Black Students' School Success: Coping with the "Burden of 'Acting White.'"

Autor/in	Fordham, Signithia
Titel	Black Students' School Success: Coping with the "Burden of 'Acting White.'"
Quelle	(1985), (59 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Beigaben	Tabellen
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Monographie
Schlagwörter	Tagungsbericht; Academic Achievement; Adolescents; Black Achievement; Black Community; Black Students; Coping; Ethnicity; High School Students; High Schools; Kinship; Racial Attitudes; Social Mobility; Social Structure; Urban Schools + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Schulleistung; Adolescent; Adolescence; Adoleszenz; Jugend; Jugendalter; Jugendlicher; Bewältigung; Ethnizität; High school; High schools; Student; Students; Oberschule; Schüler; Schülerin; Studentin; Rassenfrage; Soziale Mobilität; Sozialstruktur; Urban area; Urban areas; School; Schools; Stadtregion; Stadt; Schule
Abstract	Black adolescents have learned a well-defined fear of "acting white": a fear of excelling in academic arenas which traditionally have been defined as the prerogative of white Americans. The focus of this analysis is the resulting conflict experienced by academically successful and unsuccessful black students in one predominantly black high school in Washington, D.C. The basic premise is that black students experience inordinate ambivalence and affective dissonance around the issue of academic excellence in the school context. This paper contains four sections. The first briefly reviews the theoretical and ethnographic literature on how the black ecological structure affects the school performance of black students, highlighting the fictive kinship system in the black community. The second section reviews existing research literature and autobiographical data on black students' success, noting the existence of a fictive kinship system in the black community and in academic success (including the notion of "acting white"). The third part considers ethnographic evidence from recent fieldwork, presenting preliminary findings from that research setting. The final section discusses the implications of the analysis, focusing on the "burden of acting white" and academic success among black adolescents. A six-page reference list is appended. (LHW)
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2004/1/01