Karolyn Tyson

It's not a black thing : Understanding the burden of acting white and other dilemmas of high achievement

For two decades the acting white hypothesis—the premise that black students are driven toward low school performance because of racialized peer pressure—has served as an explanation for the black-white achievement gap. Fordham and Ogbu proposed that black youths sabotage their own school careers by taking an oppositional stance toward academic achievement. Using interviews and existing data from eight North Carolina secondary public schools, this article shows that black adolescents are generally achievement oriented and that racialized peer pressure against high academic achievement is not prevalent in all schools. The analysis also shows important similarities in the experiences of black and white high-achieving students, indicating that dilemmas of high achievement are generalizable beyond a specific group. Typically, highachieving students, regardless of race, are to some degree stigmatized as “nerds” or “geeks.” The data suggest that school structures, rather than culture, may help explain when this stigma becomes racialized, producing a burden of acting white for black adolescents, and when it becomes class-based, producing a burden of “acting high and mighty” for low-income whites. Recognizing the similarities in these processes can help us refocus and refine understandings of the black-white achievement gap.

Weighing In: Elementary-Age Students and the Debate on Attitudes toward School among Black Students

Many of the prevailing theories concerning the relatively low academic performance of African American students tend to center on the attitudes of adolescents. Much less research attention has been paid to the attitudes of younger students. As a result, the image of black adolescents — who, like most American adolescents, exhibit oppositional attitudes — has come to represent much of what we know and take for granted about black students as a group. The findings of this study, based on data collected in an ethnographic study of two all-black elementary schools, suggest that black children begin school very much achievement-oriented and engaged with the process of schooling. These findings provide evidence that the school experience plays a significant role in the development of attitudes toward school.

Other People’s Racism: Race, Rednecks, and Riots in a Southern High School

This article uses data drawn from nine months of fieldwork and student, teacher, and administrator interviews at a southern high school to analyze school racial conflict and the construction of racism. We find that institutional inequalities that stratify students by race and class are routinely ignored by school actors who, we argue, use the presence of so-called redneck students to plausibly deny racism while furthering the standard definition of racism as blatant prejudice and an individual trait. The historical prominence of rednecks as a southern cultural identity augments these claims, leading to an implicit division of school actors into friendly/nonracist and unfriendly/racist and allowing school actors to set boundaries on the meaning of racism. Yet these rhetorical practices and the institutional structures they mask contributed to racial tensions, culminating in a race riot during our time at the school.

The More You Talk, the Worse It Is Student Perceptions of Law and Authority in Schools

Prior works have established the association between students’ perceptions of school discipline and both behavioral and academic outcomes. The interplay between disciplinary fairness and students’ perceptions of their rights, however, warrants further investigation. In an effort to better understand the development of students’ perceptions of school disciplinary climates amid variation in school legal environments, we identified students’ perceptions of their due process rights based on 5,490 student surveys and 86 in-depth interviews in New York, North Carolina, and California high schools. We then examine the link between students’ perceptions of their due process rights, their past experiences with school discipline, and their perceptions of school disciplinary fairness. While quantitative results reveal a negative relationship between students’ perceptions of their rights and perceptions of disciplinary fairness, our qualitative data bolster this finding and deepen our understanding of students’ perceptions, illustrating students’ complex, varied, and often vague understandings of their due process rights when faced with disciplinary sanctions. As prior work has underscored the critical relationship between students’ perceptions of their schooling experiences and educational outcomes, uncovering this negative relationship is an important step toward understanding how variation in perceptions of rights may have consequences for students’ educational outcomes.