Acting White: Are We Barking up the Wrong Tree?

by Lory Hough

We’ve all seen the movies about a motivated teacher who, with the best of tough-love intentions, comes into an inner-city school determined to turn the black and Latino students on to learning and the value of education.

“It’s as if the latent potential is present, but the students just
need more motivation,” says Assistant Professor John Diamond from his office at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where he’s on sabbatical working on a new book about race and opportunity in an affluent suburban school. “These movies can evoke powerful emotions, particularly for educators who are often deeply invested in helping young people reach their full potential, but they also tend to reinforce the perception that addressing educational inequality is about changing attitudes.”

It’s this perception that motivated Diamond to write the recent paper, “Are We Barking Up the Wrong Tree?” to be published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, that looks at the common belief that all American-born black students, regardless of geography or social class, don’t value education, primarily because doing well in school is seen as “acting white.”

In fact, says Diamond, the studies prove otherwise.

“Most research suggests that African American students [as a group] are no less engaged or invested in education than their white peers,” Diamond says. They want to go to college at the same rate and they spend about the same amount of time doing homework.

Despite this, Diamond says the perception still exists, particularly in the media, and is continually raised as a central explanation for the racial achievement gap.

“I think one reason for this is that it places responsibility on individuals rather than institutions. It’s easier to point the finger at individuals and to emphasize the need for them to change,” he says. “If black and Latino/a kids don’t care about education, then underfunding schools and providing lowerquality educational opportunities is not really a problem.”

Instead, we should be focusing on the real educational obstacles that black students face — obstacles that Diamond knows personally.

“I study how racial inequality gets reproduced through education in part because I have experienced the educational system in the United States as a black male and dealt with low teacher expectations of black students, race-based tracking, and other problems that students continue to face,” he says. “This personal experience happens to be a core problem for the country as well. As demographic shifts increase the percentage of students of color in the United States relative to whites, we must find ways to address racial disparities in school opportunities and outcomes. We must also develop theories that are sophisticated enough to deal with post-civil rights era racial inequality, which is often more subtle and elusive than traditional racial discrimination.”

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Photo by Tanit Sakakini