The Myth and Danger of Resilience: How Reckoning With Systemic Oppression Has Forced Us to Reconsider Resilience as a Construct

Abstract

In 2006, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006), a noted education scholar, gave her Presidential Address to the American Educational Research Association. In that address, she directed educators to move away from talks of achievement gaps, which were dominating discourse in education and political conversations about education. She noted that the term achievement gap focused on short-term solutions and personal responsibility rather than social responsibility. In her talk, Dr. Ladson-Billings focused on race, noting that the original blatant educational equities were due to race, along with class and gender. She asserted that what persists are inequities, particularly around race.

In her delineation of how educational inequity came to be, Ladson-Billings articulated that we cannot just measure students of color against their white counterparts without addressing why there is a gap in test scores and educational attainment in the first place. That, in and of itself, is a superficial analysis of the problem. This problem is not one of individual moral or intellectual failure, but is the result of systematic exclusion from a quality education. This idea is the difference between an achievement gap and an equity gap. In other words, the achievement gap focuses on the individual, that is, what may be “wrong” with a student in regard to why they are not progressing in their studies. The term equity gap, conversely, describes the systematic discrimination where individuals have been denied educational access and opportunity over time. This extends from the level of the individual and includes more macro-level factors such as present government and institutional policies and practices that show up as persistent gaps between students who have privilege and those who do not.

H. Richard Milner, IV, a professor and scholar of urban teacher education, added to the discourse by explaining that current explanations for the achievement gap and inequity at its foundation compare racially minoritized students to white students without context; framing white students as the norm, and everyone else as the “other”; leads to studying racially minoritized students from a deficit perspective; and focuses on individual students rather than institutional actions that perpetuate inequitable structures and systems (2013).

In this paper, we assert that students who have multiple marginalized identities, such as students who are racially minoritized and low-income (Crenshaw, 1989; Goward, 2018), are further impacted by the harm perpetuated by concepts that support persistence over retention. That is, there is an expectation that people of color in the United States—who often suffer from lower graduation rates than their white peers (U.S. Department of Education, 2021)—excel and achieve by any means necessary, independently (Steele, 2011). That is, asking for help is antithetical to the neoliberal ethos of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps. This myopic view that individual students can simply be “tough” or “resilient” or “gritty” in order to overcome the challenges of higher education has the potential to be dangerous and damaging to those students (McGee, 2016). In other words, the energy expended in order to succeed may be at a significant cost to the student's body, despite their success (Brody et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2022; James, 1994).

Rather than aiming to truly rectify higher education systems that negatively impact marginalized students, educational researchers have indicated that students need to build resilience, grit, or a growth mindset in order to complete the rigors of a university education (Duckworth et al., 2007; Dweck & Yeager, 2019; McGee, 2016). This outlook ignores the history of exclusion of marginalized students from the academy. Thus, historically excluded students who do reach the academy are, in essence, being told (implicitly by the systems set in place by the institution or explicitly by educational researchers) to fight upstream to get in, and then work even harder to finish when they get there, all with minimal help. The institutions themselves have been told to shift and adapt to the students they admit at least since the 1990s after scholars critiqued Vincent Tinto's (1993) theory of student departure, and yet, institutions are not held accountable for low graduation rates or lack of student belonging. Institutions are not told to be more resilient, the students are. Therefore, students “grind” harder to be successful, and increase their chances of developing a syndrome epidemiologist, and professor emeritus, Sherman James called John Henryism (1994): a paradoxical construct that many consciously minimize mental fatigue, while keeping the appearance of positive well-being (e.g., remaining highly engaged in schoolwork), but with an increased odds of students developing negative health outcomes (e.g., metabolic syndrome; Brody et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2022).

Understanding the Context

The Higher Education Context

In higher education, resilience and grit have become ingrained in student success ideology. Rather than focus on retention, which requires universities to think about the way institutional policies, practices, and structures do, or do not, support course completion and graduation, the emphasis is often placed on students persisting despite their background characteristics. While background characteristics, such as race, class, and gender, certainly impact student success, these are mostly fixed categories and not necessarily important in and of themselves. These categories alone do not necessarily predict poor performance or not having the necessary competence to succeed, but what they do predict is how particular groups of students respond to institutional systems and systemic oppression. While this critique is often laid at the feet of highly rejective campuses, broad access institutions are implicated as well when nationwide one-quarter of students stop out before their sophomore year (U.S. Department of Education, “Fall Enrollment,” 2020).

When looking at the higher education data, however, it becomes clear that individual resilience, or lack thereof, cannot be the answer to the problems that face students of color, that face low-income students, and that face students who are in both categories. Just as financial literacy courses are useless when you are trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents to pay your rent, teaching resilience and grit, when it is clear that some institutions have historically not served their marginalized students well, provides an out for these institutions instead of inviting them to rethink the systems they have put in place. Therefore, institutions need to be able to withstand scrutiny, be resilient, and shift practices to create programs that support marginalized students directly, along with developing faculty to be inclusive and using teaching modalities that may better suit the variety of populations that higher education now serves.

The Myth of Resilience

Resilience is a nebulous concept. One particular definition of resilience that has gained traction (and is useful for this paper) is “the capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the viability, the function, or the development of that system” (Southwick et al., 2014, p. 4). Even though scholars are beginning to consider resilience as a construct that is a process, it is still often operationalized as a trait a person has. Conceptualizing and operationalizing resilience this way needs to be abandoned. It again puts the onus on the individual to change and adapt, not the system. What should be considered is that as contexts change, a person's identity also follows that contextual change (Kaplan & Garner, 2017), producing the psychological outcomes that are needed to fit in that context, and leading to subsequent motivation, action (Ajzen, 1991), and achievement (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020). With this idea in mind, it is now time we give up the term “resilience” altogether and move to another word and definition that assumes a student's need to overcome challenges that are context-specific, brief, and driven by one's identity. We suggest using John Henryism.

John Henryism

John Henryism Conceptually Defined

John Heryism is conceptually defined as a strong behavioral predisposition to engage in effortful, active coping with difficult environmental psychosocial stressors (i.e., social and economic; James, 2019; James et al., 1987), particularly for historically underrepresented minorities. This concept is an ode to the American folk hero who met his demise after beating the mechanical steam drill in a race of man versus machine. Within this conceptual definition of John Henryism, what needs to be understood are the outcomes related to high levels of effortful, active coping, which, coincidentally, are paradoxical. That is, despite achievement being predicted by high levels of good psychological health (i.e., higher rates of self-control nested within a sense of autonomy; Brody et al., 2020; Kiecolt et al., 2009), what is seen as resilience on the outside is only skin deep; it is superficial (Brody et al., 2020). Instead, the adaptive aspects (i.e., the psychological) of John Henryism go hand-in-hand with the maladaptive, that is, there is increased potential for negative long-term health outcomes if not mitigated by a higher socioeconomic status. Considering the name John Henryism, these negative health outcomes are a result of fighting the (literal) machine (i.e., oppressive systemic factors) over long periods of time without the necessary support. For example, the lack of policies supporting an inclusive campus climate for low-income students may lead to increased social support on the one end, but higher levels of effortful, active coping on the other end (Bronder et al., 2014).

John Henryism Hypothesis

In James’ (1994) germinal study, he discovered that John Henryism is not distributed equally. What this means, and is relevant to this paper, is that John Henryism (i.e., high-effort coping) occurs as an individual interacts and subsequently copes with psychosocial stressors in a particular context or environment. We argue that responding to a context suggests that John Henryism is not a static trait as it is a coping response to environmental psychosocial stressors. That is, John Henryism is dependent on the factors within an individual's psychological system, for example, one's identity; their feeling of community support; access to necessary community institutions; the portrayal of their identity in the media, etc. (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). Therefore, in regard to James’s (1994) study, socioeconomic factors—which are a proxy for these nested systemic factors (e.g., the outcome of racist redlining policies resulting in the ghettoization of many groups of color)—interact with an individual's racial identity and level of wealth resulting in the psychological manifestation of John Henryism. The results from James’ study were that high levels of John Henryism and low levels of socioeconomic need result in low levels of cardiovascular disease risk. Put another way, high John Henryism paired with high socioeconomic status was indicative of good long-term psychological and physical health.

On the flip side of this coin, those individuals with low socioeconomic status and racially minoritized backgrounds are at a significantly greater risk of developing long-term health issues. Unlike the high John Henryism × high socioeconomic status group, this group (high John Henryism × low socioeconomic status) does not have the luxury of the buffer that great or even adequate socioeconomic resources buy. It is with this group where John Henryism is particularly paradoxical: where high levels of motivation and self-regulation (underpinned by a sense of autonomy and self-control) lead to long-term “grinding” and a higher probability for increases in allostatic load (the accumulation of long-term stress that can lead to negative health outcomes; Bryant & Anderson, 2022). As Fetty Wap (2015) said in “No Days Off,” “Going hard, no days off, yeah, ay/Grinding hard for that payoff, yeah, yeah!” It goes without saying that taking days off can be detrimental to one's income (and academic achievement); however, according to research in John Henryism, low-income racially minoritized groups are choosing and attempting to keep pace with those who have more privilege by, literally, taking no days off. They simply cannot afford to. As explained by Ratcliffe and McKernan (2010), Black people are more likely than their white counterparts to experience poverty due to systemic racism, which can significantly increase stress. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that groups with racially minoritized identities combined with lower socioeconomic resources could have negative long-term health outcomes, while John Henryism protects against the negative psychological factors on the way to achievement. What is important to note is that John Henryism is not necessarily an adaptation to a system (i.e., a white power structure), it is (conscious or not) resistance against that system. Or, to reference hip-hop again, in the words of Yasiin Bey, formerly known as the Mighty Mos Def (1999): “They say they want us successful/but then they make it stressful. When I start keeping pace/they start changing up the tempo.”

John Henryism and College Students

Like the folk hero, the day-to-day experiences of many racially minoritized college students and their intersections often lead to the same results: these students end up sick and hurt because of how they perceive their identity on college campus and how their peers perceive them (Goward, 2020). The college student population is not as “traditional” as it once was: campuses filled with 18–22-year-old, middle-class to affluent, white undergraduate students (Felten & Lambert, 2020). Because of the cultural expectation of going to college in the United States, many students have to find the financial means of obtaining a college education. For example, many students first join the military in order to use the GI Bill to pay for college or students are working full-time jobs while also going to school full-time, or are parents returning to school after raising a family. It goes without saying that the attention “traditional” college students could put toward their schoolwork and extracurricular activities is different from today's students. Colleges and universities have student populations with many competing goals, often with school not being the main priority (Felten & Lambert, 2020; Neely et al., 2009). It could be the case that students are relying on reserves of motivation in order to balance both their college and noncollege lives. It is within this thought that nontraditional students may need to work harder to remain engaged in their schoolwork compared to their traditional counterparts. That is, nontraditional students may need to rely more heavily on their John Henryism.

As we have discussed, in the interim John Henryism is not entirely maladaptive. For example, Torsney et al. (2022) demonstrated that higher levels of John Henryism—especially for historically underrepresented racially minoritized students—are adaptive when it comes to engagement in schoolwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, John Henryism was a protective factor for keeping some of the most vulnerable students engaged in their schoolwork during an incredibly challenging time. Having studies that demonstrate that John Henryism may buffer students’ engagement offers some indication that John Henryism is a constantly reinforcing momentary process for many students in order to achieve academically. That is, some students may be considered to be resilient; rather, they are responding to their identity in a school-based context, positively impacting their engagement in their schoolwork. For some students, their John Henryism never shuts off. It is always engaged (Goward, 2020). Because engagement in schoolwork—which has been defined as the “holy grail” for achievement (Sinatra et al. 2015)—is critical for academic achievement and persistence toward graduation, it may take momentarily processing one's effortful, active coping in order to stay engaged in a task. Therefore, what needs to be considered is what happens when students become aware of the John Henryism process. Will it impact disengagement? Improve well-being? Create some sort of ah-ha moment for both students and university personnel?

Discussion

The main objective of this paper is a reconceptualization of resilience, seen through the lens of racially minoritized students, low-income students, and students who are both. We are suggesting the term John Henryism be used instead of resilience. As we have explained, the inherent nature of John Henryism is that it is a coping strategy to overcome environmental psychosocial stress. Because it is a coping strategy, it is inherently situational (i.e., context-specific and momentary) and may offer more nuance both in the short and long term about an individual's psychological and physiological responses to school. This goes counter to the idea that a person can develop certain psychological attributes such as “grit” or “resilience.” Rather, we posit resilience is actually momentary effortful, active coping (i.e., John Henryism) which occurs when an individual's identity interacts (explicitly or implicitly) with the context. Therefore, we have proposed the following model:

This model offers a lens into identifying why historically marginalized students, paradoxically, may overcome environmental challenges to succeed academically while also being more prone to negative long-term health effects. What our model offers compared to many of the resilience models available is three important qualities: (1) role identity in context (Kaplan & Garner, 2017) is the driver for momentary high-effort coping; (2) John Henryism is an emergent property of the system that is impacted by perceptions of identity in context and historical factors; (3) this model offers a feedback loop as John Henryism in context will reinforce role identity and ultimately impact the ever-evolving historical implications of the context. Below we will discuss how this model can impact how colleges and universities can support low-social power college students.

Recommendations for Higher Education

Reshaping Our Field to Account for Students at the Margins

Common thinking regarding resilience is that it is either a trait (i.e., a psychological capacity that individuals have and can develop) or a state (i.e., a temporary state of being). Both differ from our conceptualization in that John Henryism is not a trait and it is a momentary process dictated by identity in context. Because of this new conceptualization, colleges and universities should have a new focus on moving beyond the basics of holistic student support to being aware of the nuances of student needs and challenges that a concept like John Henryism demonstrates. In this case, a reconceptualization of resilience—a ubiquitous term—may greatly benefit students who have marginalized identities or are responding psychologically to how they perceive themself in a college environment.

This kind of work requires campuses to invest in student support services practitioners by decreasing student-to-staff ratios to make it easier for support staff to meet with their caseloads of students early and often. It also requires institutions to be mindful of what student support services can do to contribute to closing equity gaps, and what lies elsewhere. For example, most recently the California Community Colleges have restructured their equity plans, which were heavily focused on student services, to further delve into ways that harm happens in the classroom. Student support services have plenty of work to do in addressing the needs of the various campus student bodies and the ways identity formation happens on those campuses, but student services cannot do this work in a silo. As more and more campuses claim to be working toward closing equity gaps then the work has to be informed by a whole campus approach, which includes both student services and faculty. Unfortunately, higher education is still learning how to provide basic holistic support, and this is often due to the workload challenges that a reduced number of full-time faculty and full-time staff face due to low state investment in public education. A nuanced approach to this work is impossible when employees are stretched thin. Nonetheless, these concepts may be helpful for faculty to share in graduate programs geared toward higher education practitioners, and for faculty success offices to share with new faculty so that we are aware of new ways of thinking in higher education theory.

What a shift from resilience to John Henryism requires is finally recognizing that higher education has to begin serving the students it has and not the ones higher education was shaped for in 1636 at the founding of Harvard. Rather than continuing to allow old policies and practices to exist because they always have, every institution has to rethink putting the onus on students to adapt to an outdated system, we can adapt. In practice, this looks like not holding financial literacy programs, and instead ensuring that financial aid information is clear, delivered in a timely fashion, and that monies are dispersed in a timely manner. Instead of workshops teaching students to endure abuse in the classroom by being resilient, institutions need to address known problematic faculty and staff. Another area that should be addressed is the students in the “murky middle” who are performing well enough to not land on anyone's radar by earning between a 2.5 and a 3.5 grade point average, and will likely graduate, but will leave the institution scarred because they have coped with the stressors of higher education through John Henryism. Although they will graduate, they will not be in the best position to start their professional lives, as they likely will not have been able to compete for high-quality internships or other opportunities.

Finally, rather than asking students to be more resilient, campuses can embrace student resistance to the structures that harm them. Tara Yosso's (2005) community cultural wealth framework named “resistant capital” as “those knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality.” Students who know that their campuses will listen to, and act on, their concerns about oppression are less likely to resort to forms of coping (high effort or other) with campus climate stressors, and thus, more likely to persist. Yosso's framework, which challenges deficit thinking and challenges racism (also another benefit of thinking in terms of John Henryism), provides a lens that affirms a student's background, home life, and home community, and encourages educators to support students in mining their cultural capital to support them as they obtain their formal education rather than abandon that cultural capital to adopt new norms of the academy or a different social class. Producing high-quality first-year experience courses, or other student services, supports this framework and may alleviate some of the negative effects of John Henryism noted earlier.

Ideas for Future Research

Research using John Henryism as a mechanism for overcoming environmental stressors in college and in educational settings, in general, is in its infancy. We have outlined how resilience needs to be reconceptualized and applied with the concept of identity as the driver. This is what we have outlined in our model. Because the research on John Henryism in an educational context is so sparse, we are proposing three new avenues for taking research on John Henryism forward. These pathways include: (1) creating a new scale to measure John Henryism in the context of college classrooms; (2) conducting longitudinal analyses and momentary measures of John Henryism in the college context; and (3) creating interventions that can teach students when John Henryism is being used and how to stop it from becoming maladaptive.

First, the John Henryism Active Coping (JHAC-12) scale has proven to be a reliable and valid measure for measuring John Henryism and health-related outcomes. However, it was constructed with a specific social context as the study population. This population did not include historically underrepresented students in college classrooms. The new scale would include all of the above aspects of our model: perceptions of historical context, identity in context, John Henryism, and school-related behavior. The creation of this scale should offer a better understanding of how John Henryism occurs in a school setting.

Second, it is necessary for future studies of John Henryism to consider longitudinal and momentary methods. It is important to use these methods for two reasons: (1) so John Henryism can be observed how it fluctuates over time, and (2) to see how John Henryism occurs in context. In other words, using these two types of analysis will allow us to observe how John Henryism occurs at multiple grain sizes within a unit of analysis (Sinatra et al., 2015).

Last, interventions that teach about the short-term and long-term impact of John Henryism need to be used. For example, it might behoove colleges and universities to teach first-year students about John Henryism through creative means that may be historically overlooked. One such way to connect students' identities to what is happening culturally or socially is to consider pedagogies that celebrate students’ cultural backgrounds. Christopher Emdin's (2021) work addresses how students’ whose cultures are considered low-brow are dismissed as antiintellectual, and not suitable for academic work. Some scholars have used hip-hop as an avenue to facilitate culturally relevant pedagogy. Hip-hop not only frames challenges facing racially minoritized people, and society in general, but has many songs underpinned by John Henryism. Lines such as Nas’s (1994) “N.Y. State of Mind” where he spits, “I don’t sleep / because sleep is the cousin of death,” could be easily explained in terms of John Henryism and the development of the theory. Furthermore, as André 3000 poetically explained in Rick Ross’s (2012) song “Sixteen,” “She yelling that selling's [drugs] a sin/well so is telling young men/that selling is a sin/if you don't offer new ways to win,” is another example of how students could analyze and critique how grind culture and opportunity for historically underrepresented minorities is framed. In essence, John Henryism would fit seamlessly into conversations about Hip-hop at the college level, and, more importantly, is one tool that contributes to a university offering culturally relevant pedagogy for racially minoritized students in the United States since the musical genre has become a global phenomenon since its inception in the 1970s. Hip-hop's influence globally on not only music, but also fashion, in the form of luxury fashion houses creating streetwear lines, and other forms of commerce has yet to penetrate the structures of higher education that scholars of student services and support have been discussing as not culturally relevant for more than 40 years.

Another intervention that could be used is for first-year students to journal about how they perceive their identities in certain contexts around campus. Once a full set of data has been established (e.g., after the end of a semester), students can then speak with a counselor or other students about their experiences. Were those experiences good? Were they bad? Did they have a feeling they could not quite understand in one of their classes? This kind of intervention might be useful for figuring out who may need further support as they progress through their academic careers.

We understand that this term does not encapsulate all of the perspectives of racially minoritized students. It does not capture the cultural differences between groups of students who may be of the same race, but different cultural backgrounds. Nor does the concept incorporate other identities that impact students’ educational journeys such as identifying as a part of the queer community. This is a potential limitation of the term “John Henryism.” However, John Henryism was meant to describe what happens when a sense of autonomy, drive, and purpose meets white, patriarchal resistance. The goal of this paper and future research is to emphasize to researchers and practitioners that John Henryism is something they should consider studying. What the concept does do is give us a place to begin addressing and describing the needs of racially minoritized students, low-income students, and multiply marginalized students, and we welcome the work of others in addressing the intersectional ways identity impacts students on campus. We assert it is better to start with some of the challenges on campus and continue to iterate rather than attempt to address every identity at once.

Implications for Practice

In practice, remedying the impact of students having to push through poorly designed systems means redesigning systems. For example, in current practice, student support services are often deployed to support students in high “D” grade, “F” grade, and withdrawal courses without examining the pedagogy that is happening in the classroom. A redesign of this practice will involve student support services and faculty support services working together to determine why these courses have these outcomes and retrain faculty if necessary, and ensure that student support is embedded in the work at the start. In student support, this will require us to spend our efforts supporting all students, even the ones who seem to be performing well. The rise of suicides in higher education (Cramer et al., 2022) is telling us that our mental health systems need to be more robust beyond the six sessions per semester of therapy students are often offered.

For academic advising, it means reducing the student-to-advisor ratio so that advisors have time to get to know students well enough to spot when things may be wrong, to support students in navigating the academy, and help prepare students for the next step rather than focus on the transactional nature of selecting classes each semester. In practice, the work of supporting students requires a focus on the retention of students by the institution taking on an iterative process to continually adapt to the students it serves rather than hosting another workshop for students on how they can adapt to, and survive, the institution and persist. Developing student persistence should be focused on student self-authorship (Baxter Magolda, 2004) which helps students use the institution as a place of self-discovery and exploration prior to becoming not only a part of the workforce, but also participants in the communities where they decide to reside postgraduation.

Scholars from outside of higher education have long contributed to the literature that informs our practice. Adding the work of noted public health scholar Sherman James reminds us to think of our campuses as communities, and that we are stewards of the health of those communities. Using public health scholarship to inform practice means considering not only the graduation rates of our campuses as a success, but also student well-being. Models of student success that take students’ well-being into account for all the students a campus admits from those who are thriving, those who are not, and those who we often do not notice because they are doing just well enough to not have missed success markers that trigger alarm. Practitioners would do well to craft programming that checks in with students at every level and work across entities to provide support.

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to consider a different point of view as to why historically underrepresented minority students ultimately succeed in school, but do so at a cost (Goward, 2020). We argue that considering John Henryism, i.e., high-effort coping as a response to environmental stressors, as a source of motivation for historically excluded students’ academic achievement, can allow stakeholders in higher education a more nuanced understanding as to how students overcome barriers related to their identity. We hope this paper can provide college and university professionals with a new lens to examine students’ academic achievement as they confront and overcome systemic barriers. We argue stakeholders in higher education (e.g., administration, staff, faculty, etc.) should be investing in high-quality systems of support (Rolle et al., 2021) to be able to get students from marginalized backgrounds to graduation, without having to rely on using John Henryism to get there.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Shonda L. L. Goward

SHONDA L. GOWARD, Ed.D. is the Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Advising and Success at San José State University. Her current research focuses on how universities can retain historically excluded students and support their academic success and well-being.

BENJAMIN M. TORSNEY is an Assistant Professor at Temple University. Ben's research focuses on John Henryism, a form of high effort coping as a response to environmental stressors and the motivation of pre-service teachers to enter the teaching field.

We love feedback. Send letters to executive editor Z Nicolazzo (AboutCampusMag@gmail.com), and please copy her on notes to authors.

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