, 261 studies in all. Other scholars have attempted similar projects, but this study stands out for its scope and statistical rigor.

"There have been inconsistencies in the results of the studies on this topic over time," says the UNC professor, who insists she entered the project with no political agenda. "I wanted to see if I could find any basis for a firm conclusion. And if inconsistencies occurred, I wanted to know when and why."

The broad trends she discerned are fairly straightforward. Before age 10, whites slightly surpass blacks in self-esteem. Everyone takes a big self-esteem hit in junior high. After that, blacks narrowly but consistently surpass whites, through age 21, the upper limit of the study.

For Sandra Graham, a professor of education at UCLA, the study is "the definitive statement on the issue." She notes that Gray-Little's findings are surprising in that they don't "fit with the prevailing perceptions of how a stigmatized person should feel about themselves."

"The prevailing view," she says, "is that society puts you in a certain place and that influences how you feel. But the research has not supported that idea."

Making use of a technique called meta-analysis, the study culled data from many studies and treated them as if they were part of one giant study -- a method that increases the odds that the findings are not the result of chance. Gray-Little dices up the research in provocative ways. The self-esteem gap seems to vary along socioeconomic lines, for instance. Low-income blacks show higher self-esteem than low-income whites. The gap, however, disappears at higher income levels.

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