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Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:11:36 -0600
From: Vicki Washington <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: The 'Acting White' Myth
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Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 09:51:06 -0600
To: vicki Washington <[log in to unmask]>
From: Corliss Olson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Fwd: The 'Acting White' Myth
Hi Vicki,
I thought this was an interesting article, good information for
myth-debunking, & another awareness of how racism sneak in -- &
can be booted out.
Corliss
The 'Acting White'
Myth
By PAUL TOUGH
The New York Times
December 12, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12ACTING.html?oref=login
When Bill Cosby spoke out publicly in May against
dysfunction and irresponsibility in black families, he
identified one pervasive symptom: ''boys attacking
other boys because the boys are studying and they say,
'You're acting white.''' This idea isn't new; it was
first proposed formally in the mid-80's by John Ogbu, a
Nigerian professor of anthropology at the University of
California at Berkeley, and it has since become almost
a truism: when smart black kids try hard and do well,
they are picked on by their less successful peers for
''acting white.''
The only problem with this theory, according to a
research paper released in October, is that for the
most part, it isn't true. Karolyn Tyson, a sociologist
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
William Darity Jr., an economist at Duke and U.N.C.,
coordinated an 18-month ethnographic study at 11
schools in North Carolina. What they found was that
black students basically have the same attitudes about
achievement as their white counterparts do: they want
to succeed, understand that doing well in school has
important consequences in later life and feel better
about themselves the better they do.
So where does the idea of the burden of ''acting
white'' come from? One explanation the authors offer
will make sense to anyone who has ever seen a John
Hughes movie: there's an ''oppositional peer culture''
in every high school -- the stoners and the jocks
making fun of the nerds and the student-government
types. When white burnouts give wedgies to white A
students, the authors argue, it is seen as inevitable,
but when the same dynamic is observed among black
students, it is pathologized as a racial neurosis.
More insidiously, the authors say, the idea that
failing black kids pull down successful black kids can
be used as an excuse by administrators to conceal or
justify discrimination in the public-education system.
The one school where the researchers did find anxiety
about ''acting white'' was the one in which black
students were drastically underrepresented in the
gifted-and-talented classes. And significantly, at this
particular school, the notion of the burden of ''acting
white'' was most pervasive not among the black students
interviewed by the researchers, but among their
teachers and administrators, who told researchers that
blacks are ''averse to success'' and ''don't place a
high value on education.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
_______________________________________________________
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