A high school class on race and racism

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2004 by Lawrence Blum

(3) The "acting white" hypothesis has acquired a good deal of public cachet, with little scholarly support; what support there has been has derived from a somewhat misleading reading of the work of John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham (e.g., Fordham and Ogbu, 1986). John Ogbu's 2002 major work, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003) retreats more decisively from this view, but nevertheless retains the claim that values and patterns within the Black community (in both peer and parental cultures) contribute significantly to Black school under-achievement, and that African American students are subject to "low effort optimism" leading to diminished academic effort.

(4) See for example, Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, "Stereotype Threat and the Test Performance of Academically Successful African Americans," in Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (eds.), The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998): 401-427. Jencks and Phillips's collection presents and evaluates many hypotheses about the achievement gap (focused more specifically on the gap in standardized test scores). Genetically-based explanations, suggested by the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, are refuted by Jencks and Phillips in the introduction to their collection, and do not seem to be taken seriously by the scholarly community dealing with the achievement gap.

(5) There is a national network--the Minority Student Achievement Network--of which CRLS is a part, consisting of schools with a demographic similar to CRLS that are attempting to close the achievement gap.

(6) The advent of a new African-American principal (in 2002), and a veteran CRLS African-American vice-principal, seems to promise a new empowerment of Black parents.

(7) Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) is a classic defense of heterogeneity. I have also seen Anne Wheelock, Crossing the Tracks: How 'Untracking' Can Save America's Schools (New York: New Press, 1992) cited frequently. I am not conversant with the scholarly literature in this field.

(8) Tamar Lewin, "Growing Up, Growing Apart," from How Race is Lived in America

(9) The conversation is reconstructed from notes taken by a post-doctoral student who was observing the class.

(10) The students frequently referred to what I would call "standard English" as "proper English," and "African American vernacular" as "slang." I did not systematically challenge this use but intend to do so next time I teach the class, in fall 2004.

(11) This discussion, like so many in the course of the term, was intense and very fast-moving, and I was unable in the moment to take up various threads that might have seemed to cry out for more exploration, such as the idea that whites have no culture, or reasons other than those mentioned why a member of one group might adopt or be attracted to the cultural styles of the other. (For example, is the white attraction to Black youth culture connected with Blacks being seen as "bad," as oppositional, in a way that covertly reinforces the stigmatizing of Blacks in American life?)