"Acting white".
Darity, William, Jr.
Roland Fryer's research reported in the last issue of
Education Next ("Acting White," research, Winter 2006) uses a
large nationally representative data set and innovative statistical
methods to show convincingly that black students in racially integrated
public schools have fewer friends if they earn A's than if they
earn B's. He defines this finding as evidence of "acting
white." The findings are important, but they may or may not be due
to acting white (or the social dynamics surrounding the accusation) as
people usually define it. Last spring (after debating Fryer about his
definition), I included the following question on a survey to which
several thousand students across several school districts responded:
"At this school, people like me get accused of acting white."
Preliminary analysis shows patterns that are fascinating. It appears
that accusations of acting white really are a problem and could be part
of the explanation for Fryer's findings concerning popularity, but
the patterns are more nuanced than people might expect.
RONALD F. FERGUSON
Senior Research Associate
Harvard University
The notion that black students engage in academic self-sabotage
because of fear that they will be subjected to taunts from their
same-race peers, as Roland Fryer writes, is to attribute racial
inequality to black dysfunctionality. This is no different than the
perspective William Ryan years ago astutely labeled "blaming the
victim." Its propagation absolves the researcher and the
policymaker from looking at deep-seated structural and institutional
practices that perpetuate racial disparities.
Fryer's study treads gingerly on the victim-blaming field.
Constructively, his work indicates that to the extent that a burden of
acting white exists, it is not universal. He finds no evidence of such a
phenomenon, for instance, for black students in predominantly black high
schools. This is especially intriguing, since, in the original
construction of the claim, Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu professed to
have found the phenomenon of racialized harassment for black high
achievers in an all-black high school in Washington, D.C. However, if
one looks carefully at their 1986 Urban Review paper, none of the
student narratives they report makes any reference to a fear of being
accused of being a race traitor. Their respondents do express an
aversion to being called a "brainiac," but this is absolutely
no different from white high achievers not wanting to be called
"nerds" or "geeks."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
If popularity measures are indicators of the presence of a burden
of acting white, then Fryer's finding is no surprise to those of us
who have studied the subject. What is missing from his study, however,
is information about the racial composition of the most-advanced classes
offered by the schools in the Adolescent Health data. Research that
colleagues and I have conducted indicates that when a burden of acting
white develops, it occurs in a specific context, a school that is
desegregated at the facility level, but has a segregated curriculum due
to racialized tracking. The one or two black students who find their
ways into Advanced Placement or Honors classes may well be subjected to
racialized harassment from black peers who are outside of those
classes--classes that appear to be the property of white students.
School practices with respect to race and class assignment produce the
burden of acting white, not attitudes that black students hold
regardless of the type of school they attend.
What becomes critical is to understand the processes that lead to a
segregated curriculum or the exclusion of black students from AP and
Honors classes. Those processes find their origins in the
elementary-school years with the extreme underidentification of black
students for gifted and talented programs. Those are the processes
generating schooling inequality that merit far more attention than the
alleged burden of acting white.
WILLIAM DARITY JR.
Professor of Economics
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
