Race, the Achievement Gap and Acting White
Try as many have to deny the existence of the “acting white” phenomenon, evidence for it continues to pile up. Stuart Buck’s recent Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation puts the problem front and center. But, when the highly-regarded linguist, author, expert on race relations, and conservative think tank fellow John McWhorter writes about it in the very liberal/progressive The New Republic, you know all sorts of people are paying attention.
We’ve previously discussed Buck’s book here.
The late John Ogbu, the Nigerian-American anthropologist known for his work on race and ethnicity as they relate to educational and economic achievement, began his study of the achievement gap this way: “Basic premise: Some minorities experience a disproportionate amount of school failure. Why?”
The conclusions he drew from his study of low-achieving black students– that the “burden of ‘acting white’ was preventing them from putting forth effort in their school work”–caused quite a stir. That work was published in 1986.
McWhorter notes:
Ogbu (with Astrid Davis) published an ethnological survey of Shaker Heights, Ohio describing the “acting white” problem’s effects there in detail, while a documentary on race and education in that town explicitly showed black students attesting to it. Both book and documentary have largely been ignored by the usual suspects.
Roland Fryer, African-American professor of economists at Harvard, has found that “acting white” is an issue in only some schools:
My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools. It does not allow me to say whose fault this is, the studious youngster or others in his peer group. But I do find that the way schools are structured affects the incidence of the acting-white phenomenon. The evidence indicates that the social disease, whatever its cause, is most prevalent in racially integrated public schools. It’s less of a problem in the private sector and in predominantly black public schools.
Being a good student, Fryer finds, in not a disadvantage in private schools or in not-very-integrated schools:
I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.
McWhorter, an African-American, has written about the problem himself in Losing the Race:Self-Sabotage in Black America.
In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist.
Buck’s book, according to McWhorter, should finally put to rest the argument that there is no “acting white” problem. And it lays the groundwork for solving it.
Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the “acting white” charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people’s unusual social history in America—and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.
Once it becomes evident that the achievement gap between black and white students is a recent phenomenon, Buck says, then slavery and Jim Crow are no longer reasonable explanations for it.
As McWhorter notes:
Buck’s historical chronicle demonstrates that the “acting white” charge dates only as far back as the 1960s, which is much too recent to qualify as a demonstration of blacks’ intelligence level or as an indication that black American culture has been opposed to “book learning” for the four hundred years of its existence. I even sense from the testimonials I have received that if one particular year could be pegged as the time in which “You think you’re white making those grades?” “tipped” as a community commonplace, it would be 1966—perhaps because this was the year that “black power” ideology went mainstream in the black community. Buck pulls back the camera and documents how we got from Brown v. the Board of Education to “acting white” just twelve years later.
Buck, says McWhorter, describes the history of the problem this way:
Traditionally, anti-intellectualism was distributed in black American culture precisely the way it was distributed in general American culture, imputed partly to class and partly to individuality. During and after the Civil War, blacks were starved for education, and the idea that loving to learn was “white” was unknown.
After this, there was no achievement gap of note between blacks and whites. Unsurprisingly, blacks who went to under-funded backwater schools tended not to come out as learned citizens. But when conditions between blacks and whites were equal, there was no problem. Thomas Sowell has noted that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst admitted thirty-four blacks between 1892 and 1954, and seven (more than a quarter) were Phi Beta Kappas. Up through the 1950s and beyond, black public schools were often excellent, as fondly recalled today by older blacks perplexed at the “acting white” charge. The most famous example was Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., where, in 1899, students outscored all-white schools in standardized tests.
(Aside: Thomas Sowell– famed African-American economist, writer, conservative columnist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute– has written about the concept of social capital in his own work, an idea that seems to fit with what Ogbu has said about the importance of community and the cultural attitudes that lead to the problem of “acting white.”)
McWhorter continues:
It was the demise of segregation, of all things, that helped pave the way for the “acting white” charge. With the closing of black schools after desegregation orders, black students began going to school with white students in larger numbers than ever before. White students were often openly hostile, and white teachers only somewhat less so. Black teachers and administrators from the old black schools often lost their jobs. Unsurprisingly, black students started modeling themselves against white ones as a form of self-protection. This dovetailed nicely with the new open-ended wariness of whites that was the bedrock of “Black Power” identity.
As Buck rightly notes, humans seek group identity, and black teens passed on a sense that black identity did not include “white” scholarly achievement even as the old-fashioned bigotry receded. Hence the “acting white” charge now flung in plush schools like those in Shaker Heights, where racist hostility from whites is an affair of the past. Subtle interracial tensions surely exist—but students of other races cope with them without developing a sense that they are rejecting their heritage by making A’s.
Once the “acting white” problem is acknowledged, the next step is solving it. Proposed solutions seem to be at least as controversial as stating the problem has been.
It is crucial to note that Roland Fryer’s work, as well as some of the studies claiming that “acting white” charges do not matter, have shown that the problem is largely limited to precisely the integrated schools, where there are white students for black ones to define themselves against. And this leads to Buck’s second suggestion, which runs up against the deeply entrenched impulse to decry “segregation”—namely, the establishment of all-black schools.
Buck does not mean that the notoriously lousy all-black inner-city schools should be our model for success. But in the increasing numbers of all-black charter schools, as well as public ones turned around by dynamic principals, students calling one another “white” for liking schools is as unheard of as it was in the black schools of yesteryear. Our visceral recoil today at any conception of an all-black school as reminiscent of shabby one-room schoolhouses in the segregated Deep South must be discontinued.
It’s important to note, in a time when there is so much focus on large urban schools, that the situations studied by these researchers are found in suburban schools– like Shaker Heights– and schools where black kids are less than — by at least one account– 80% of the student body.
Megan McArdle at The Atlantic weighs in on all-black schools here.
John Ogbu’s Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, published in 2003, is reviewed here.
