Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004
"Acting white" has always been a negative accusation within the African American community. It means that you're out of place and out of touch with heritage. Such an allegation communicates that you've rejected your inherited culture and traded it in for that of the culture of the "former oppressors". It means that you believe that white culture is better than black culture.
It means that you're a sell out.
Though scholars do not agree on a standard definition, they are certain that this social occurrence has a negative impact on black youths. Harvard scholar Roland Fryer describes the phrase as "a set of social interactions in which minority adolescents who get good grades in school enjoy less social popularity than white students who do well academically." In other words, black youths don't think being smart is as cool as their white classmates. Many researchers believe this to be one of the reasons why black youths don't achieve as well as their white and Asian counterparts. This issue particularly plagues young black males. Not only are they under represented in college, but they are more likely to be labeled disabled; more likely to drop out high school; and more likely to attend under funded schools.
We all know that adolescence is a critical age in terms of discovering and establishing one's identity. Many young black males are finding themselves having to choose between retaining what they believe to be a critical aspect of their identity or developing their intellect and becoming productive members of society.Their choice will determine how they spend the rest of their lives.
In my last post I spoke about how I had been deemed the "white-black" guy. It's something I've hear both within and outside of the black community (I've even heard it from some of my family members). When we make such comments with a moderate degree of certainty not only are we reserving what we perceive to be intellectual or academic but we also assign what we perceive to be base or vulgar to another. We create a completely arbitrary measure of how authentic we are to our respective groups instead of celebrating each others unique qualities. We carve out these neat little sections for each group within society and we accept whatever roles these sections prescribe, not realizing that these sections keep us from understanding one another. Where there is no understanding there can be no trust and how can we build strong communities without trust.
But my black coworkers filled me with some hope. They didn't have any roles or expectations that I needed to meet in order to satisfy some standard of "blackness". But apparently some of my other coworkers did, to whom I gladly disappointed.
