'Acting White' Remains a Barrier for Black Education
In the eighties, (black) anthropologist
John Ogbu with Signithia Fordham
argued that black kids under perform in school partly because those who behave scholarly are teased as being "white," such that often fitting in means letting one's grades slip. And indeed, legions of nerdy black kids are familiar with black peers saying "Why are you working so hard on that school stuff? You think you're white?"
However, the documentation of this has always rankled those who prefer to document black problems as due to institutional racism rather than cultural problems, and over the past ten years, it has become popular to claim that it has been "refuted" that black kids think of school as "white" and that this lowers black scholastic performance.
But the people taking that position have a way of serenely neglecting
counterarguments, not to mention embracing starkly shaky argumentation as authoritative simply because it makes what they regard as the better music. For example, one supposed piece of evidence that the "acting white" bit isn't a problem is that
if you ask black kids if they value school they say yes. But this is hardly the smackdown argument people suppose. Last time I checked, race and racial self-identification were a subtle business. Who's up for asking Donald Sterling whether he likes black people? Aren't these sociologists, educators and journalists such as Bouie exactly the people who would laugh out the room a study claiming that you can identify people's inner racism by asking them about it?
t's careful work that shows that indeed, black American teen identity often includes a sense of school as the province of whites—which is hardly surprising given black Americans' history in this country. Clifton Casteel did a study in Elementary School Guidance and Counseling in 1997 in which white eighth and ninth graders tended strongly to say they did homework for their parents, while black kids said they did homework for their teachers—that is, the black kids had a quiet sense that school was not for what "we" are at heart. Then, Harvard's
Roland Fryer has shown that among black teens, the better one does in school the fewer people report him or her as a friend—and to much more of an extent than among kids of other races.
The evidence continues. Newspaper coverage of the phenomenon has been rich. John Ogbu wrote a whole book squarely documenting black kids being told that doing well in school was white. After I wrote Losing the Race in 2000, I was surprised by thousands of letters, including over a hundred from black people explicitly attesting that they were teased as "white" for liking school, as well as from concerned teachers wondering what to do about black kids coming to them and telling them about this happening. I could go on, and on, and on (and have, elsewhere). The evidence is of crushing weight.
The "acting white is a myth" crowd see quite the weapon in, for example, Tyson, Darity and Castellino's finding that it's mostly in integrated schools that the "acting white" charge flares up. Their implication seems to be that because it isn't an issue among poor black kids, it basically isn't an issue at all. But whence suddenly the idea that only poor black kids' problems matter? Anyone can see that the reason poor black kids underachieve is lousy schools, not being called "white," but surely we aren't under the impression that there are so few middle class black students in 2014 that their problems qualify as mere static. That black kids suffer this in advantaged circumstances such as these is exactly why the "acting white" issue is a problem.
Meanwhile, another purported riposte to people like me is studies showing that problems like poverty, poor schools, and economic duress "disprove" that the acting white charge is significant. However, they do not—they merely show that the issue is multifaceted. The question is why a widespread brand of social rejection would not have an effect, and a serious one, on grades; people claiming "acting white" is a myth have no answer to that question.
You are fukking crazy if you believe that being called or labeled as acting white hasn't effected many a black student in an all black school setting.
