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