This is from Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and shows the extraordinary affect that racial stereotypes and internalized oppression can have on test scores.

I'll first offer the snippet from the book, then offer a brief explaination of the word "priming", then I'll post Gladwell's sources at the end. [Emphasis added by myself.]

The psychologists Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half. As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think they are a reliable indicator of the test taker's ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she's truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of "smart"?...

..."I talked to the black students afterward, and I asked them, 'Did anything lower your performance?'" Aronson said. "I would ask, 'Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your race?' Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance. And they would always say no and something like 'You know, I just don't think I'm smart enough to be here.'"