Perhaps the most surprising part of a recent documentary that ran on PBS was the deep nostalgia that the older African-Americans interviewed in it showed for their segregated school. The film, A Place Out of Time—The Bordentown School, describes an all-black New Jersey school founded in the late 19th century and closed in 1955, a year after Brown v. Board of Education—because it could not attract enough white students. The interviewees marveled at the direction the school gave them, the pride it instilled, and the accomplishment it afforded them later in life. As one man recalled, “the teachers gave you a hard time, but not because you were black.”
That something was lost in the process of desegregating America’s public schools is not a common or politically correct observation. And it’s perhaps not a particularly helpful one unless there is something else to be said on the subject. Stuart Buck, a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Arkansas, has something else to say. In his new book, Acting White, Buck attempts to trace modern black culture’s aversion to education and anti-intellectual attitudes to the era of desegregation. The phrase “acting white”—used to shame black students who aspire to academic success for being traitors to their race—was never heard, according to Buck, before schools were integrated in the late 50s and early 60s.
Buck’s extensively researched and clearly written treatise begins with a tour of the literature on “acting white.” He ticks off all the other possible explanations for why “the average black high school senior in America is performing at about the level of white eighth graders.” None of those other explanations is satisfying. Those who think money is the problem might want to know that schools with high concentrations of black students often spend more per pupil than their white counterparts. Research shows that the so-called stereotype threat, in which blacks are fearful of confirming white views of their supposed inferiority, cannot begin to explain the achievement gap. But the most important evidence of black children’s fear of “acting white” is this: even blacks who come from stable, middle-class homes tend to do more poorly in school than whites from the same background.
The fact that the accusation of “acting white” can have such a strong effect on a child’s academic performance is both counterintuitive and frightening for most parents. We don’t like to think that peers can do so much to undermine the messages that children receive at home. But the studies that Buck cites—showing how black students’ popularity decreases as their achievement level rises, whereas whites experience the opposite effect—are devastating. How has such a destructive idea taken hold in the black community so that even 10-year-olds are destined to stay on-message?
It was not always thus, says Buck. He trolls the archives of newspapers, diaries, radio interviews, and social science to show that after slavery, blacks could not enroll in schools fast enough. Though these Reconstruction-era institutions were often in terrible condition, with poor lighting, leaky roofs, and outdated textbooks, black children (and adults) would beg to stay in school longer. One teacher from Virginia noted that when summer vacation was about to start, “several students came to her in tears and said, ‘Now Miss Dodd, you ought not to stop school for we are just beginning to learn.’” An observer of a black school in Florida wrote: “The eagerness and thirst for knowledge manifested by the freedmen’s children has been to me a matter of continual surprise. They gather round the schoolroom door long before the hour of opening, study diligently through the regular school hours and beg for admittance to the adults school at night, at which time they may frequently be found in the same class with their parents helping them through the mysteries of the alphabet.” The former slaves and their children often gave what little money they had to ensure the continued operation of schools.
During the Jim Crow years, black schools were something of a haven, even the center of community life, for many blacks. The principals, Buck explains, were often the most respected men in the community. The teachers at black schools were dedicated and caring and demanded high performance from students. William Pollard, a dean at Syracuse University, says that his teachers in a black school in segregated North Carolina “would not accept mediocre work because they knew that I could not function in a racist society being a mediocre person.”
In the years following the Brown decision, almost all the black schools were closed. Some of them, writes Buck, were actually in better condition than the white schools, but whites would not go to previously black schools. The black principals were either demoted or fired. Some of the black teachers remained, but starting in the 60s, with more professional opportunities open to blacks, their percentage of the teaching force started to diminish.
Buck paints a stark picture of what black students in one of the newly integrated schools faced: a lack of black adult role models, white teachers who were at best condescending and at worst hostile, and white peers who tried to keep them out of extracurricular activities. Black students who were typically behind their white peers academically were placed in the lowest-performing classes. In other words, whites dominated the schools, and if a black child showed an aptitude for academics—or even an enjoyment of them—he was, well, acting white.
Buck offers an insightful hypothetical here. What if, after desegregation, all the black churches had been closed? Black ministers would have been demoted, as they probably had less formal education. Blacks would have gone to religious services in nicer digs, but they would have had to adapt to white worship traditions. “In other words, black people would have been taken out of a church that, for better or worse, they could call their own, and would instead have found themselves a most unwelcome minority in a white-controlled church.” Going to church would have become something that white people—or people trying to fit in with white people—do.
It is just around the time of desegregation that the phrase “acting white” starts popping up in the literature. Buck has found hundreds of examples to corroborate the words of Henry Louis Gates, who said, “If anyone had said [that making straight A’s was acting white] when we were growing up in the 50s, first your mother would smack you upside the head, and second, they’d check you into a mental institution.”
But one wonders whether Buck went back far enough in his research. Is the notion that education was something pursued by whites and that blacks who did so were trying to be like whites really so recent? The resentment that field slaves had for house slaves was not merely that the former were envious of the relatively easier lives of the latter. Weren’t the lighter-skinned house slaves (often the illegitimate children of slave holders) sometimes educated alongside the master’s children? Didn’t the field slaves see them as getting a little too close to whites and the things that whites valued?
In his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell traces back the low academic performance of blacks today to the adoption by blacks of Southern white values. Low regard for human life, high illegitimacy rates, disdain of education, even a similar dialect, says Sowell, characterize both black culture and white “hillbilly culture.” And he traces the similarities back to their contact in the 17th and 18th centuries. But then what should we make of the words of John W. Alvord, the superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau? “Here is a people long imbruted by slavery,” Alvord wrote, “and the most despised of any on earth, whose chains are no sooner broken than they spring to their feet and start up an exceeding great army, clothing themselves in intelligence. What other people on earth have ever shown, while in their ignorance, such a passion for education?”
Both Buck and Sowell seem to agree that the 1960s were a turning point for black culture and education. That was when, as Sowell suggests, intellectuals “began promoting the idea that those blacks who exhibited a culture different from the ghetto or black redneck culture were not ‘really’ authentic blacks.” This message, that real blacks did not want education, was being enforced from the top down and, as Buck shows, from the bottom up.
Buck’s suggestions for how to solve this problem include more single-sex education and schools that compete against one another in academics the way they do in sports. Both ideas, Buck believes, might encourage a kind of group solidarity that can ultimately shift the direction of peer pressure.
Throughout Acting White, Buck repeatedly makes clear that he does not favor a return to segregation. Reasonable people, in fact, will tire of his disclaimers. You might ask yourself, “Who the heck would write a book in favor of segregation?” after the third or fourth repudiation.
But then it says something about the academic world in which Buck operates that he must emphasize this point repeatedly and that the very topic of his research renders him suspect. Perhaps that is the charitable explanation for this little tidbit about Buck from the book jacket: “Along with his wife he is the adoptive parent of two black children, including one from Haiti.” What does it mean that Buck had to add this in order to insulate himself from criticism? Never mind it, though. Stuart Buck needs no excuse to write on race. His work stands on its own.