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State of the Discourse
Angel Harris, Kids Don't Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 336 pages, ISBN 978-0-674-05772-2. Hardcover, $35.00.
Karolyn Tyson, Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White After Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 240 pages, ISBN 978-0-199-73645-4. Paper, $24.95.
Some of the more influential research on race and education published in the last few decades comes from the work of John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham (Fordham 1988; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu 1978, 1987, 1991, 2003). In Ogbu's writing about the oppositional culture hypothesis, he argued that Black students frame their relationship to schooling through the lens of their historic marginalization in the United States. Out of their understanding of their systematic disenfranchisement, Ogbu suggested that "they not only generate theories [that] contradict dominant notions of status attainment and produce disillusionment about the instrumental value of school; but develop substantial distrust for school and its agents which then suppresses commitment to school norms" (Lewis et al., 2008, p. 259). Together, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) expanded on these ideas in their article on the "acting White" hypothesis suggesting that students not only disengage from school themselves, they also put pressure on their Black peers not to work hard in school lest they be accused of "acting White." Together these two interconnected theories have gained substantial notoriety and have become part of the general commonsense about why Black students are not doing better in school--"the problem," it is believed, is the academic disengagement or "oppositional culture" of African American students.
In fact, since these ideas were first published, the "acting White" hypothesis and the related oppositional culture argument have captured scholarly and popular imagination in discussions of educational achievement (Carter 2005; Farkas et al., 2002; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Fryer and Torelli, 2010; Horvat and Lewis, 2003; Ogbu 2003; Tyson et al., 2005). The idea that Black students underperform in school because their peers discourage them from achieving has taken on a life of its own as arguably the most popular explanation for Black-White achievement gaps (O'Connor et al., 2006). At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, as part of his "coming out"...