washingtonpost.com
The Price of Acting White

By Richard Morin
Post
Sunday, June 5, 2005; 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.)

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.

morinr@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
---
http://melanism.com

"i'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just gonna ask where they're going and hook up with them later"
Mitch Hedberg (R.I.P)

R U My Friend:
http://www.myspace.com/722546

>
>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."


Nobody ever told me I was acting white b/c I got good grades. I was just "smart."

school...I wanna say that I didn't get that either but being smart wasn't too good either.

niggas never made fun of me for being getting good grades or being smart.

As long as you a cool dude, niggas respect you for being smart.

But like the article said, this doesn't really exist in predominately Black schools.

I went to a predominantly white school and I did fairly well. I had a lot of black friends from other high schools. There were black kids that automaticlly assumed that I "acted white" when I told them what school I went to. Some of the girls wouldn't talk to me for the same reason.

At the same time, there were also black kidss that gave me props and supported me when I did well.

I think you'll get a little bit of everything from everybody. But that accusation of "acting white" is real and powerful.

Peace,

*** MARBLES ***

The overwhelming majority don't. So why is a minority issue painted as the prevalent idea that needs to be addressed in terms of Black issues in secondary education? Is it because of class issues?

cause it was the "cool" thing to be dumb...

>Nobody ever told me I was acting white b/c I got good grades.
>I was just "smart."

And the study's skewed because, if you have "lots" of "unpopular" friends, then you're not "popular." But if you have a solid & supportive social network, how salient is "popularity"?

it was no "popularity" unless you created that in your mind (hating)
everybody had they lil' group of friends

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

if you had your crew, who cared about football players or cheerleaders or shit like that? i knew ONE girl who was pressed on that shit, and she became a cheerleader and was on the homecoming court. of course, since i dated her, does that mean i was "popular"? LOL

High school kids do a lot of crazy things in the name of popularity. A kid with a solid support system may still suffer in school or among his/her peers due to the teenage phenomenon of popularity.

Peace,

*** MARBLES ***

and "popularity" just wasn't important in my ghetto high school. it might've mattered to the cheerleaders, but ain't nobody else really give a fuck. everybody had their own set of friends and social circles they ran in.

Id argue that its MUCH less of an issue in poor schools just because they have other fish to fry(overcrowding, etc).

But there are still sliding scales of popularity

...and most black schools in this country are poor, which they are, then how salient is this study anyway? i mean, certainly, the basketball team, and certain of the football players, were popular, as were certain of the hustlers, but i just don't see where it was hyper-important to folks. but as i said, i was a nerd, but dated a cheerleader, so maybe my POV is skewed.

all the schools I went to, popularity was paramount...



www.port-morgan.com
www.madeinmtl.com
www.darfurinfo.org

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

white?

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

that reply didn't even follow to what you said....

i've ever seen.

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

Clearly, black and white kids do not see nerds the same way. If black kids think of black nerds as acting white, then who do white kids think of white nerds then?

but i'm clearly disagreeing with people saying that black kids equate intelligence with whiteness. for the most part they equate stooshness with that.

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

as you knew what I was talking about. Now that you've clarified what you meant, I know what you're talking about.

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

>that reply didn't even follow to what you said....

naaawl, it just went over ya'll head.

Out of the schools I went to, usually its a 50/50 split between nerds and popular kids for the top spots as far as grades are concerned.

my point was the kids that got made fun of
there prolly was a reason behind it (like hey maybe they really did act white? it happens)
i don't remember anybody ever making fun of people for getting good grades
the people who REALLY could give a fuck about school...weren't there
everyone else cared atleast a LIL bit. if not them somebody at home


http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

i mean, while I still thinking teh whoel acting white thing is overblown, I do believe being "cool" is more important to black people than it is to whites...



www.port-morgan.com
www.madeinmtl.com
www.darfurinfo.org

the only fucked up thing is
white people can get by on that mentality
we can't

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

>the only fucked up thing is
>white people can get by on that mentality
>we can't

co-sign.

.

believe being smart is acting white. Grades don't dictate who is smart but that is a entire different subject. This is another prime example of how useless the media is especially for black people because children just don't pull this shit out their ass they get it from television.

the predominant culture, or, to large extent, in our own culture. kids therefore don't see this as something to identify with or aspire to. but there's a jillion examples (via mass media which commoditizes our culture) of black folks who get over and get paid by getting sweaty on a court or field of some sort, or who get paid for being hustlas (either the real ones on the block, or the faux ones in recording booths).

so even having a similar anti-intellectual bent as the general society, the impact is not the same for us, because we lack the norming view of general society.

those of us who are successful probably look beyond the mass media for validation.





peace & blessings,

x.

"I'm on the Zoloft to keep from killing y'all." - Iron Mike

"But I'm just saying, thats my blanket policy as a grown ass adult." - Crucian1


my philosophy on free time:

"and next time when he get it he'll waste it on somethin'

in john mcwhorter's losing the race deals with this.

is it just me or is the report very scant on the analysis?

i may be back later with a longer reply.

and mcwhorter's book was long on personal anecdotes and extrapolation from that, and extremely short on any real analysis. in other words, it was a crock, and who puts any stock in that fool?

his general ideas.

I went to school in ghana and still got into trouble for being one of the nerdiest guys in my class. Plus I went to college with a whole bunch of white kids who were never popular in high school. If you're smart and don't have the social skills to balance it out you will catch hell. Period.

$ociologik
________________________________________________________________________

OKFreeAgent™ : Perfecting the Fine Art of Non-Conformity

My elementary school was pretty diverse, and a lot of the time I was accused of "acting white" or "talking white" by some of my friends that weren't on the honors track. The kids in my classes never really seemed to have issue with the way I was.

My high school, on the other hand, was nearly 90% black, though the bulk of my close friends weren't (and still aren't). I think by that point, most people just assumed that I wasn't going to try to fit the stereotypical mold, and people just accepted me as I was. I wasn't what one would conventionally call popular, but because I was so involved in a lot of groups in the school, people knew who I was, and I rarely got shit from anyone.

http://www.aidsmarathon.com/participant.asp?runner=CH-3006&EventCode=HN05

I kinda get where they were going tho

if you weren't corny, you were just 'the smart boy'

the few times i heard the term, it was when i
went to mixed schools.

environment?


http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

i mean,when i went to school in Haiti, nobody was ostracized for being smart...actually, it was something people strived for.
I would assume it would be the same in a predominently black school

i guess when you're around white people
its easier to pick up the "black people are dumb" mentality

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

not onlly by the faculty, but by
nood cats i grew up with.

BUT i think the fact that they KNEW
me and i went out of my way to be
cool with them, insulated me
from whatever venom they might
have spit.

also, i had cool cousins and whatnot.

if i had been a total cornball or something,
it might have been different.
----------------------------------
The epitome of man’s sinfulness is trying to be like God, without God (Isaiah 14:14)

basically, i had my own lil church crew, and didn't really study most folks. i was the smartest kid in school, etc, and i think cats that didn't know me DID have the impression that i was something other, cuz i dressed preppy, won spelling bees, etc -- basically was just different.

my junior year, silkk da shocker's second album came out, and i had to review it for the school paper. well, that shit was GOOD, and i gave it a glowing review. cats seriously came up to me in the hallway after that like, yea man, that silkk is tight, i'm glad you gave it a good review. i think that gave me more cred during my years in HS than anything else i ever did.

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

inter-racial schools, there is more
of a sense of seperating us. black
kids that are put in the ap classes
associate with more white kdis by
default. the other black kids
may feel 'LEFT BEHIND' especially
if 'smart black kids'

- sound, act, and socialize like
the white kids they've been suddenly
exposed to

~ the teachers deal with the LEFT
BEHIND black kids differently than
they do with the 'smart' black kdis

kids notice those type things.
----------------------------------
The epitome of man’s sinfulness is trying to be like God, without God (Isaiah 14:14)

when i was put into honors classes in a mixed school i had less access to Black students in the course of a school day.

http://bkbrickhouse.blogspot.com
last updated 051505

"sis...there is a cabal of dem bitches on this board,
one of dem fassys flashes the 'gaybatsignal'
and you can hear the chi-chi dem ostrich stampeding towards your post...

Bomberclart, what ah ting.

the study's findings. (i graduated in 1994, the study started the year after)

in my 1st yr of high school i rolled w/the popular Black kids and i had a 2.7ish GPA. at the beginning my sophomore yr i was still rolling w/them, but by the end of the yr we'd grown apart a bit. my GPA was higher, i was in advanced classes, and i was participating in theater...i can't attribute the change in my popularity w/Black kids to my grades alone. by junior yr i'd slipped in popularity w/the cool Black kids, i was in w/the nerdy Black kids & the theater geeks, i was taking college-level honors classes, and i had a 4.0. in senior yr my GPA was 4.5 or so and i was eating lunch in the library w/a couple other known but not exactly popular Black kids so we could do our homework. LOL

wow.

at the reunion in October everything was the same too.

...I went to a "diverse" school, and my grades plummeted (from straight A's to C's, D's, F's). There were many other variables (self-esteem, family ish, etc) but one of the de-motivators was my want to not stick out or be made fun of...cuz I didn't fit in w/ the white kids, but I didn't fit in w/ the blacks either.

I attended a predom-Black high school and my experience was completely different. I mean, I was a lame...but not because I got good marks or was into the arts (which I was)-actually those things saved what little status i had...more for "traditional" reasons (lack of fashion sense or the means to achieve it, strict parenting, no social skills, questionable attractiveness). I had a well-rounded academic experience, played sports, dated and had a variety of friends across socio-economic (if not cultural) lines. Also, most the "popular" kids were in the honors classes, and made more of a point of making fun of blatent stupidity over most other things...

Now Ivy League...that was a whole other plate of yams...that could warrant some interesting studies.

The white man is very clever…We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart-Obierika

i keed, i keed. some of my bestest friends are sociologists.

all jokes aside, it seems like this is what happens when researchers oversimplify or mis-appropriate "common" knowledge. sometimes the things folk commonly say don't translate well when taken as a form of empirical measurement. i can imagine some conservative reader of the washington post concluding that black and latino communities need only embrace achievement like "d. whiteman" has done and all of our woes will cease. i mean, the "acting white" thing is no new phenomenon. as most of the responses to this post show, a lot of us have heard of the phrase. but, as the responses also show, that doesn't mean that all of us (black and latino folk) have been plagued by taunts of "acting white" either. not everybody who has high scholastic achievement, or low scholastic achievement for that matter, is dogged by the fear of acting white. this is not to discount the study, but to contextualize it. i'm sure that this "new" observation the harvard researchers have made will be considered by educational policy folk, or at least by the general public (whomever they may be). and i'm sure that this "acting white" thing can lead some of them off into a tangent, into believing that the causes of black and latino academic underachievement have more to do with some abstract fear of "acting white" than with the continued political, social, and economic inequalities these groups face. i don't know how many students have been prohibited from going to college for fear of acting white, but i do know that there are a grip of high school kids who've been told that college just isn't "for them," who were never even encouraged by their teachers to apply, who were told that they'd be "better off" learning a trade. somebody should study that. what would a harvard sociological study look like that assessed the relationship between discouraging, disparaging guidance counselors and the achievement of students of color? i'm not saying that the acting white thing is a non-issue. i just suspect that it's neither the sole nor the primary cause of scholastic underachievement in students of color.

and as a personal aside, i graduated high school with a 4.1 GPA. I did the whole IB diploma thing, and I went to an "academic magnet" school that was mostly white, but had a strong group of black students (it was the south, and the latino and asian student population was relatively small). in 9th grade, a history teacher was handing out progress reports. everybody sitting around me got an "A" and I got a B+; i was the only black person in the otherwise all-white class. there had been no major tests, and nothing really to base grades on. i couldn't for the life of me understand why i didn't get the same grade as my peers, since we'd done the same quality of work for the last 3 weeks. so, i asked the teacher what was goings on. he looked me squarely in the face and replied, "my dear, some of us are just B+ students." i think we really need to understand and investigate the importance of tracking (i.e. racial profiling) in the educational system. yeah, some black and latino kids do get accused of acting white. and it's a damn shame. but plenty others get typecast--by teachers, parents, administrators and the like--as simply being incapable of success. where's the harvard study on that?

peace,

grammie

and i've long thought that educational tracking is the devil.

but that's a whole nother conversation.

*offended*

$ociologik
________________________________________________________________________

OKFreeAgent™ : Perfecting the Fine Art of Non-Conformity

At my high school the whole popular crew in my year were all in AP and honors classes, NHS, and constantly on the honor roll. It was sooo uncool to be dumb. The thign is my high school was 100% black in the inner city. I defintely think that schools can change this perception, mine did.

group identification. they need to study that, too.

because there are a few background facts...

** teacher expectation is HIGHLY correlated with kids' academic acheivement

** the US is a historically racist country with a prevailing mythos of black (and you can add hispanic) intellectual inferiority

** popular culture depictions of blacks do little to validate or even acknowledge black intellectual acheivement/ popular cultural depictions of blacks GREATLY overemphasize black physical and entertainment achievement.

given all of that shit...

the way that the educational system works is that it tracks kids and creates self-fulfilling prophecies based upon educator (societal) expectations. high acheiving blacks (particularly in schools with significant non-black populations) are therefore seen as 'exceptions' and not as the desired outcome for all blacks.

throughout my schooling, starting in 5th grade, my predominantly black school district in NJ piloted G&T (gifted and talented). there was a lot of taking us out of class and putting us off into special classes.

that creates a schism in your peer group. oh? y'all on some other shit. cats i was cool with in 3rd grade considered me out of the group in 5th and 6th.

i didn't 're-integrate' back into my peer group until jr. year of high school, and it was mostly the result of sports and hip hop that bridged the gap.

teachers would attempt to treat me like i was special. different. i would fight that. but the realities of meeting my academic appetites meant that there was differentiation, and kids do notice that.

as i've said many times, i had a couple teachers (white)in h.s. tryin to correct my speech in the hallways. only math teachers, b/c my english teachers knew i was getting high A's with ease. i had to let these other teachers know that i understood the difference between 'standard' and colloquial english, and was quite capable of making my own choice of situationally-appropriate vernacular.

it would be years later before i'd read about and understand duboisian consciousness and AAVE, etc., but i lived the principles.

we NEED proactive measures now to provide black (i hate the word role models) examples of academic/intellectual success, and to inflate the value of academic achievement in the school setting.




peace & blessings,

x.

"I'm on the Zoloft to keep from killing y'all." - Iron Mike

"But I'm just saying, thats my blanket policy as a grown ass adult." - Crucian1


my philosophy on free time:

"and next time when he get it he'll waste it on somethin'

this is a SOCIOLOGICAL question, muthafuckas.

ok let me go back and finish reading it now.

down with economists!

especially harvard economists!

$ociologik
________________________________________________________________________

OKFreeAgent™ : Perfecting the Fine Art of Non-Conformity

hypothesis. i don't know if the article mentions it, but this is ogbu's theory -- and it hasn't been supported, except in ethnographic studies.. and even then, it's been problematic. Sociologist Douglass Massey (et al .. 2003 ,I think), tested out a number of different theories attempting to explain the achievement gap.. they looked specifically @ high achieving minority students at selective universities across the country -- there was no support for the acting white hypothesis at all.. I'd love to actually look at the study cited in the article to see how they operationalized 'acting white' (it wasn't explained whatsoever here).. I'd also be interested in the methodology -- are we talking self-reported popularity? And what about students' perceptions of acting white - how is that accounted for? Without the neccessary qualitative analysis to complement the quantitative data, the argument seems mad weak to me.


$ociologik
________________________________________________________________________

OKFreeAgent™ : Perfecting the Fine Art of Non-Conformity

the one time there's an issue i can actually talk on with a bit of authority

gotdamn.

$ociologik
________________________________________________________________________

OKFreeAgent™ : Perfecting the Fine Art of Non-Conformity