There is an idea among certain young blacks that if their black peers are focused on academic pursuits, excelling in school, and speaking proper English, they’re “acting” like white people, which is a bad thing.
I’ve blogged about the “acting white” theory a few times on this blog, and every time I do, I draw out the naysayers — black liberals who claim the phenomenon is not as widespread as it seems. Having been a black youth attending school with other black youth, I can attest to the existence of a strong and insidious “acting white” undercurrent flowing like putrid sludge.
Many have theorized that the acting-white syndrome plays a role in academic underachievement among black students. That’s only one reason, of course. There are others. Too many black kids live in unstable homes (a working or partying mother and no residential father, for example), and because of this instability and lack of structure, they tend to watch too much TV when, in my opinion, they shouldn’t be watching any at all. Another reason is the existence of skin color preferences, a disincentive to striving to be the best. Why make the grade when being black will get you into at least one of the schools of your choice?
Then there’s the legacy-of-slavery-and-racism excuse, an embarrassing relic of an idea that black people born in the 80s, over a century after slavery ended and 50 years after Jim Crow died, whose great-grandparents have never experienced a day of involuntary servitude in their lives, living in a country where you can own $200 sneakers, an iPod, a big-screen digital TV, air conditioning and other luxuries, and still be considered “poor.” Living in America has spoiled us all. But I digress.
I’ll digress a bit more. Flowing from black underachievement is the perceived need for skin color preferences once blacks graduate — sometimes whole grades behind their white peers — from high school. Academically unprepared students enter schools with much lower grades and standardized test scores, do poorly, sometimes graduating on time, well beyond four years, or dropping out altogether. It’s a vicious cycle that won’t stop until people are finally tired of being perceived as second-rate.
There have been numerous studies on this unfortunate and self-defeating phenomenon. Writer and linguist John McWhorter wrote a book about it called Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America where he theorizes that there’s something within the black sub-culture itself that fosters anti-intellectualism. Last year a couple of black professors argued that “acting white” has more to do with status group inequality. Translation: black kids underachieve because too few of them are represented in “harder” classes.
That’s poppycock. Black kids underachieve because, generally speaking, studying isn’t stressed and education isn’t highly valued, and I think these factors are sub-cultural. That’s the kind of bold statement that irks black liberals, who inexplicably continue to read a blog they claim to loathe. 
“Acting white” is in the news again. A black economist at Harvard named Roland G. Fryer has come out with a new study:
Roland G. Fryer found the acting-white stigma is most prevalent in racially mixed schools and most potent among black and Hispanic males. In many schools, he says, it could be a leading factor behind anemic test scores and poor graduation rates.
“If minority students today deliberately underachieve in order to avoid social sanctions,” he wrote in the fall issue of Education Next , a magazine published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, “that by itself could explain why the academic performance of 17-year-old African-Americans … has deteriorated since the late 1980s, even while that of 9-year-olds has been improving.” (Source)
Fryer claims that black kids, especially boys, perform better in same-sex and same-race schools. He even has the audacity to suggest, obliquely, that integration may not have been such a great idea after all. Read some of Fryer’s papers. (Removing legal barriers to attending a government school is a good thing; government forcing parents to send their kids across town to achieve “racial balance” ought to be criminal.)
I noticed the trend toward same-sex and same-race schools. I have no problem with these schools as long as they’re private and not supported with my taxes. In fact, I hope to see more entrepreneurs creating academically competitive same-race schools, especially if there’s strong evidence to suggest that black kids perform better when surrounded by their black peers and whites are not castigated as racists for creating similar schools.
Yeah, right.
