Tweet
What is "acting white"?
Although they did not coin the term (its origins are obscure), it was an ethnographic study by anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, published in the Urban Journal in 1986, that did the most to bring it to the attention of their fellow academics. Their “Capitol High,” a pseudonym for a predominantly black high school in a low-income area of Washington, D.C., had what the researchers said was an “oppositional culture” in which black youth dismissed academically oriented behavior as “white.”
In the late 1990s, Harvard University economist, Ron Ferguson, found much the same thing in quite another setting, an upper-class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, called Shaker Heights. Although that city had been integrated for generations, large racial disparities in achievement persisted. When Ferguson detected an anti-intellectual culture among blacks in the local high school, Shaker Heights became virtually synonymous with the problem of acting white.
Fordham and Ogbu traced the roots of the “oppositional culture” to institutionalized racism within American society, which they contend led blacks to define academic achievement as the prerogative of whites and to invest themselves instead in alternative pursuits. Other observers, however, place the blame for acting white squarely on the shoulders of blacks. The Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter, for example, contrasts African American youth culture with that of immigrants (including blacks from the Caribbean and Africa) who “haven’t sabotaged themselves through victimology.” These two theories, the former blaming acting white on a racist society, the latter on self-imposed cultural sabotage, have emerged as the predominant explanations for acting white among American blacks.
educationnext.org/actingwhite/
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali/Nizam al-Mulk