> This started with the familiar refrain of the guy who has stayed off
> welfare despite the slings and arrows of Polack joke-tellers calling
> someone out for parroting what he considers received
> hand-wringing-left wisdom.
>
> Funny how it turns out "acting white" is not only the very definition
> of received wisdom but that it comes from all directions.
*snork* here's the snippet from Michael Eric Dyson's book, Is Bill Cosby Right?, where he lays out the history of the emergence of the idea that "acting white" is a put down used among blacks, to the research generated to test whether it had any legs. Turns out that a study of 25000 students, another of 11 or so high schools, reveals: zippo in terms of serious evidence. I'd note also that he has some prelude passages about anti-intellectualism in American life and brings up Hofstatder for a couple of pages. Doug's comments on Hof intrigue and given I haven't read the book in question since high school wondered if anyone was interested in a group reading. Anyway, from Dyson's book. excuse typhos. I'm at work and in a hurry.
"The notion that black youth who are smart and who study hard are accused by their black peers of "acting white" is rooted in a single 1986 study of a Washington, D.C., high school conducted by Signithia Fordham, and black antrhopolotist at Rutgers University, and John Ogbu, the late Nigerian professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkley. According to Fordham and Ogbu, many black students at the school didn't study and deliberately got bad grades because their classmates thought they were "selling out" and "acting white." Fordham and Ogbu's study has gained iconic status in the anecdotage not only of Cosby but of figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ini the pages of the New York Times and Barack Obama in his thrilling keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.
the trouble with such citations is that they help circulate and give legitimacy to a theory that is in large part untrue. First, in 1997, Duke professor Philip J. cook and Georgetown professor Jens Ludwig set out to determine, through field research, if the alleged grief visited upon those black students who study actually existed. While Fordham and Ogbu studied one school, cook and Ludwig studies 25,000 public and private school students, following them from eight grade through high school.. Cook and Ludwig concluded that black students were just as eager to excel in school as whites and that black students, and that black students dropped out of school only slightly more than white students, largely due to low family incomes or absent fathers. Cook and Ludwig discovered that blacks and whites with similar family characteristics cut class, missed school, and completed homework at nearly the same rate.
Cook and Ludwig uncovered an intriguing fact: that the black students who were members of academic honor societies were *more* likely than other black students to view themselves as "popular." Further, they found that students who belonged to honor societies in predominantly black school were more popular than their peers who had not received such an honor. cook and Ludwig concluded that there was little evidence to support the notion of an oppositional peer culture to black academic achievement. In fact, other studies suggest that the parents of black students are more likely than white or Asian parents to have assisted their children with their homework or met with their children's teachers, and just as likely to encourage them to put forth their best effort in school. Black parents are more likely than white parents to place their children in educational camps, attend PTA meetings, check their children's homework and reward their children for academic success. Moreover, while only 6 percent of white students in grades 6 through 12 reported discussing national news events with a parent on a daily basis, 26 percent of black students in comparable grades reported that they did so. And there is evidence that high school black peer groups were more likely than comparable white peer groups to believe that it is important to study hard and get good grades, leading to the conclusion that white, not black, academic peer culture opposes academic achievement.
More recently, Univ. of N. Carolin pros Karolyn Tyson, a sociologist, and William Darity, Jr., and economist coordinated an 18 month ethnographic study of elven schools in North Carolina and concluded that black and white students are fundamentally the same when it comes to the desire to succeed., knowing that doing well in school can positively impact later life, and feeling good about themselves when they do well. They also concluded that when anti-intellectual activity occurs in white culture, "it is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as racial neurosis." the authors also argue that the single case where they found any evidence of the anxiety of "acting white" occurred at a school where there was an overrepresentation of whites in gifted-and-talented classes and a drastic underrepresantation of black students. But the anxiety occurred most freqqently not among the students, but among the teachers and administrators, who accused the black students of being "averse to success" and placing a low value on education, underscoring how racial hierarchy and the social mythology of low black academic desire collude to deprive black student s of an equal education.