Mary J. Blige would appear to share the ignorant worldview held by some of her contemporaries like Kanye West. I personally find it stunning when undeniably successful non-whites rail against the establishment for being racist. Huge crossover artists…

What is Acting White? What is Acting Black?

Exactly.

What needs to be pointed out, I think, is the study that the Blog Queen refers to, parses data in a way that contradicts the theory of McWhorter.

Here are some other “Acting White” articles and studies for consideration:

http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/spew4th.pl?ascribeid=20041004.082424&time=08%2036%20PDT&year=2004&public=1

The Burden of Acting White

brookings.nap.edu/books/0815746091/html/375.html

I was such a jerk.

Whats with black women getting so upset when a successful black man marries a white woman?

Not all black women, but alot of them.

I see this ALL the time, that black man gets pilloried.

Isnt that kinda the same thing?

I am interested in understanding what you mean when you say “the black community has lost so much of itself.”

It’s really sad that the black community has lost so much of itself that even achievement is subject to racial epithets.

What a great post; I never thought of it this way.

And communitarianism is a great word, and damn underused at that.

It is true that there is foolish compulsion to be a monolith, even if it means doing things that arent necessarily the best for each individual. I have seen this compulsion in many groups of people, and I feel it safe to say that having a sense of cultural cohesion is a good thing, but not if being culturally cohesive simply means bucking the “white” paradigm.

When doing well in school became a “white thing”, though, I am still confused about. I read “Losing the Race” and if I am not mistaken, this avoidance of scholastic achievement as a “white” phenomenon is actually a corollary effect of urban blacks trying to seperate culturally from white America – to find “authentic blackness.”

Authentically black can mean doing well in school, can it not?

Anyone here watch reality TV? I don’t, so I’m not really sure of this person’s name or what the show was about. (maybe some of you tv worshipers can fill in the details here.)

Anyway, flippin’ through the channels a while back I came across some reality show with Tyra Banks as the host. It had to do with models- top models? or be a super-model? Whatever.

Anyway, there was this one chick on there who had been “voted off” the show- or whatever the term is. She was talking about how she had come to understand why the judges were taken aback by her, and she accepted the fact that she “acted too white”

Apparently as a teenager she started her own fashion company, and her family was upper middle class. She was ambitious and didn’t grow up in the projects so apparently she was an “oreo”. (they actually used that term) And apparently she wasn’t black enough, even for Tyra. Because for some reason all of this cost her bonus brownie points.

Eh- maybe someone out there can fill in the details. I only saw fifteen minutes of the show as they were re-capping her time there.

Later another model, who was mix raced, was complaining because an all black model made inferences that she (the all black model) was the only black person in the group.

On Nov 7th I wrote about Primarily Black Male Schools In Chicago??? in which
The Chicago school district plans to open an all-boys high school primarily for black teenagers….