Rogers, the first in her family to attend college, has a PhD in developmental psychology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), where she has dedicated her young career to giving more young people the tools they need to succeed regardless of gender or race.
I talked with her about her own path to success and how her experiences influenced her professional goals. Her story is unique, of course, but she said she’s far from the only person who defies stereotypes, and yet the stereotypes persist and damage the prospects of too many children.
Rogers said she remembers “hearing all those statistics and thinking, those things are very true, but at the same time that’s not me”.
“Yes,” she said, “a lot of black and brown kids are dropping out of school and getting into trouble and doing poorly socially and academically, but a lot of black and brown kids are doing really well, overcoming incredible obstacles and succeeding.”
She’s trying to understand why some kids respond one way and other kids another to cultural norms, expectations and stereotypes, and what can we do, as schools, communities and parents, to equip more children to succeed.
What helped her? Family, teachers, coaches, mentors, people who gave her a chance to develop her talents and a positive sense of her self.
Her father was in the army and brought his family to Tacoma when she was 2 and her sister was 4. She was home-schooled by her mother until she entered Wilson High School.
In first grade, Rogers said, her sister was constantly in trouble with her teacher, who was frustrated by the talkative, opinionated child. “My mom, after battling with this teacher for a year, said, “You know what; I don’t have to put up with this.’” So she decided to home-school both girls. She was an aerobics instructor and braided hair. She wasn’t a teacher, so she expected the girls to take responsibility for doing their work.
The system suited Rogers, who said she is independent and introverted and would happily sit in her room doing her work. When she did go off to high school, Rogers said, it was no big deal. She was ready for it.
Home schooling fit perfectly with another activity that helped shape Rogers, gymnastics.
She was a high-energy kid, so her grandfather suggested her parents sign her up for gymnastics, which they did when she was 3 years old. She started competing at 6, and gymnastics dominated her schedule in ways regular school would not have allowed.
“Much of my childhood was spent in the gym,” she said. By the time she was 10, Rogers was training more than 20 hours a week. She excelled and made the national team, travelling to China, Japan and elsewhere.
Gymnastics channelled her high energy, gave her confidence and eventually got her a scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she won multiple championships and awards. Rogers will be inducted into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame on October 10.
UCLA is where, at the urging of a counsellor, she decided to pursue psychology. Rogers wanted to work with kids and had intended to become a teacher, but psychology offered another way to have an impact. In psychology classes, she said: “I was very much immersed in conversations about inequality and education as the vehicle for equality.”
Her last year at UCLA she worked in a lab that was exploring the impact of discrimination on kids; she became hungry to do more. So at 23, she and her husband moved east so that she could do graduate work at New York University.
In pursuing her PhD, she said, she wanted to know how children make sense of and respond to negative statistics and stereotypes, so that she could craft effective intervention strategies.
Rogers is the only person at I-LABS who does interview-based research. She works directly with children in schools, and in one project, she noticed that black boys who recognised that stereotypes about race didn’t apply to them would often accept gender stereotypes that put them in the privileged position. For them, it seemed normal to believe boys are natural leaders, for example.
The first step toward helping children deal with stereotypes, Rogers said, is for adults to be aware, and privilege makes that harder.
She said research has already shown what works for teachers, but she said the research often doesn’t make it from lab to classroom. “Caring and high expectations are paramount,” she said. “We know all these things,” she said, “why isn’t it happening?” That’s where issues of race and privilege come in, she said.
“Raising our own awareness of stereotypes, and being willing to question what we might see as natural or normal, can create a space for kids to also question the inequities and social contradictions they encounter and help them to resist stereotypes in their own identities and relationships.”
I wonder how her assertive sister would have been viewed had she been a boy? As adults we should question our assumptions. “When an Asian child isn’t the smartest in class,” Rogers said, “or a black child is the best in the class, do we find ourselves thinking, ‘Uh, s/he sure is an exception’?”
As a society, she said, “we want to talk about individuality and overcoming obstacles, and you can be anything you want to be. But that conversation has got to be couched in history and a system of racism and privilege and discrimination and stereotypes - these are real threats that derail potentially successful people.”