What is acting white

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New York: Academic Press. Minority education in a comparative perspective. Journal of Negro Education , 59 1 , Pearson, H. The Black academic environment. Wall Street Journal , p. Spencer, M. Old issues and new theorizing about African American Youth: A phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory. It is larger for blacks in public schools, but nonexistent for blacks in private schools, "a finding that may partially explain why black kids in private schools do especially well. Blacks in more segregated schools "incur less of a tradeoff between popularity and achievement.

The authors find that two of the most common explanations for black underachievement -- that white society holds talented blacks back so much that they develop coping devices that limit their striving for academic success, and that blacks sabotage their high achieving peers -- fail to explain the fact that academically excellent students of all races retain their popularity at segregated and private schools. Fryer and Torelli conclude that the patterns in their data accord best with a model in which investments in education are thought to be indicative of an individual's opportunity costs of peer group loyalty.

NBER periodicals and newsletters are not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely with appropriate attribution. More in this issue. The Digest: No. Share Twitter LinkedIn Email. You've probably heard it before: Too many black students don't do well in school because they think being smart means "acting white. At best, it's a very creative interpretation of inadequate research and anecdotal evidence.

At worst, it's a messy attempt to transform the near-universal stigma attached to adolescent nerdiness into an indictment of black culture, while often ignoring the systemic inequality that contributes to the country's racial achievement gap. John Ogbu , an anthropology professor at the University of California Berkeley, introduced it in an ethnographic study of one Washington, DC, high school.

He found what he dubbed an "oppositional culture" in which, he said, students saw academic achievement as "white. The acting white theory has since become a go-to explanation for the achievement gap between African-American students and their white peers, and is repeated in public conversations as if it's a fact of life.

Even President Barack Obama said in , when he was running for US Senate, " Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. Perhaps aware of some of the research debunking this as an academic theory in the intervening years, he noted in remarks related to the My Brother's Keeper program that it was "sometimes overstated. Or why are you speaking so properly? It's no surprise that the "acting white" narrative resonates with a lot of people.

After all, it echoes legitimate frustrations with a society that too often presents a narrow, stereotypical image of what it means to be black. It validates the experiences of African-American adults who remember being treated like they were different, or being smart but not popular in school. And for those who are sincerely interested in improving educational equality, it promises a quick fix. The "acting white" theory also validates a particular social conservative worldview by placing the blame for disparate academic outcomes squarely on the backward ideas of black children and black cultural pathology, instead of on harder-to-tackle factors like socioeconomic inequality, implicit racial bias on the part of teachers, segregated and underresourced schools, and the school discipline disparities that create what's been called the school-to-prison pipeline.

Despite abundant personal anecdotes by African Americans who say they were good students in school and were accused of acting white, there's no research that explicitly supports a relationship between race, beliefs about "acting white," social stigma, and academic outcomes.

Even those who claim to have found evidence of the theory, Toldson explained , failed to connect the dots between what students deem "white" and the effect of this belief on academic achievement.

A prime example of a shaky study on this topic, according to Toldson, was Harvard economist Roland G. But the numbers didn't actually add up to support the "acting white" theory, Toldson said. To start, the most popular black students in his study were the ones with 3. The least popular students? Those with less than a 2. It seemed that the "social price" paid by the lowest-achieving black students was actually far greater than the price in popularity paid by the highest academic achievers.

Something else that has to go too, though: the idea that any black student is only being properly served if white kids are studying next to him. That misimpression, fostered by the school-integration movement, has yielded a disturbing by-product: a harmful psychological association between scholastic achievement and whiteness.

Read: How Brown v. Many black students placed in previously all-white schools encountered white teachers either overtly or covertly hostile to their presence, at best thinking of them as hopeless prospects for success.

Many of the white students, while hardly as starkly belligerent toward them as the sneering kids in photographs of Little Rock Central High School, were distinctly unwelcoming to the new black kids in countless ways. This will surprise few of us today, and it was hardly limited to the South: Recall the famous shot of the angry white woman at the meeting on busing in Boston. That kind of rejection can make a person disidentify from a whole environment, and one result was a sense that school was for white kids, something outside of the authentic black experience.

Over time, open white resistance to black kids in these schools receded as attitudes on race changed. But this is how cultural memes can work. A meme can be especially tenacious when it is useful for other purposes.