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News and Views: "Acting White"; Is It the Silent Killer of the Educational Aspirations of Inner-City Blacks?
Many young blacks believe that success in studies is not the proper province of a "real man." Is there a pervasive inner-city culture that ridicules black kids who "act white" when they do well in school? If so, is this responsible for the poor educational performance of inner-city black males? Or, is the acting white thesis just another " blame-the-victim" theory developed by mighty folks who rule over the funding of inner-city education and who are not prepared to take measures to rebuild and improve these dilapidated and often dangerous institutions?
One of the oldest traditions of Jim Crow was that when it turned out that American Negroes didn't recover quickly from servitude and legalized segregation, one blamed the victim. Today, the conservative and commonly accepted view is that a very large number of black students have only themselves to blame when they perform badly in school. One flaw in their character, it is said, is that they fear that if they persist in their studies they will he accused of "acting white." This theory as a responsible cause for the low levels of black male educational achievement was first advanced in a 1986 study of a Washington, D.C., high school conducted by Signithia Fordham, a black anthropologist at Rutgers University, and John U. Ogbu, a black anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley. This study found that many black students at the school avoided study and good grades because...