in a black neighborhood, and was able to provide some economic activity and jobs in the community. But when it came to himself and his family, he didn’t want to tempt fate. We lived around whites.
Of course, many of our friends and most of our extended family lived in the black sections of town. Growing up, my best buddy, Trevor, lived on the same street that we had before moving to University Heights. Like my family, Trevor’s was middle class. Like me, Trevor had a mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness and a father who wasn’t. His parents were married; he and his younger sister had a good relationship with their dad; and Trevor was a solid student who excelled in math and science. Buffalo had two selective public high schools that used entrance exams. Trevor attended one of them and his sister attended the other.
But Trevor’s neighborhood ultimately got the better of him. Over time, he was taken in by the knuckleheads and thugs. School became less attractive to him than running the streets. He drank and smoked weed. His language and attitude changed. Always a little quiet, he became sullen and much more withdrawn. He listened to gangsta rappers like the Geto Boys and Ice-T. Girls became “bitches.” He got into fights. He asked me why I hung out with “white boys.” We would cross paths from time to time as teenagers, but by the end of high school I hardly knew Trevor anymore. We lived in different worlds. He kept company with a crowd that I consciously avoided.
At the time, Trevor’s “white boys” comment stung. I did have a number of white friends on account of the schools I attended. So long as we could afford it, my father sent me to private institutions, where black students were scarce. I went to public schools in seventh, eighth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, but I wound up in honors classes where the vast majority of kids were white. My two sisters, to my father’s chagrin, opted for the neighborhood public schools. Nor did they take to the church, which distressed my mom. Both of them fell in with the wrong crowd, willingly. Indeed, they largely rejected the middle-class values that our parents labored to instill in us. And notwithstanding the geographic distance, soon they were sliding into Trevor’s world. We lived under the same roof, but I spoke, dressed, and generally behaved in ways that were not only different from my siblings but associated in their minds with “acting white.” The teasing was good-natured for the most part, and I didn’t let it get to me, but it was constant throughout my adolescence. It came from friends and family, from children and adults, from fellow congregants in the church, and on one occasion from a black public-high-school teacher who mocked my standard English in front of the entire class after I’d answered a question.
I very much enjoyed school. I was outgoing, athletic, made friends easily. But it wasn’t just the social life that attracted me. I also liked learning. I liked books. I was curious about the world. I wanted to be smart, not because I associated it with being white but because I associated it with my father. Dad was smart, and I wanted to be like Dad. I didn’t avoid black friendships, but most of the people I came across who shared my sensibilities, particularly about education, were white. There were other studious black kids around, but not many, and there seemed to be fewer as I got older. The reality was that if you were a bookish black kid who placed shared sensibilities above shared skin color, you probably had a lot of white friends.
By contrast, the Trevors were everywhere. I was related to them, attended school with them, worshipped with them. These were black kids from good families who nevertheless fell victim to social pathologies: crime, drugs, teen pregnancies, and a tragically warped sense of what it means to be black. Some were ghetto kids from broken homes with the odds stacked against them. But a surprising number were middle-class children from intact families who chose to reject middle-class values. They were not destined for Buffalo’s mean streets. They had options and they knew better. Yet the worst aspects of black culture seemed to find them, win them over, and sometimes destroy their lives. My black peers were getting pregnant and fathering children. My cousins were compiling criminal records and doing drugs. My parents did what they could, but in the end neither the church nor University Heights proved impenetrable. By the time I graduated from high school my older sister was a single mom. By the time I graduated from college my younger sister was dead from a drug overdose. A short time later Trevor would also be dead, and his sister would also be a single mother.
The kind of ribbing that I experienced as a child would follow me into adulthood, where my older sister’s children would take to deriding my diction. “Why you talk white, Uncle Jason?” my niece, all of nine years old at the time, once asked me during a visit. Turning to her friend, she continued, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he trying to sound so smart?” They shared a chuckle at my expense, and I was reminded of how early these self-defeating attitudes take hold. Here were a couple of black third graders already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. Moreover, they had determined that “sounding white” was something to be mocked in other blacks and avoided in their own speech.
The findings of academics who have researched this “acting white” phenomenon are thoroughly depressing, and demonstrate that my experiences are neither new nor atypical. Here is basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar describing his experience as a studious kid at a predominantly black Catholic school outside of Philadelphia in the 1950s:
I got there and immediately found I could read better than anyone in the school. My father’s example and my mother’s training had made that come easy; I could pick up a book, read it out loud, pronounce the words with proper inflection and actually know what they meant. When the nuns found this out they paid me a lot of attention, once even asking me, a fourth grader, to read to the seventh grade. When the kids found this out I became a target . . .
It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for doing everything I’d ever been taught was right. I got all A’s and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide. 3
In the late 1990s the black residents of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb, invited John Ogbu, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the black-white academic achievement gap in their community. Roughly a third of the town’s residents were black, and the school district was divided equally along racial lines. Yet the black kids trailed far behind whites in test scores, grade-point averages, placement in high-level classes, and college attendance. Black students were receiving 80 percent of the Ds and Fs.
Nationwide, the racial gap in education is well documented. Black kids are overrepresented among high-school dropouts and students who are not performing at grade level. Black scores on the SAT and other standardized tests are far lower on average than those of whites. The achievement gap begins in elementary school and widens in higher grades. By the end of high school the typical black student is several years behind his white peers in reading and math. The usual explanation of this is class inequality. Blacks don’t perform on the level of whites because they come from a lower socioeconomic background and their schools have fewer resources, goes the argument. But what Ogbu found is that this problem transcends class and persists even among the children of affluent, educated black professionals.
“None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why Black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as White students,” wrote Ogbu. “Within the Black population, of course, middle-class children do better, on the average, than lower-class children, just as in the White population. However, when Blacks and Whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, one sees that Black students at every class level perform less well in school than their White counterparts.”4
Ogbu and his team of researchers were given access to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and students in the Shaker Heights school district, which was one of the country’s best. And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among Black students,” wrote Ogbu. “The students themselves recognized this and used