"Acting white".

Roland Fryer's research reported in the last issue of Education Next ("Acting White," research, Winter 2006) uses a large nationally representative data set and innovative statistical methods to show convincingly that black students in racially integrated public schools have fewer friends if they earn A's than if they earn B's. He defines this finding as evidence of "acting white." The findings are important, but they may or may not be due to acting white (or the social dynamics surrounding the accusation) as people usually define it. Last spring (after debating Fryer about his definition), I included the following question on a survey to which several thousand students across several school districts responded: "At this school, people like me get accused of acting white." Preliminary analysis shows patterns that are fascinating. It appears that accusations of acting white really are a problem and could be part of the explanation for Fryer's findings concerning popularity, but the patterns are more nuanced than people might expect.

RONALD F. FERGUSON

Senior Research Associate

Harvard University 

The notion that black students engage in academic self-sabotage because of fear that they will be subjected to taunts from their same-race peers, as Roland Fryer writes, is to attribute racial inequality to black dysfunctionality. This is no different than the perspective William Ryan years ago astutely labeled "blaming the victim." Its propagation absolves the researcher and the policymaker from looking at deep-seated structural and institutional practices that perpetuate racial disparities.

Fryer's study treads gingerly on the victim-blaming field. Constructively, his work indicates that to the extent that a burden of acting white exists, it is not universal. He finds no evidence of such a phenomenon, for instance, for black students in predominantly black high schools. This is especially intriguing, since, in the original construction of the claim, Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu professed to have found the phenomenon of racialized harassment for black high achievers in an all-black high school in Washington, D.C. However, if one looks carefully at their 1986 Urban Review paper, none of the student narratives they report makes any reference to a fear of being accused of being a race traitor. Their respondents do express an aversion to being called a "brainiac," but this is absolutely no different from white high achievers not wanting to be called "nerds" or "geeks."

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If popularity measures are indicators of the presence of a burden of acting white, then Fryer's finding is no surprise to those of us who have studied the subject. What is missing from his study, however, is information about the racial composition of the most-advanced classes offered by the schools in the Adolescent Health data. Research that colleagues and I have conducted indicates that when a burden of acting white develops, it occurs in a specific context, a school that is desegregated at the facility level, but has a segregated curriculum due to racialized tracking. The one or two black students who find their ways into Advanced Placement or Honors classes may well be subjected to racialized harassment from black peers who are outside of those classes--classes that appear to be the property of white students. School practices with respect to race and class assignment produce the burden of acting white, not attitudes that black students hold regardless of the type of school they attend.

What becomes critical is to understand the processes that lead to a segregated curriculum or the exclusion of black students from AP and Honors classes. Those processes find their origins in the elementary-school years with the extreme underidentification of black students for gifted and talented programs. Those are the processes generating schooling inequality that merit far more attention than the alleged burden of acting white.

WILLIAM DARITY JR.

Professor of Economics

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill