It’s such a loaded term. Our first
reaction is that it’s just a sad case of internal racism, black kids being
peer-pressured into performing badly in school. But, like most issues involving
race or class, it’s more complicated than that.
University
of Rochester Professor Signithia
Fordham, who has spent a portion of her academic
career observing the “burden of ‘acting white’,” does not want us to blame the
kids. Instead, she wants us to see the trap African American kids — both the
ones being taunted and the ones doing the taunting — are in.
Yes, the idea of “acting white” stems
from racism. But Fordham says we have to pay attention to where the racism is
coming from. Blaming black students for the black-white achievement gap, she
says, is like blaming blacks for being forced to sit at the back of the bus.
If anything, the notion of “acting
white” is gaining in popularity (“I feel like it’s back to the future,” Fordham
says). So 20 years after her initial essay on the topic, we’ve invited Fordham,
along with one of her students, to write about it.
Professor and student, obviously, see
the problem from two different perspectives, two different stages in life. But
they overlap in their discussions of identity, of race, of success — and of
the uphill fight many African American students still face.
Back to the future
by Ron Netsky
Congressman BarackObama spoke about it in his keynote speech at the
Democratic Convention in 2004. New York
Times Columnist John Tierney wrote about it last November. Harvard
economist Roland G. Fryer did an exhaustive numerical analysis of it. And last
week Claude Lewis invoked it in the Philadelphia
Inquirer (in a column reprinted in the Democrat
& Chronicle).
Since its popularization in a study
by anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu in the Urban
Review two decades ago, intellectuals can’t stop talking about the stigma
attached to black students perceived to be “acting white.”
Fordham, Susan B. Anthony Professor
of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester, wrote a book, Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity and
Success at Capital High (University of Chicago Press, 1996). In it she
explored “acting white” and other issues based on her 1981 to 1984 study of a
predominantly black Washington, D.C.
high school.
Fordham herself had been accused of
“acting white” during her high school years, but at the time she blamed herself
for perhaps being too outspoken. When she first encountered the phenomenon at
“Capital High” (a pseudonym for an actual school), she was in denial about it.
A highly regarded scholar, Fordham
has published numerous articles involving race, gender, identity, and
education. But it is her concept of “acting white” that continues to generate
debate.
In a recent interview Fordham
discussed “acting white” and related issues. The following is an edited version
of our conversation.
City: Claude Lewis recently wrote, “Every black
parent ought to be outraged at youngsters who believe that those who seek
education are ‘acting white’…” He is the latest to misunderstand your concept.
Fordham: It’s misunderstood far more than it’s understood. First, people limit it to the
school context. Then they create a false dichotomy, kids who are seeking
academic achievement and kids who are not. That is a component of “acting
white,” but “acting white” is much larger than that. It’s part of the larger
African American community. That’s why I wrote about Rosa Parks. “Acting white”
not only means conformity, it is also resisting prevailing norms and
expectation. It’s not just school.
City: But when people like BarackObama use the term, they see it simply as a stigma
that keeps black kids from achieving.
Fordham: When I think about “acting white,” I think about black people trying to avoid
or erase humiliation, because I see humiliation as the primary issue that
affects people who are stigmatized.
City: You suggest that inferior schooling, lack
of job opportunities and other social conditions have caused blacks to feel
inferior and to ascribe academic achievement to whites. What’s your reaction to
people like Bill Cosby who put the blame on blacks themselves?
Fordham: It is truly unfortunate that he thinks the interactions of the people on the
back of the bus make them responsible for their consignment to the undesired
seats. As you know, even if they behave like saints, they do not have the power
to change the seat assignments. Someone else must do that.
Look, I know it isn’t popular these
days to talk about enslavement, to talk about humiliation, to talk about
identities as enclosed, because everybody’s now saying everything is so porous
you can get through these things and it’s not the situation. But I’m devastated
when I read things like what Bill Cosby said about this, because I think that
doesn’t capture what the issues are.
It’s as if the black people on the
bus were responsible for the fact that they had to sit at the back. That’s not true.
Rosa Parks was compelled to sit in the seats she was assigned, not because
black people said she should sit there. She was assigned to those seats because
that’s where society said she should sit.
So it’s not about black people
against other black people, it’s about how we change the social system so that
all black people will benefit.
City: In “Blacked Out,” you write that one of the
things that seems to make the education process difficult is generational.
Fordham: After the Brown decision and the Civil Rights act — in the 1960s generally
— black people were engrossed in acknowledging what they had achieved. Their
children were the kids that I studied, and their parents were always baffled by
why their kids wouldn’t take advantage of what they saw as the wider
opportunities available to them. And rightfully so. You fight for something so
hard, why don’t the kids do so much better? Because if we had those
opportunities, we would have gone much further in life than we’ve actually
gone.
But they don’t get what is happening
in culture systems, how they operate. These kids are fearful of the loss of
identity. This is not something they would verbalize or even have the
understanding to talk about if you asked them.
City: How do you feel about so-called Black
English? Will students who use Black English be at a disadvantage?
Fordham: It’s a very powerful issue that people seek to avoid, but I think black kids
are extremely victimized by it, by the schools’ stigmatization or humiliation.
The language that people use — you can’t disregard that. Language is a
critical component of culture, and what the school says is that you have to
divest yourself of the language that you learned at your mother’s breast. So
kids stop engaging, stop talking, stop participating.
There are so many ways you can get
kids involved if you accept them for who they are. Identity is very important
in what kids do. Some things you don’t do because it’s not part of your
identity and it’s a violation. In some ways, people who are black and “acting
white” are violating what is seen as a black identity. And that’s what’s
missing in the analysis of “acting white.”
City:
But ultimately, doesn’t a person have
to learn to speak standard English to succeed in society?
Fordham: To be perceived as an intellectually smart person, yes, they have to learn to
speak standard English. That’s important. But I can think of so many people who
make millions of dollars in America
who can’t put a sentence together in the way intellectuals think they should.
To say that Black English is the reason kids are not getting through school or
not doing well as adults is not the whole picture.
City:
How do we get kids — not just black
kids — to value education?
Fordham: If education is rewarded, it will be valued. If it’s valuable to be a football
player, kids will gravitate towards that. If we value education, we’ll reward
kids for getting that. If we value teaching, we’ll reward people for teaching.
But we don’t.
Was Rosa Parks ‘acting white’?
by Signithia
Fordham, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Susan B. Anthony Professor of Gender
and Women’s Studies, University of Rochester
Was Rosa Parks guilty of “acting
white” that day in Montgomery when
she refused to give up her seat to a white man who boarded the bus? When the
other black passengers did not initially support her because she was upsetting
the imposed and customary order of race relations and they feared white
reprisals against the whole black community, were they responsible for the
insult to her dignity?
Mrs. Parks’s
defiant refusal to continue to accept the socially and legally mandated
dehumanization of black people in Montgomery
led her to act as if she were entitled to first-class American citizenship,
with all the rights and responsibilities that implies. Her decision to remain
seated when she was expected to stand up triggered a cascade of collective,
public acts of resistance to segregation, securing access to public
transportation, desegregated schooling, and the vote for a host of minority groups.
In the wake of Mrs. Parks’s recent death and a conference held jointly at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University called “Acting White” Revisiting Ogbu and Fordham’s [sic] Hypothesis (on October 28 and
29, 2005), I am reminded of the controversy that followed the publication of my
article with John U. Ogbu, “Black Students’ Schools
Success: Coping With the ‘Burden of Acting White'” (published in The Urban Review in 1986).
In my anthropological study of
academically successful students at overwhelmingly black “Capital High” in Washington,
D.C., I found that all black students were
alienated by the mismatch between the culture of their community and that of
the school. Some resisted by refusing to comply with assignments, while others
resisted by defying their teachers’ low expectations and becoming academically
successful.
Virtually all black students paid a
price: some by dead-end educational and occupational careers, and others by
“acting white” and losing their own voices.
The conference planners
misinterpreted my argument and, like so many others had done before, limited
“acting white” to valuing or devaluing schooling. While my research was
centered in a high school, its scope was much larger. Following traditional
anthropological research practices, I treated the school as the “village”
center and presented a wide-ranging analysis of the cultural practices of the
group. For African American youth, “acting white” was associated with what was
historically thought to be the prerogative of white Americans. Schooling was
only one of those prerogatives; access to stable, well-paying jobs was another.
In a situation in which these
formerly “white” prerogatives are simultaneously made available and denied,
black youth responded with uncertainty and ambivalence, and, in some instances,
a collective oppositional black identity emerged. Because a black identity is
at the core of the response to the accusation of “acting white,” I cannot
embrace the idea supported by recent researchers, including the conference
planners, that all high-achieving students — regardless of race or class —
are stigmatized and subject to ridicule and exclusion by their lower-achieving
peers. I resoundingly reject their conclusion that the problem of “acting
white” is “not a black thing.” This misinterpretation of pervasive patterns of
inequality in American high schools is hauntingly familiar.
My research findings were initially
distorted to hold the less academically successful peers of the high-achieving
black students I studied responsible for the underachievement of all African
American students. These alienated, envious, and unsuccessful students
criticized their peers for “acting white.” But they were not responsible for
the black-white achievement divide. That is not what I said, and it is not what
I meant.
A similar distortion emerged at the
recent Acting White conference. The
presenters suggested that the source of the problem is not unequal structure of
the system of schooling in America
and that the problem of “acting white” does not exist. A handful of African
American high school students enrolled in elite classes in the “Research
Triangle” area were paraded on stage and asked to report whether their black
peers accused them of “acting white.” Not surprisingly, following the pattern
reported in the researchers’ recent article, these academically successful
black students said “no,” and their verbal denials were used as empirical
evidence that this phenomenon does notexist
in most schools and could not impede the academic achievement of contemporary
African American students.
Most reasonable people would agree
that, like the black people on the bus with Mrs. Parks that day, the less
successful black students are not the major obstacles to the elimination of the
black-white achievement gap. Like every black person on the bus that day, all
African American students are victimized — regardless of their academic
performance — by social policies and educational practices that challenge
their humanity and aspirations.
How ironic that in the current debate
about the black-white academic achievement gap, we overemphasize the influence
of students who are not doing well academically on the performance of black
students who are successful. At the same time, we fail to examine the
configuration of power on the bus and underemphasize the power of the social
configuration of the school, especially racialized
academic tracking and teachers’ low expectations of black students’ academic
performance.
Twenty years ago, I concluded that
academically successful students at Capital High were compelled to “cope with
the burden of ‘acting white’.” After reviewing what has been written about the
schools that most American students of African ancestry attend today, I am
convinced that my earlier research was not seriously flawed and that the notion
of “acting white” is still very much “a black thing.”
‘Stop acting white’
by Nathan Gibbons
The
following is compiled from two essays written for one of Professor Fordham’s
classes, in 2005.
Identity is by no means static; it is
an ever-changing facet of every individual’s social being. Not all identities
are self-made; they are often imposed as a result of social construct. I’ve
found that a person’s identity may change, to some extent, based on how that
person conforms to certain social expectations.
Social positioning, for example, has
succeeded in impressing certain identities upon the social groups to which it
is associated. While growing up, I wasn’t as aware of some of these social
structures. This is partly because I didn’t conform to many of the expectations
that come with being a black person.
While the other black kids were loud
and got into trouble all the time — a sort of in-your-face resistance aimed
at the social elite — I was that kid that apparently acted like something I
wasn’t. “Stop acting white” is what the other black kids, including my brothers
and sister, said about me with alarming frequency.
While the other blacks used
“loudness” to affirm the worth of their existence, I resisted in a more subtle
manner. I resisted society’s preconceived notion that black kids would never
amount to anything. I did this by positioning myself right smack in the middle
of the social elite. I convinced myself that in order to thrive, I had to find
a way to become popular, which then meant being rich and white.
After failing to do this several
times, I soon discovered a loophole that would allow me to penetrate the
seemingly insurmountable wall that separated me from the social elite. Through
sports, I went from non-existent to well known and even to admired by those who
would ensure the place I felt I was entitled to in high society.
Despite the relief and contentment I
felt upon finally being accepted by the rich white kids, I experienced an
unmistakable contrast of identity roles. It seemed that the more I fit in with
the “pretty boys,” the more I was ridiculed by the groups to which I inherently
belonged. I can actually remember circumstances in which I was torn between
hanging out and affiliating myself with my family and being with my newfound
but not so genuine friends. With a great deal of shame and embarrassment I
admit that I often chose my friends.
Ironically, though there was a time
when I would disregard the importance of my cultural roots, it was these same
roots that instilled the resiliency and perseverance I showed in climbing the
social ladder. My father taught me not to settle for the scraps that society
can and often does try to give me, but also to never forget where I came from.
Needless to say, this task was a little too difficult for me at the time.
The perception of what it is to “win”
or “lose” varies between social groups. “Winning” to one individual or group
can be “losing” to another. This certainly rings true for me. A black member of
a predominately upper class white school environment, I was almost immediately
faced with the question of which team I should compete for — only I wasn’t
yet aware that I even had to compete.
While I was self-driven to do well in school, I had no idea that my academic success would warrant some backlash from
those to whom I was culturally attached. I excelled in the classroom, dominated
in sports, and even managed to work my way into a very socially prestigious
network of friends, and was thus a self-made winner.
I enjoyed my upward social movement
immensely — so immensely, in fact, that I deliberately compromised the
relationships between me and my siblings.
To them, the ends were in no way,
shape, or form justified by the means.
To them, I had no concept whatsoever
of the things in life that are truly important.
To them, I was a loser.
I was criticized for what I
considered to be success. It wasn’t unaccepting
whites that ridiculed me, but those I inconsistently considered to be my own.
In trying to gain standing with my friends, I became the focal point of
scrutiny to other individuals, namely my own family.
When I look at the past and the
extremes I went to in pursuit of social prominence, I experience an array of
emotions. I am now a student in an elite institution, a student who’s had
tremendous academic and athletic success, and a student whose relationships and
connections will undoubtedly continue to be very beneficial, as they already
have.
With my coming of age, I’ve become
more aware of the social structures that led me to feel inferior. I still feel
horrible when I think of how I ignored the importance of the relationships with
my brothers and sister. We are closer now than we’ve ever been, due in no small
part to my maturation, but I can’t help but wonder what my life would be like
had I not chosen to, at least in some ways, abandon my culture for a more
socially acceptable one.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2006.
