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School Success Coping With The Burden Of Acting White

495 Words2 Pages

Influencing the Community
The way we think, act, and speak is directly related to the place and time we belong to. Thereafter, our own self is constantly being shaped by the society we live in. Whether we like it or not, it is happening without us even noticing it. Just think about it, from the food we like to the language we speak; it’s all because of the society we live in. While being a part of society happens effortlessly, belonging to a specific group can often be challenging in a variety of ways. In the article Black Students’ School Success Coping With the “Burden of ‘Acting White’ ” by Signithia Fordham and John U. Ogbu; the authors show how much black students are affected by their own black community.
Just as white people are expected to act in certain ways, black people are as well. Unfortunately, wanting to get educated, getting good grades, and achieve academic success in general was not considered a very “black-people-kind-of-thing”. For the black community of Capital High School, anything related to achieving academic success was viewed as “acting white”. This reasoning, led African American students to be focused on belonging to the black community …show more content…

I question whether this would really help or not. I believe it wouldn’t, because this idea of “acting white” is not something students are learning at school. They are experiencing it at schools, but they are learning it in their neighborhoods, in their houses, with their families and friends. Unless, the teacher is lecturing students in how to “act white” and “act black”, which I don’t think so. Just as there is “acting white” behavior for blacks; there is “acting black” behavior for whites. Both of them are social constructed labels based on stereotypes; nobody taught it to us we were born into

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