This study explored the processes that lead to relatively lower academic performance among African American students. It has been suggested that African American students perceive that, because of discrimination, education is less useful as a tool for upward mobility for African Americans than it is for members of other ethnic groups. The nature of African American beliefs about the relationships between perceptions of discrimination and grades was studied with 40 African American high school and 120 African American college students. The study expanded the group-specific scale devised by R. A. Mickelson (1990) into four independent subscales. Results suggest that perceptions of discrimination do predict grades, but this relationship is mediated by the student's academic self-esteem and moderated by the level of racial centrality, a construct that measures the extent to which being black is part of one's self-concept. Different types of experiences with discrimination appear to be related to different types of experiences and predict different educational outcomes. In general, the hypothesis that academic self-esteem mediates race-specific educational utility and grades was supported. (Contains four tables and four references.) (SLD)