Posted by
The Dutchmeister on Sunday, July 23, 2006 10:45:26 AM
"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that 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."
- Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004
By know, everyone is familiar with what acting white means. It basically describes minority adolescent students who get good grades as being shunned by their peers. It also means that such academically conscientious minority students are considerably less popular than white adolescent students who do well academically.
This is the conclusion of
research done by Harvard economist and research fellow
Roland G. Fryer. Writing in an
article for
Education Next, Fryer acknowledges the pervasiveness of the "acting white" stigma:
"My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools... 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."
Fryer begins by looking at prevailing research on how negative peer pressure adversely affects black (and Hispanic) academic achievement. He examines the "
oppositional culture" thesis of the late John Ogbu and Sinithia Fordham, as well as the work of
John McWhorter dealing with
anti-intellectualism as a form of black cultural self-sabotage. The author also looks at studies that claim to show that anti-intellectualism is no more severe a problem among black and Hispanic youth than it is among whites, but points out that these latter studies depend solely on self-reported (and, thus, far more subjective) measures of personal popularity. "Unfortunately," Fryer says, "when students are asked to judge their own popularity, they can be expected to provide a rosier scenario than is warranted."
Fryer then goes on to describe his own research metholody in examine the "acting white" stigma among students. He poses the following questions:
- Do high-achieving black and Hispanic students have fewer, less-popular friends than their lower-achieving peers?
- How does this compare with the experience of white students?
The results of his research confirm pervasiveness of the problem.
"At low GPAs, there is little difference among ethnic groups in the relationship between grades and popularity, and high-achieving blacks are actually more popular within their ethnic group than high-achieving whites are within theirs. But when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA (an even mix of Bs and Cs), clear differences start to emerge.
As grades improve beyond this level, Hispanic students lose popularity at an alarming rate. Although African Americans with GPAs as high as 3.5 continue to have more friends than those with lower grades, the rate of increase is no longer as great as among white students.
The experience of black and white students diverges as GPAs climb above 3.5. As the GPAs of black students increase beyond this level, they tend to have fewer and fewer friends. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer friends of the same ethnicity than a white student with the same GPA. Put differently, a black student with straight As is no more popular than a black student with a 2.9 GPA, but high-achieving whites are at the top of the popularity pyramid.
My findings with respect to Hispanics are even more discouraging. A Hispanic student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and Hispanic-white differences among high achievers are the most extreme.
The social costs of a high GPA are most pronounced for adolescent males. Popularity begins to decrease at lower GPAs for young black men than young black women (3.25 GPA compared with a 3.5), and the rate at which males lose friends after this point is far greater. As a result, black male high achievers have notably fewer friends than do female ones. I observe a similar pattern among Hispanics, with males beginning to lose friends at lower GPAs and at a faster clip, though the male-female differences are not statistically significant... Indeed, when minority students reach the very highest levels of academic performance, even the number of cross-ethnic friendships declines. Black and Hispanic students with a GPA above 3.5 actually have fewer cross-ethnic friendships than those with lower grades, a finding that seems particularly troubling."
Fryer also shows that, for black and Hispanic students, the adverse effect of good grades on popularity disappears in private schools, and that, surprisingly, white private school students with the highest grades were less popular than their low-achieving counterparts. He shows, further, that the adverse correlation between academic achievement and social popularity is twice as pronounced is more racially integrated schools.
"Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark, with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!
This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line."
Why is the "acting white" stigma a bigger problem in more racially integrated schools? Fryer attempts to answer this question by discussing anthrological research in group dynamics:
"Anthropologists have long observed that social groups seek to preserve their identity, an activity that accelerates when threats to internal cohesion intensify. Within a group, the more successful individuals can be expected to enhance the power and cohesion of the group as long as their loyalty is not in question. But if the group risks losing its most successful members to outsiders, then the group will seek to prevent the outflow. Cohesive yet threatened groups—the Amish, for example—are known for limiting their children’s education for fear that too much contact with the outside world risks the community’s survival.
In an achievement-based society where two groups, for historical reasons, achieve at noticeably different levels, the group with lower achievement levels is at risk of losing its most successful members, especially in situations where successful individuals have opportunities to establish contacts with outsiders. Over the long run, the group faces the danger that its most successful members will no longer identify with its interests, and group identity will itself erode. To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group. The penalties are likely to increase whenever the threats to group cohesion intensify.
Applying this model of behavior to minority and white students yields two important predictions: A positive relationship between academic achievement and peer-group acceptance (popularity) will erode and turn negative, whenever the group as a whole has lower levels of achievement. And that erosion will be exacerbated in contexts that foster more interethnic contact. This, of course, is exactly what I found with regard to acting white.
Understanding acting white in this way places the concept within a broader conceptual framework that transcends specific cultural contexts and lifts the topic beyond pointless ideological exchanges. There is necessarily a trade-off between doing well and rejection by your peers when you come from a traditionally low-achieving group, especially when that group comes into contact with more outsiders."
The author favors this anthropological explanation more so than the theories of Ogbu/Fordham and McWhorter:
"However plausible it sounds, the oppositional culture theory cannot explain why the acting-white problem is greatest in integrated settings. If Fordham and Ogbu were correct, the social sanctions for acting white should be most severe in places like the segregated school, where opportunities are most limited. The results of my studies, of course, point in precisely the opposite direction.
The notion that acting white is simply attributable to self-sabotage is even less persuasive. According to its proponents, black and Hispanic cultures are dysfunctional, punishing successful members of their group rather than rewarding their success. That theory is more a judgment than an explanation. A universal, it cannot explain the kinds of variations from one school setting to another that are so apparent in the data I have explored."
What does the Dutchmeister think?
Roland Fryer's work is a welcomed contribution to the burgeoning research into the adverse relationship between high academic achievement and social popularity in explaining the "acting white" stigma. However, I do not agree with his criticism of McWhorter's thesis as being "more of a judgement than an explanation," and not being able to "explain the kinds of variations from one school setting to another that are so apparent in the data I have explored."
First, based on studying his work and my own observations and experiences, I believe that McWhorter's work is indeed an accurate explanation of the problem. In addition to studying Ogbu's work, McWhorter repeatedly noticed a distinctive and pervasive anti-intellectual attitude among middle- and upper-middle class black students while teaching at Berkeley. As much as he tried not to "stereotype" them and despite his efforts to attribute it to other factors, he kept noticing the same cultural aversion toward the scholarly over and over again. Many of the black students he taught at Berkeley felt (and a few even openly expressed) that being zealous about learning for learning's sake made one less "authentically black," as he quotes a black female junior commenting in 1998 on the minority freshman class post-Prop 209:
"We are concerned that black students who achieve at such a high level [i.e. whose academic credentials were so impressive that they gained admission to Berkeley without affirmative action] are not going to be concerned with fostering an authentic African-American presence at Berkeley."
This young lady's attitude about high-achieving black students as basically being "not really black" is one of the most negative, dysfunctional and self-defeating aspects of modern black American culture, and transcends class. McWhorter is not "judging" blacks; he is simply stating a very hard-to-swallow fact of black life. I myself experienced this anti-intellectual attitude throughout K-12, high school, and graduate school.
In any event, Fryer's conclusion as to what needs to be done is instructive:
"As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high. To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end."