The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and organized into 5-year periods for analysis. A random sample of 10% of the concordance lines was selected for coding for each 5-year period. Each concordance line was coded twice, once for semantic prosody and again for semantic role. Coding of the concordance lines showed that the semantic prosody was mostly negative. The most frequent semantic role was experiencer followed by agent. It was noted that with the semantic role of agent, the semantic prosody was frequently negative, thus reinforcing the strength of the semantic prosody. The results suggest that the representation of Black students in contemporary American English may contribute to negative perceptions of those who are ascribed the identity of Black students. One implication of this research is that we need to develop an awareness of language choices made in reference to Black students that reflect and reinforce perceptions. This awareness is a useful step in addressing the imbalance of power regarding Black students and how it is perpetuated and perceived through language choices. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]