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Acting white


In the United States, acting white is a pejorative term, usually applied to African Americans, which refers to a person's perceived betrayal of their culture by assuming the social expectations of white society.Success in education in particular (depending on one's cultural background) can be seen as a form of "selling out" by being disloyal to one's culture.

The term is controversial, and its precise meaning is hard to define. Some minority students are discouraged from achieving in school by the negative prejudices of ethnic peers; such a view has been expressed in articles in The New York Times, Time magazine, and The Wall Street Journal—and by public figures and academics across the political spectrum.

The question of whether or not "acting white" attitudes are prevalent has been debated in academic literature. The African-American comedian and media figure, Bill Cosby, used the term in what became a noted May 2004 speech when he challenged the black community against the idea that gaining education was "acting white". Black people accused of "acting white" are sometimes referred to as Black Anglo-Saxons, a term coined by comedian Paul Mooney. The 2008 election of Barack Obama as President of the United States resulted in a public discussion that the acting white attitude may be waning, as he represented a model of African-American achievement.

Not all scholars define acting white in the same way. Most definitions include a reference to situations where some minority adolescents ridicule their peers for engaging in behaviors perceived to be characteristic of whites. In this scenario, they equate "white behavior" with high grades in school, a result researchers can quantify, but the term is not limited to this.

In 1986, Signithia Fordham co-authored with Nigerian sociologist John Ogbu a study that concluded that high-performing African-American students in a Washington, D.C., high school borrowed from hegemonic white culture as part of a strategy for achievement, while struggling to maintain a black identity. Ogbu made a related claim in his 2003 book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, concluding that black students' own cultural attitudes sometimes hindered academic achievement and that these attitudes are too often neglected. Ogbu had earlier written in his seminal work Minority Education and Caste (1978), that school disengagement among caste-like minorities occurs because white society limits the job-success of their parents and others in their communities by a glass ceiling. In his new book, he said that non-whites "failed to observe the link between educational achievement and access to jobs."


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