John McWhorter on ‘Acting White’ and Cultural Barriers to Black Education

Here we go
again. A black woman (see photo at right) has articulately battled
the idea that using standard English is “acting white” in a video
that has gone viral of late, and she’s been called out for
propagating a myth that black students devalue school. In the
eighties, (black) anthropologist John Ogbu with Signithia Fordham
argued that black kids underperform in school partly because those
who behave scholarly are teased as being “white,” such that often
fitting in means letting one’s grades slip. And indeed, legions of
nerdy black kids are familiar with black peers saying “Why are you
working so hard on that school stuff? You think you’re white?”

However, the documentation of this has always rankled those who
prefer to document black problems as due to institutional racism
rather than cultural problems. To them, we’re wrong to warn black
kids not to fall for the “acting white” slur. John McWhorter writes
that this sounds like telling someone about to go outside on a
rainy day not to use an umbrella, but to support efforts to
eliminate weather.

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