The price of acting white (for minority HS students)

[Lucky Luciano]

Any credibility to this? Sorry I posted the whole article because I saw this posted on another message board which did not provide a link to the article.
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The Price of Acting White

By Richard Morin

Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page B05

" Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."

-- Barack Obama, keynote speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention


It may be even worse than Obama imagined: It's not just black children who face ridicule and ostracism by their peers if they do well in school. The stigmatizing effects of "acting white" appear to be felt even more by Hispanics who get top grades.

At least that's the claim of Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and graduate student Paul Torelli, who have mined an unusually detailed data set on teenage students to study the relationship between performance and popularity in public and private schools.

As commonly understood, acting white is a pejorative term used to describe black students who engage in behaviors viewed as characteristic of whites, such as making good grades, reading books or having an interest in the fine arts.

The phenomenon is one reason some social thinkers give to help explain at least a portion of the persistent black-white achievement gap in school and in later life. Popularity-conscious young blacks, afraid of being seen as acting white, steer clear of behaviors that could pay dividends in the future, including doing well in school, Fryer said. At the same time, the desire to be popular pushes many whites to excel in the classroom, enhancing their future prospects.

Certainly that's what the data suggest is happening, Fryer said. Among white teens, Fryer and Torelli found that better grades equaled greater popularity, with straight-A students having far more same-race friends than those who were B students, who in turn had more friends than C or D students. But among blacks and especially Hispanics who attend public schools with a mix of racial and ethnic groups, that pattern was reversed: The best and brightest academically were significantly less popular than classmates of their race or ethnic group with lower grade point averages.

"For blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5 , then the slope turns negative," Fryer and Torelli wrote in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. A black student who's gotten all A's has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a straight-A white student. Among Hispanics, there is little change in popularity until a student's average rises above a C+, at which point it plummets. A Hispanic student with all A's is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has three fewer friends than a typical white student with a 4.0 grade point average.

Fryer and Torelli based their conclusions on a federally funded survey of 90,118 junior high and high school students in 175 schools in 80 communities nationwide during the 1994-95 school year. The resulting data set contained a wealth of information on each student, including the number of friends they had and who those friends were. To prevent an inflated tally, the researchers counted students as friends only if each listed the other as a friend.

The researchers used this data to construct a social status index based on the number of friends of the same race that a student had in the school, adjusted for the popularity of each friend. Thus, someone who had lots of unpopular pals was rated lower than someone whose shorter list of friends might include such typically sociable types as cheerleaders or the student body president.

Digging deeper, they found that their overall results did not change significantly when they examined all of a student's friends, regardless of race. High-achieving Hispanics and blacks also had fewer friends, even when there was a relative abundance of same-race friends with similar GPAs in their classes.

They also found that more blacks "acted white" in schools where less than 20 percent of the students were African American, while hardly any did in predominantly black schools or in private schools. "These findings suggest the achievement gap is not about cultural dysfunctionality," Fryer said, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, the phenomenon may be more prevalent among blacks living in the more affluent suburbs than among those living in the inner city. (There were no majority-Hispanic schools in the study.)

[Saynt]

1. You can't be serious...

... I mean, not to disregard your statement completely, but you're trying to tell me that us white nerds were supposed to have been more popular? I disagree sir.

But in fact, I agree with pretty much everything there. This is the sort of stuff Bill Cosby talks about. Something which is keeping good, smart kids in the shadows.

*edit* this white nerd spelled a word incorrectly :P

[Lucky Luciano]

2. haha...yes - the white nerd part stood out to me too, but was

really not the point of the article as you know.

[Broken_Hero]

3. Same with NA...

The same stigma effects the Native Americans also. Oh, i'm native by the way, Haida, from Southwest alaska, for all the naysayers...:) My wife who is half cherokee and I have been called apples (Red on the outside, white on the inside) for a long time. More so on her side, than on my side of the family. Its really disheartning, and plain dumb to think of being successful and a viable part of society to be a WHITE trait. I don't remember any or our native ancestors advocating laziness, or sloth? So why does the stigma of being successful, be slapped with a WHITE trait label?

I agree with most of the post, not sure of the popularity numbers and such, but i do agree with Barack on the you are acting WHITE thought. My wife and i have been labeled apples for a very long time, just because we graduated high school, and graduated from an all indian university in Lawrence Kansas, but to hell with them, they are still in there trailers back on the rez, but that is the thinking of the average indian these days, it seems, i'm not speaking for all of them, but a lot of the ones i deal with, and my inlaws hold true to that theme....

[newswolf56]

4. Actually this report gives reason for hope because...

...the data the study's authors have accumulated obliquely suggests this is a class-war phenomenon rather than a racial schism. Precisely the same phenomenon was observable 50 years ago in white or mostly-white high schools, especially where the predominant social classes were non-union blue-collar or lower-income shopkeeper-bourgeoisie. The sole exceptions were in New York City and other intellectual centers. In high schools everywhere else, an absolutely malevolent, vindictively enforced lockstep-conformity was the order of the day. The most despised kids in all such schools were thus invariably the "brains" (modern equivalents "nurds" or "geeks"), who were viciously preyed upon by the dominant cliques -- "socialites" (including jocks) and "hoods." Doing A-level schoolwork got you accused of "brown-nosing the teachers" and "sucking ass" -- with the result you'd be jeered with "suck" noises in the halls during class changes and constantly tormented whenever possible. What this behavior expressed in the 1950s was the ultimate hopelessness of the underclasses and even the lower-middle class: the reflexive belief, even then, that the socioeconomic ladder had already been cut off and was increasingly out of reach.

It is significant here to note that for many of the Eisenhower years -- I finished high school in 1958 -- the economy suffered from a combination of Republican tight-money policies and mild recession. There was also of course the generalized atmosphere of hysteria engendered by the constantly stoked fear of Soviet Communism. But the election of John Kennedy in 1960 brought about a period of renewed hopefulness and growing prosperity, and -- at least according to the people I know who attended high school during the early 1960s -- the high-school subcultures of the JFK/LBJ years were therefore much more accepting of academic achievement and bright or exceptionally bright students: in some instances even the students themselves reportedly encouraged it.

In other words, it appears the blacks and Hispanics are going through the same phase Caucasians in this country went through a half-century ago: ironically becoming in their own way as maliciously conformist as the society against which they are rebelling -- ultimately a form of (self-destructively) identifying with one's own oppressor. The fact that this behavior can be recognized as a class phenomenon (a matter of economics rather than anything indigenous to a given culture) means it can be combated by economic means -- that is, if blacks and Hispanics (or anyone else including Caucasians) ever again gain upward mobility in the neo-feudal New Order of the global economy. The racial-and-ethnic-identity elements make the "actin' white" behavior more difficult to ameliorate, to be sure, but (unless it is so manipulated by the Establishment) that behavior does not at all suggest the unbridgeable balkanization of America to which some commentators have attributed it. But I doubt there is anyone in or out of academia or anywhere else -- at least anyone with a public platform -- who dares address this for what it is: one of the characteristics of an exploited underclass in which economics -- not race or ethnicity -- is ultimately the causative factor.

As John Edwards says, we need a new War on Poverty. But the deficit inflicted on us by BushCo means such a crusade is impossible -- and will probably remain so for at least another 50 years. The global corporations rule, and their DemoPublican political vassals will render whatever service is necessary to tighten the grasp of the boardrooms' diverse tyrannies. Indeed, building a deficit so huge it would destroy all possibility for social services was Reagan's outspoken intent; now his vice-president's son has made it an absolute and inescapable reality.

[Lucky Luciano]

5. After reading your post I ahd to click on your profile

to see what it is you do. As I susepcted, some kind of professional writer!

Well done!

:toast:

[Karenina]

6. I was called an "oreo"

taunted, assaulted and finally transferred to a high school in the Big Apple. It is VERY MUCH a "class" thing in more ways than 17. ;-)