I have written a couple of times about the debate over whether there is peer pressure against high-achieving black students for “acting white” — here and here, which referred to a National Bureau of Economic Research report that provides new evidence, in the form of friendship patterns, for the “acting white” theory.
Now comes reader Paul Engel, who sends a link to this article in the St. Petersburg Times about a new article by one of the co-authors of the NBER report, Roland Freyer, a rising star young anthropologist economist at Harvard.
Roland G. Fryer found the acting-white stigma is most prevalent in racially mixed schools and most potent among black and Hispanic males. In many schools, he says, it could be a leading factor behind anemic test scores and poor graduation rates.
“If minority students today deliberately underachieve in order to avoid social sanctions,” he wrote in the fall issue of Education Next, a magazine published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, “that by itself could explain why the academic performance of 17-year-old African-Americans … has deteriorated since the late 1980s, even while that of 9-year-olds has been improving.”
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He crunched data from something called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which is based on a nationally representative sample of 90,000 students in grades 7-12. The study asked students to list up to five of their closest friends.
In the late 1990s, two other studies used the same database and concluded the acting-white stigma was urban legend. But those studies relied on what students reported about their own popularity. And students don’t often admit they’re unpopular.
Fryer, a 28-year-old Florida native and rising star at Harvard, thought counting how many times a student’s name appeared on other students’ lists would be more accurate. Then he linked popularity to grades.
It comes down to the dynamics of group identity, Fryer said. When a minority group fears the loss of successful members, it will “penalize” peers who act different.
The results differed greatly by school type.
In integrated public schools, Fryer found little difference among ethnic groups between grades and popularity for students with lower grade point averages. But when GPAs reach 2.5 and beyond, white students with good grades become more popular, while minority students become less so. The dropoff is greatest for Hispanics.
In private schools and predominantly minority public schools, Fryer found no such trend.
How long will it be before high-achieving white students are given guff by their peers for “acting Asian”?
Well, that’s kind of odd. Being in the highest level classes in math sure didn’t translate into popularity, even in geek school (North Carolina School of Science and Math) and even for the guys. Well, we ubergeeks were popular amongst ourselves…
But yeah, thinking back to “regular” school, plenty of the guys and gals in the “normal” honors classes were very popular, but they weren’t seen at all intellectual. If you enjoyed learning a little too much, well, you were a weirdo, no matter your race.
I think it’s not just a matter of peer pressure, but also family pressure. Didn’t the Thernstroms or this other guy (I forget his name) look into at what grade parents would start bugging their kids? Drop below a B, and the white kids get bugged. Drop below an A, and the Asian kids get bugged. In the (suburban, middle class) white and Asian families, it was expected that the kids go to college, and in the Asian case in particular that they’d go to really top colleges in “real” majors like pre-med or engineering.
If you don’t expect to college, especially in a “real” subject, you’re not going to see much pressure on grades. I’ve seen this dynamic in the rural white schools, where few people are expected to go to anything higher than community college. Heck, it’s no big deal if you drop out of high school in many of these communities, still. There are still plenty of Southern jokes about the kid who goes away to college and gets too big for his britches.
Fryer is an economist, not an anthropologist.
Roland Fryer is a rising star economist at Harvard, not an anthropologist. Here are some of his research papers, as you can see, he focuses primarily on race issues, and is not afraid to think up new and non-PC solutions to fixing the problem. In short, a great economist doing great things.
the problem that black kids have is not just acting white. It’s a whole constellation of ideas that they have been fed that makes it kind of worthless from their viewpoint to work in school. My cousin told her nephew that the white man does not want him to succeed and when he acts up in school he’s just doing what the white man wants so he should stop acting up and do his schoolwork. Did this tactic work? No! The white man hates you, he’s plotting against you, he stole everything from you, the war on terror is a war to kill everyone who is not white, the school work is not your culture, and a whole bunch of similar stuff is what black kids learn from other black people, whether directly or indirectly. After hearing this kind of stuff, how can a kid go sit in the class and listen to the teacher or read his book. What’s the point when you’re already doomed.