Posted by
Sonny Farmer on Sunday, May 09, 2010 9:43:53 PM
I found this piece to be very interesting and makes a lot of sense and at the same time, raise some eyebrows.
Is “acting white” a legacy of integration policies that
shortchanged blacks?
1:06 am February 27, 2010, by Maureen
Downey
Atlanta Journal Constitution
As the white adoptive parent of two black children, Harvard Law
graduate Stuart Buck began to read about education and race and became
intrigued by the “acting white” epithet sometimes directed at at
high-achieving minority students.
That personal interest grew into a professional one that
culminated in a book due out in May, “Acting White, the Ironic Legacy
of Desegregation.”
A doctoral student in education at the University of
Arkansas, Buck says his research led him to a surprising conclusion,
that the “acting white” criticism had its roots in desegregation that
wrenched black students from schools and communities they knew and threw
them into new schools where they were often reviled, shunned and
underestimated.
“The analogy I would draw is treatment for cancer,” said
Buck, speaking by phone from Arkansas. “Segregation is like a cancer
that we had to get rid of, but the treatment that saved our lives had
unintended side effects.”
While black students often attended segregated schools
that lacked the resources of white facilities, Buck says the schools
served as the connective tissue in a community that historically valued
education.
“In segregated schools, black children had consistently
seen other blacks succeeding in the academic world,’’ he says. “The
authority figures and role models — teachers and principals were all
black. And the best students in the schools were black as well.”
While black parents welcomed integration, they had hoped
for a merger of black and white schools. Instead, they witnessed the
destruction of black schools and the erasure of the culture, community
and closeness that the schools had created. Their children marched off
to white schools where they experienced hostility and were tracked into
lower-level classes. In his research, Buck found many examples of where
even new facilities that had housed black schools were abandoned because
white parents weren’t willing to send their kids to black schools.
“They did not want to send white schoolchildren into
black schools, to be taught by black teachers and disciplined by black
principals,” he says.
A University of Georgia and Harvard Law graduate, Buck
cites Butler High School in Gainesville, which was built in 1962 but
closed seven years later as part of the desegregation plan.
Black principals were demoted or fired, and teachers
made to feel unwanted in the integrated settings. Buck notes that
Gainesville had 115 white teachers and 70 black teachers in 1966. Three
years later, 22 black teachers remained.
The loss was significant to the city’s black students
because black teachers usually lived in the same community, knew the
families of students and delighted in their successes.
There was an affection that was not easily replicated
with white teachers who did not live in the same communities, attend the
same churches or shop in the same stores.
In losing their school, Gainesville’s black students
lost their mascot, their school colors, their yearbook and newspaper.
Buck says the uprooting of black students from familiar and supportive
environments was made even more difficult by the reception in their new
schools.
Buck draws on news accounts of the era in which white
students commented, “This is our school and they are just going to have
to adjust.” White female teachers, raised to fear black men, were not
comfortable teaching black high school boys.
Buck cites the research showing that capable black
students are still less likely to be in advanced classes than white
peers. Either out of overt racism or “liberal guilt,” Buck says white
teachers did not hold black students to high expectations.
Once reassigned to desegregated schools, black students
“were sitting in a classroom with mostly other black students in what
they believed to be the ‘dumb’ class, watching as the white students
headed to the ‘smart’ class down the hall,’’’ writes Buck.
Dispirited, black students began to associate
achievement with white students and ostracize peers who joined the white
kids in the ‘‘smart’’ classes down the hall.
Among the research that Buck mentions: The findings of
Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. that while the popularity of white
students rises with grade-point average, black children become less
popular the better their grades.
He cites the experience of Ron Kirk, the first black
mayor of Dallas, who recalled getting beat up at his newly integrated
junior high school for being black and again in his neighborhood the
same day for not being black enough.
Buck believes it is important to understand anti-school
attitudes because he believes that students must be willing partners in
education. “From youngest ages, children love learning, but something
happens around 10, 11 or 12,” he says. “We have to understand why it is
that children, black or white, don’t want to learn.”