Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

Journal of Negro Education, The, Spring 1996 by Jean Harris

Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, by Signithia Fordham. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 411 pp. $22.95, paper.

Reviewed by Jean Harris, Olympic College.

At a time when the standardized test scores and educational attainment levels of African American students have been shown to lag stubbornly behind those of European Americans despite a spate of remedies directed at teachers, educators, and curriculum, a study that sheds light on how African American adolescents define and evaluate the cost of academic success should be of immediate interest to educators and policymakers. Moreover, anthropological research by an African American scholar who has herself traversed the oft-mined terrain of educational institutions should be must reading for ethnographers, psychologists, and general readers who want to understand Black student achievement, underachievement, and what Cose (1993) has dubbed the "rage" of the Black middle class. Such are the elements of Blacked Out, a study of success in the Black community that uses a high school as its field research site.

In Blacked Out, Fordham expands upon her earlier argument, first posited in the 1980s, that Black students' academic and out-of-school behaviors must be understood in light of an ethos that, on one hand, values Black identity and, on the other, defines achieving academic success as "acting White" (Fordham, 1988; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). True to form, she rejects simplistic arguments that success for African Americans is dependent solely upon desire and ability. She rejects as well the notion that African Americans who resist conventional notions of success do not want to live out some aspects of the American Dream. Instead, she contends that, for Black students, academic success and academic underachievement are processes of resistance that enable African Americans to maintain their humanness in the face of a stigmatized racial identity. As Blacked Out reveals, this resistance manifests among African American adolescents as both conformity and avoidance.

Employing the holistic perspective that is the hallmark of her discipline, Fordham examines the myriad cultural, sociohistorical, and psychological processes that affect student academic success at Capital High, a pseudonym for a school of almost two thousand students located in Washington, D.C. Core data for this study were collected by means of participant observation, interviews, and field notes Fordham gathered over a four-year period with 33 key informants, their peers, and nonfamilial adult members of the school community. Additional data came from questionnaires she administered to a large sample of other students and school personnel.

Fordham maintains in Blacked Out that, among African Americans, differences in childrearing practices and gender socialization are associated with differences in levels of academic achievement and in preferred resistance strategies. As background to her study, Fordham traces historical events that have influenced African American cultural practices and social structure, delineating four eras that have elicited varying responses from different strata within this group: the enslavement era (ca. 1609-1865); the First Emancipation (1866-1959), or the period after the Civil War when slavery was legally abolished, yet people of African descent were forbidden to "act White" and assume citizenship on a par with European Americans; the Second Emancipation, the 26-year transition period corresponding roughly to the years 1960-1986, during which time Black Americans were obligated to act White in order to compete with European Americans; and the neosegregation or contemporary period, which Fordham observes others have called the era of the "new racism," with its emerging and not yet clearly defined parameters. For example, acknowledging that fictive kinship has been an organizing principle among Black families since the time of official enslavement, Fordham argues that the egalitarian ethos of cooperation and sharing fostered by this principle stands in opposition to the individualistic ethos of the schools. As a result, she writes, "African American adolescents (and adults) who wish to pursue academic excellence are confronted by two formidable obstacles: the barriers established by the larger society ... and intragroup pressures manifested in the fictive kinship system" (p. 88).

Additionally, Fordham argues that while the parents and educators in the Capital High community were most influenced by the ideas and events of the First Emancipation era, the students at the school are the products of Second Emancipation experiences. This latter orientation, she maintains, presents unique challenges to their success and positive identity formation. One of the primary concerns For&am notes among African American adolescents is the need to resist "contamination" by the larger society by refusing to reflect an imagined "other." High-achieving Black students do this, she suggests, by conformity-that is, they "validate African Americans' humanness by demonstrating the ability to perform academically in ways that parallel and even surpass those of their white counterparts" (p. 236). However, because they view school success as acting White, these students must employ a variety of strategies to cope with the burden of racial alienation. For all their efforts, Fordham shows that they often run the dual risk of constructing a raceless self that is disconnected from other Black Americans and that fails, because of structural barriers, to achieve the success bought at so high a cost. No wonder then, as she further posits, underachieving Black students choose avoidance as their primary resistance strategy. By refusing to engage in those aspects of the curriculum that require masking or relinquishing a racialized self, Black underachievers avoid the construction of their Black selves in the image of White others.