The Price of Acting White
- From: IMJs@xxxxxxxxx (IMJ)
- Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 22:39:06 CST
The Price of Acting White
By Richard Morin
" 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 [a B+ average],
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.)
Why is "acting white" absent in mostly black schools? That's easy, said
Fryer, who is African American. He recalled his own experience growing
up and attending predominantly black schools in Daytona Beach, Fla., and
Dallas. "We didn't act white -- we didn't know what that was," he said,
stressing that he prefers data to anecdote. "There were no white kids
around."
Two Sociologists Enter a Bar. . . .
Who says the social sciences aren't good for a laugh? Certainly not your
Unconventional Wiz, who has dined out for more than a decade on
delicious bits of research that are smart and funny. Now comes "The
Sociologist's Book of Cartoons," published by the American Sociological
Association and on sale as part of its centennial celebration. It
features 86 cartoons, most of which were published in the New Yorker
magazine, including some as long ago as the 1920s and '30s.
The 'toons poke playful fun at social scientists and their
preoccupations. One panel evoked sociologists' professional fixation
with dating and mating. It featured a woman outside her door, saying to
her date: "I had a nice time, Steve. Would you like to come in, settle
down and raise a family?"
Another cartoon makes a distinction between sociologists, psychologists
and political scientists and those who do so- called "hard" science,
such as physicists, chemists and the like. "I'm a social scientist,
Michael," a father tells his young son. "That means I can't explain
electricity or anything like that, but if you ever want to know about
people, I'm your man."
A few others have little or nothing to do with the social sciences . . .
but they're funny, so who cares? The book opens with a wry introduction
by ASA President Troy Duster of New York University. He notes that the
ASA has always had a sense of humor. In fact, until 1959 it was known as
the American Sociological Society, or ASS. "While there were many good,
even compelling reasons for the name change, was there not some
self-humor lost?" Duster lamented.
Anonymous Approval
Contrary to perceptions in some quarters that the news media's
credibility is sinking like a stone, most Americans reject the claim
that journalists use anonymous sources too often, and a clear majority
trusts the media to report the news accurately and fairly, according to
a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. Nearly two in three said
reporters use unnamed sources in news stories either the right amount of
time or not often enough, while a third faulted journalists for using
anonymous sources too frequently.
Nearly six in 10 -- 58 percent -- also said they trusted the news media
to "fully, accurately, and fairly" report the news, compared with 44
percent in a similar question Gallup asked in a poll conducted last
September during the controversy that followed a "60 Minutes" report by
then CBS anchorman Dan Rather about President Bush's National Guard
service.
A total of 1,003 randomly selected adults were interviewed last month
for the Post-ABC survey.
.
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