← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kminta
Thread ID: 18576 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-06-08
2005-06-08 04:38 | User Profile
[I]Oh boy, do I know what these kids are going through. Growing up in my Bronx, New York neighborhood and attending a predominately black/Hispanic high school, I often found myself the subject of ridicule and bullying from my peers, not for my good grades (I graduated with a 3.5 grade point average), but because I talked, conducted myself, and took interest in things that, where I grew up, branded me "white." You know what I mean by "white" -- respecting the rules of society, speaking correct English and grammar, reading Shakespeare instead of listening to crap music (Oh, I mean rap music), etc.[/I]
[B][URL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400126.html]The Price of Acting White[/URL][/B]
[I]By Richard Morin[/I]
Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page B05
[I]"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."[/I]
-- [B]Barack Obama, keynote speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention[/B]
It may be even worse than Obama imagined: It's not just black children who face ridicule and ostracism by their peers if they do well in school. The stigmatizing effects of "acting white" appear to be felt even more by Hispanics who get top grades.
At least that's the claim of Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and graduate student Paul Torelli, who have mined an unusually detailed data set on teenage students to study the relationship between performance and popularity in public and private schools.
As commonly understood, acting white is a pejorative term used to describe black students who engage in behaviors viewed as characteristic of whites, such as making good grades, reading books or having an interest in the fine arts.
The phenomenon is one reason some social thinkers give to help explain at least a portion of the persistent black-white achievement gap in school and in later life. Popularity-conscious young blacks, afraid of being seen as acting white, steer clear of behaviors that could pay dividends in the future, including doing well in school, Fryer said. At the same time, the desire to be popular pushes many whites to excel in the classroom, enhancing their future prospects.
Certainly that's what the data suggest is happening, Fryer said. Among white teens, Fryer and Torelli found that better grades equaled greater popularity, with straight-A students having far more same-race friends than those who were B students, who in turn had more friends than C or D students. But among blacks and especially Hispanics who attend public schools with a mix of racial and ethnic groups, that pattern was reversed: The best and brightest academically were significantly less popular than classmates of their race or ethnic group with lower grade point averages.
"For blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5 [a B+ average], then the slope turns negative," Fryer and Torelli wrote in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. A black student who's gotten all A's has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a straight-A white student. Among Hispanics, there is little change in popularity until a student's average rises above a C+, at which point it plummets. A Hispanic student with all A's is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has three fewer friends than a typical white student with a 4.0 grade point average.
Fryer and Torelli based their conclusions on a federally funded survey of 90,118 junior high and high school students in 175 schools in 80 communities nationwide during the 1994-95 school year. The resulting data set contained a wealth of information on each student, including the number of friends they had and who those friends were. To prevent an inflated tally, the researchers counted students as friends only if each listed the other as a friend.
The researchers used this data to construct a social status index based on the number of friends of the same race that a student had in the school, adjusted for the popularity of each friend. Thus, someone who had lots of unpopular pals was rated lower than someone whose shorter list of friends might include such typically sociable types as cheerleaders or the student body president.
Digging deeper, they found that their overall results did not change significantly when they examined all of a student's friends, regardless of race. High-achieving Hispanics and blacks also had fewer friends, even when there was a relative abundance of same-race friends with similar GPAs in their classes.
They also found that more blacks "acted white" in schools where less than 20 percent of the students were African American, while hardly any did in predominantly black schools or in private schools. "These findings suggest the achievement gap is not about cultural dysfunctionality," Fryer said, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, the phenomenon may be more prevalent among blacks living in the more affluent suburbs than among those living in the inner city. (There were no majority-Hispanic schools in the study.)
Why is "acting white" absent in mostly black schools?
That's easy, said Fryer, who is African American. He recalled his own experience growing up and attending predominantly black schools in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Dallas. "We didn't act white -- we didn't know what that was," he said, stressing that he prefers data to anecdote. "There were no white kids around."
2005-06-08 06:31 | User Profile
I really noticed this phenomenon when I was in the Navy way back when.
Most blacks only hung out with other blacks, except for a few who had white friends. You could either "hang white" or "hang black." You couldn't do both.
I was a wide-eyed farmboy from Wisconsin, and I really tried to make friends with blacks, but for the most part it didn't work. I remember one of my first days on an aircraft carrier I went to the galley for lunch and I got my chow and sat down at a table, not paying much attention to where I was. I had inadvertently sat down at the "black tabel" and in mid-bite I suddenly felt a dozen pair of black eyes staring at me. I looked around at them, and one of them smiled and said "some of these white boys is jus' crazy" and then as a man they stood up and walked off. Never did that again.
I did hang out with a couple blacks. One was a mulatto guy from someplace in the Midwest. He was pretty light skinned. He taught me how to play raquetball. Could always kick my ass, too. Real good guy.
Another was a darker skinned fellow from South Carolina. He was a devout Christian. We worked together in this little space, and got to know each other pretty well. His wife suffered from cycle cell anemia, which I understand ultimately took her life. Very sad. I liked him a great deal. I really did.
This guy was very aware of skin color gradients. He really noticed this, and would comment in private about which black guy had lighter skin than the others. Actually, looking back on it, the black officers were mostly mulattoes, or at least looking back on it now after 25 years that's my impression. But at the time I really had no idea that whole skin tone thing was going on, and knowing this guy was one of the components of my own racial awakening. (Spike Lee explored this in his film School Daze.)
Ygg calls it the "futility of racial mixing." We won't solve our racial problems through amalgamation - we'll succeed only in creating new races vying for the same closed set of goodies. Racial separation is the only way forward.
2005-06-08 22:22 | User Profile
You may be right, Walter. But the trouble with this "acting white" stigma given to black and Latino students who excel academically is that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. The black/Hispanic student who has the potential for academic success faces a choice between peer group acceptance and intellectual achievement. For me, I chose the latter. But most, out of an utterly human impulse, choose the former. Unfortunately, that's the downside of human nature -- the desire for group approval no matter the personal cost.
My advice to the black and Hispanic student who is experiencing the taunts and teasing of their peers simply for performing well in school and doing what's right -- don't give up! Carrying yourself properly and working hard in school does not make you a "sell out" or a race traitor. It makes you exceptional and an asset to the community. Take it from me. If seeking to better one's self academically, intellectually, and taking interest in non-black things makes you "white," so be it. What they call "acting white" I call just being yourself.
2005-06-09 04:38 | User Profile
Blacks made their best progress as a unified society during periods of the most intense segregation. A case in point is the 1920's. From the 1960's on, the only black people doing well has been the tiny high to medium IQ segment. The average black is far worse off socially than his grandpappy in the 1950's. Rates of illiteracy, bastardy and unemployment were much lower then. Blacks may have been poor, but they were a more cohesive and socially heathly national community.
2005-06-09 04:50 | User Profile
[QUOTE=kminta] My advice to the black and Hispanic student who is experiencing the taunts and teasing of their peers simply for performing well in school and doing what's right -- don't give up! Carrying yourself properly and working hard in school does not make you a "sell out" or a race traitor. It makes you exceptional and an asset to the community. Take it from me. If seeking to better one's self academically, intellectually, and taking interest in non-black things makes you "white," so be it. What they call "acting white" I call just being yourself.[/QUOTE]
As an intermediate step I think that vouchers would really help good students of all races, but especially black and brown kids. Vouchers would allow them to escape the moral swamp you describe.
Funny how the party that supposedly represents blacks hate vouchers.
At some point one would think that blacks would ask the question why their party fights tooth and nail for positions that hold them back.
2005-06-09 04:51 | User Profile
[QUOTE=CornCod]Blacks made their best progress as a unified society during periods of the most intense segregation. A case in point is the 1920's. From the 1960's on, the only black people doing well has been the tiny high to medium IQ segment. The average black is far worse off socially than his grandpappy in the 1950's. Rates of illiteracy, bastardy and unemployment were much lower then. Blacks may have been poor, but they were a more cohesive and socially heathly national community.[/QUOTE]
That's a good point.
Despite all its problems, strict segregation let blacks really express their astonishing talents. The artistic achievements of Harlem in that period are emblematic.
2005-06-09 17:14 | User Profile
I've often heard that argument, that Blacks were better off as a whole under segregation, but I wonder what kminta's take on it is, as a member of the high IQ segment?
Statistically, it's true, ref. the rates of social ills CornCod mentioned, but a climb in those rates (though not as dramatic a rise) has affected most other communities as well, so I don't see that desegregation was the sole cause of the problems. Rather, the get-out-of-criticism-free card of crying raciss! that accompanied desegregation made the Black population as a whole less prone to correcting social influences such as shame, peer pressure, etc.
2005-06-09 17:48 | User Profile
After desegregation, blacks began patronizing white-owned business and establishments to a very great extent, and many of the black-owned businesses in the black neighborhoods went out of business. In a way, segregation was a form of protectionism for black-owned businesses, which I think helped the black community.
2005-06-09 17:50 | User Profile
[QUOTE=MadScienceType] Statistically, it's true, ref. the rates of social ills CornCod mentioned, but a climb in those rates (though not as dramatic a rise) has affected most other communities as well, so I don't see that desegregation was the sole cause of the problems. Rather, the get-out-of-criticism-free card of crying raciss! that accompanied desegregation made the Black population as a whole less prone to correcting social influences such as shame, peer pressure, etc.[/QUOTE]
You hit the nail on the head, MST.
2005-06-09 18:07 | User Profile
The fact that blacks can have an all blacks clubs only but not whites rubs me the wrong way .