Stuart Buck

Naomi Schaefer Riley has a warm review of the book in the most recent edition of Commentary. Available only to subscribers.

I recorded a segment for the Michael Eric Dyson show today. I don’t yet know exactly when it will air. Dyson — a prominent African-American public intellectual and scholar — seemed to like the book quite a bit, even though I criticize one of his books on the first page of chapter 1.

Steve Peha liked the book, as seen by his list of book recommendations at the National Journal:

Stuart Buck’s Acting White is powerful and provides a reasonably original theory that can be said to at least partly explain the achievement gap. If you were around in the 1960s to remember desegregation, this is your book. But even if you were born in 1963, like me, you’ll still find it just as powerful. My big takeaway: little has changed. Buck quotes people from the 60s who lived through desegregation and whose grand children still attend our the local schools in the town where I currently live. I hear exactly the same comments about our schools today that folks were making a half century earlier. We are integrating but we are still not educating, and in some ways we are educating some people worse than ever.

Peha earlier had a long review of the book at Dropout Nation.

I have a blog post published at the Washington Post discussing the theme of my book.

The Washington Times has a nice review here.

Luther Spoehr of Brown gives the book a nice review at the History News Network.

The Atlantic Wire covers the book here.

John McWhorter pens another nice article defending the book at The Root.

At TAPPED (the blog of The American Prospect), Jamelle Bouie has a post disagreeing with my book. He says:

By and large, this exchange is almost entirely anecdotal; if you set aside personal childhood memories, there simply isn’t much broad empirical evidence for the claim that black students in integrated settings have a racialized antipathy toward educational achievement.

There’s a lot more evidence for “acting white” than personal childhood memories. Out of the many studies on the issue, the best is Roland Fryer’s empirical study of a nationally representative database in which students had been asked (among other things) to list out a certain number of friends. It turned out that after controlling for other variables that affect popularity, black students above a 3.5 GPA became significantly less popular. This was true mostly in integrated schools, and particularly in schools with internal integration:

I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity. . . .

Unfortunately, internal integration only aggravates the problem. Blacks in less-integrated schools (places with fewer than expected cross-ethnic friendships) encounter less of a trade-off between popularity and achievement. In fact, the effect of acting white on popularity appears to be twice as large in the more-integrated (racially mixed) schools as in the less-integrated ones.Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark,with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!

This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line.

Bouie continues:

Even Buck, whose book is the focus of the discussion, leaves room for alternative explanations. From the beginning, he concedes that the evidence for his claim isn’t conclusive and that to some degree, he is relying on the “absence of evidence” against it.

This is a mistaken interpretation.

The only thing that Bouie could be referring to is a single passage of the book, wherein I offer an admittedly speculative theory that the true effect of “acting white” is probably greater than could ever be empirically measured, because young adolescents often may be unaware of (or unable or unwilling to articulate) how deeply they have been influenced by peer pressure. Indeed, we are all affected by peer pressure in ways that we don’t normally think about. For example, no one wears a swimsuit to an important business meeting — not because of express peer pressure, but because we don’t even imagine doing so. We just instinctively know that to do so would upset our peers. Thus, perhaps peer pressure is the most powerful where people aren’t even consciously thinking about it.

In that context, I admitted that this particular argument — that acting white could be far more powerful than we realize — was possibly making too much of the absence of evidence. I do this sort of thing throughout the book; that is, I expressly raise and address counterarguments, while admitting the limitations of my own data and arguments. But I never suggest that the “acting white” phenomenon itself is characterized by the “absence of evidence.” Far from it.

John McWhorter and Richard Thompson Ford discuss my book here:

I was interviewed early this morning by The Takeaway, a national morning news program jointly produced by WNYC, the New York Times, the BBC, Public Radio International, and WGBH. The audio is here:

No. That’s not what the book argues. It’s more like this: segregation was a cancer on American society, and desegregation was like a powerful drug that combatted the cancer. Powerful drugs can have side effects that need to be addressed, but that doesn’t mean that it was better to have cancer.

Two recent blog posts (by Matthew Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie at Tapped) make the mistake of assuming that my book argues that desegregation was an overall negative. They then point to statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showing that the black-white test score gap has moderately decreased since 1978. They then conclude that “the resources made available by desegregation have done a lot to improve educational outcomes among African Americans” (Bouie) and that “desegregation probably has had some ironic effects, but the main effects of African-Americans’ greater economic, social, and cultural equality have been about what you would expect” (Yglesias).

Yes, but this is missing the point. I expressly point out in the book that desegregation had lots of benefits — the fact that it arguably had one ironic side effect doesn’t imply that it had an overall negative effect. Moreover, Roland Fryer’s empirical work suggested that the “acting white” effect (that is, the popularity penalty suffered by blacks with high grades, which he found mostly in well-integrated schools) “explain[s] 11.3% of the black-white test score gap.” In other words, absent this effect, the benefits of desegregation could have been greater, and black kids would be doing even better today.

Stanford’s Richard Thompson Ford has a review of my book in Slate today. Even though he ultimately disagrees with my book’s thesis, the review is as fair and thoughtful as an author could hope.

He ascribes the “acting white” phenomenon not to school desegregation, but to the social isolation that often occurred as an unfortunate byproduct of the civil rights movement more broadly:

Today’s black underclass may not be as poor as many blacks were in the 1950s, but its isolation from the mainstream and from positive role models is actually worse. As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has shown, the concentration of poverty in inner cities became a crisis in the decades after the civil rights movement, as suburbanization and the decline of manufacturing hollowed out inner cities and as the most successful and talented blacks pursued newly available opportunities outside segregated ghettoes. The inadvertent result was a “brain drain” and a diversion of resources away from many black neighborhoods and black institutions. Those blacks left behind in inner cities faced anemic local economies, weakened social networks, withered institutions, and failing schools. These larger economic and demographic shifts disrupted black communities and displaced black role models, creating “super ghettos” of unprecedented isolation, joblessness, and social dysfunction.

So even if school desegregation hadn’t shuttered many promising black schools, the rest of the civil rights revolution would still have undermined them. In the segregated job markets, many of the most talented blacks became school teachers and principals in black schools; after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, they moved into more lucrative jobs in racially integrated firms and businesses. The costs of school desegregation that Buck identifies—the disruption of nurturing all-black institutions and communities, racial antagonism, mutual distrust, and black alienation in white dominated settings—are among the unintended consequences of desegregation generally. If many children growing up in these neighborhoods think of education as the exclusive domain of whites, that’s because they think of almost every mainstream aspiration as the exclusive domain of whites.

This is a compelling argument. Nonetheless it still seems hard for me to see how social isolation would necessarily cause some children to think that high achievement in school is somehow “white.” For that to happen, I think you need a situation where most of the teachers are white and/or where the advanced classes are mostly white. Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli’s empirical work did find that the “acting white” effect (that is, the popularity penalty experienced by black students with high grades) is “non-existent” in all-black inner city schools — which, to be sure, remain disadvantaged for many other reasons.

John McWhorter has a nice review of my book in The New Republic. A highlight:

Buck’s terrific book is longer on analysis than prescription; but its analysis comprises such invaluable history, and so deftly counters any fears underlying the pretense that the “acting white” charge is fictitious, that I cannot imagine we will soon see another book so utterly necessary on what used to be called the Race Question. Buck has cleared the ground of many illusions and innuendos, and this can only help us to get closer to a solution for the vast problem that still remains.