Cobb

Cobb, I have been blogging about this very concept non-stop ever since I've been blogging. The people who assert that [insert color here] is a way of Being have been drinking the cultural Kool-Aid for way too long. I've baptized this cultral notion and I've named it the "aesthetic disease". "Data" has nothing to do with it. Check it: http://www.skepdic.com/confirmbias.html

I haven't read the subject study either, but remember the "why you actin' so white" and "why you talkin' so white" questions I sometimes heard leveled at my friends in a Southern public High School. Both this experience (interracial public school) and yours (all-black and/or private schools) support what the study says regarding the prevalence of the term.

But experience also tells me that any smart kid in a public school (at least back when I was there) got grief from those with either lesser ability or ambition. God, how I hated "Movin' On" and "B. J. and the Bear" and all the kids who thought anyone with higher goals than the bare necessity to get their big-rig license just thought they were better than them. I think the "actin' white" accusations are probably mostly rooted in this same basic mistrust/envy of someone doing better. Basically, mediocrity loves company, even if you gotta drag someone down to get it.

The disturbing aspect to this particular taunt, though, is the implied assumption by the ones using it that "poor performance = blackness." I would imagine that successive generations of racial stereotypes and overt racism has helped establish this thought pattern, but I also think the easy identification of "black" and strong presence of "black culture" in a way allows those within to more easilly coopt various traits or aspects as a "black thing." This also includes the lower achievers to hold forth their standards as a matter of racial identification.

Fryer is a fin d'siecle Thomas Sowell - the only difference being that Fryer gets published in the peer-reviewed literature and Sowell only gets published in white-identity political rags..., both are ass-clowns of the first magnitude, unworthy of notice save for the fact that they're cooning at a more elevated stratum of public discourse than Jesse Lee Peterson.

All three are pernicious moths sorely deprived of nurturing interpersonal communion with black folks..., if only they'd stop taking those white-identity political $$$, you know, the $TD's, and actually do something, anything with organic utility for black folks..., but nah, you just gotta let a ho be a ho....,

There is an extended point to be made that part of this tension is found in other parts of America, as cultures more or less adapt and assimilate. It's different than, say, the Irish migration, but there should be lessons to adapt in it somewhere, right?

"Acting white" -- I'm too old, and too white, to really viscerally get inner city teen culture.

I agree that 16 years of education isn't for every body, and shouldn't be so advocated. But "college for all" is also code for "make a high school diploma worth something, cause it sure as hell isn't today."

California's high school exit exam may do (some of) the worth-something job. Kids are starting to brag about how early they can pass out of the exit exam. If you are really smart (and have good k-8 teaching) well-- you can probably pass most of it by the end of 10th grade. We will see.

But let's leave off high school and look at 3rd grade. Here's a quote:

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/cotcintro.htm

"More than any other subject or skill, our children’s futures are all but determined by how well they learn to read.

“No other skill taught in school and learned by school children is more important than reading. It is the gateway to all other knowledge. Teaching students to read by the end of third grade is the single most important task assigned to elementary schools. Those who learn to read with ease in the early grades have a foundation on which to build new knowledge. Those who do not are doomed to repeated cycles of frustration and failure."--American Federation of Teachers

So how are America's teachers doing?

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/cotcintro.htm

BELOW BASIC

African American
4th grade 60%
12th grade 46%

BELOW PROFICIENT

African American
4th grade 87%
12th grade 84%

So why isn't there a mass uprising yelling about the quality of teaching in k-3 for African-American kids?

That's where the "acting white" is falling down, not later in high school. High school is too late. The kids have missed too many years of learning from poor reading.

If we had the national will, we could eradicate this shame in a year. We could be graduating all kids at "basic" level in 3rd grade. There's a giant disconnect between what is known about teaching reading and what happens in the classroom.

I agree with subman and rage that this is not a problem worthy of dealing with. Fryer marginalizes it and I think rightly so. But let me take the opposite angle and try to illuminate what I think is real about class.

The African cat who studied black Americans in Shaker Heights and gave some scholarly cred to the 'acting white' theory was purposefully hitting the homes of upper middle class blacks. Now they may not be upper middle class in American terms, but certainly in black terms. Shaker Heights is good living. The point is that those parents, like I suspect many overachieving blacks, recognized that their competition wasn't quite as daunting as they imagined. Blackfolks (watch me generalize) percieve that The Man casts a longer shadow than he actually does. And climbing up out of the working class to the next plateau of American life can be disappointing. In that regard, people who have 'made it' relative to their starting point must recognize how much wealth and mainstreaming makes a difference.

If you never expected to fly first class in your life, when your kid flies, it must seem that they really don't need to work so hard as work smart. Book learning doesn't guarantee a thing.

I don't think this is a phenomenon which is restricted to blackfolks, just ask the jewish girl who wishes she was blonde. Nobody is likely to do this study on second-generation Armenian Americans. Nobody cares. This is the result of the fact that lots of blackfolks are academics and this is the kind of research we're interested in.

Let's see how far the political legs walk it. In the end, this is the answer folks like me wanted to hear - to the extent it's real, it's isolated in some highschools.

Liz I hear you, but nobody wants to talk about hillbillies Appalachian Americans until the subject turns to who deserves Affirmative Action. So I'm one of those people who is very suspicious of one dimensional statistics. You know and I know that the unstated baggage on 'African American' is inner-city, poor people whose parents have no college education. I'm tired of it not being stated.

Regarding the comment by cnulan, that is so typical of too many black people. No reasoned discussion, no rational rebuttal, just insults, accusations of being a tom, obscenities, and the white man did it all. We are responsible for nothing. Only the white man is responsible.

Craig's just not putting his best work here on Cobb, but I assure you he's got some very sophisticated, if not convoluted, reasoning behind his assertions.

I'm not mad at him, I just think he struggles mightily to give street credibility to his overwrought theories by siding with his vision of the oppressed and downtrodden. Blacks at Harvard need not apply.

You know that my vision of the oppressed and downtrodden is buttressed by routine interaction with the self-selected best and brightest of the same - these are after all my people. Being in and of the world of our chirrens all the time, I know very well whereof I speak.

Out of respect for the obligations of a guest in your house Cobb, I won't directly disparage any of your other guests, but I must say, you have your hands full keeping common ground with folks who don't know the difference between blackness and the media-fueled psychological garment called "blackness"...,

If "overwrought" is the chief flaw you've found to date with my theories, I'm very flattered indeed brah..., (:

Well, I grew up a smart white girl in a small town in Mississippi. I had a few friends, not many, and took a certain amount of flak for my good grades and general nerdiness (although I don't think we used that term then). I remember complaining to my mother of being lonely, and she told me that it was because in my small high school there weren't many people like me. College would be different. And it was, I made lots of friends there and felt very much at home. It's funny that high schoolers feel compelled to try to force each other into acceptable forms. Maybe it's harder for black kids to fight that don't-act-like-you're-better-than-me crap than for white kids, I don't know. Are black kids more monolithic in their group norms? Don't know.

Hey. The Vision Circle podcast on this is ready. Check it out here.