Disclaimer: this post is based on a review of the discussed book; I have not read the book itself. These are thus initial thoughts, and I'm open to critique or superior interpretations/analyses from anyone who has read the book, or similar research more carefully.
Is it possible that academic underperformance of school-age African American children is a result of the 1960s-1980s federal court-driven desegregation efforts? Stuart Buck thinks so. Emphasizing the link between historical school integration and development of a culture of "social disapproval of academic success among black students," Buck argues that the way that school desegregation was implemented--by closing down all-black schools and placing the students into all-white schools with all-white teaching staff and principals--led to an atmosphere of "hostility and contempt from white students" and "the soft prejudice of low expectations from racist teachers." Buck concludes that, as a result, "[m]any [black students] in such schools began to associate education with unsympathetic whites, to reject their studies, and to ostracize academically successful black students for 'acting white.'"
Hence the name of his new book, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Slate book reviewer Richard Thompson Ford summarizes the "acting white" problem thusly:
Many blacks—especially black young men—have come to the ruinous conclusion that academic excellence is somehow inconsistent with their racial identities, and they ridicule peers for "acting white" if they hit the books instead of the streets after school.
Buck seems to argue that this black student culture that devalues intellectual pursuit is responsible for the underperformance of black students. It seems that such a claim may be a stretch; is it really just "peer pressure," at the end of the day, that accounts for academic achievement gaps, or are the gaps themselves directly caused by the "soft" prejudices that Buck sees as the cause of "culture," and the "culture" then just another symptom? The reviewer, Ford, similarly points out that a narrow focus on how "acting white" plays out within schools neglects a larger trend of "belligerent youth subculture among poor blacks that rejects mainstream institutions generally," a subculture that Ford ties to social isolation associated with White Flight, corresponding to the same period of court-ordered desegregation of schools that Buck focuses on. Such social isolation, Ford argues, was magnified by the way that desegregation was implemented, which primarily placed black students in white schools with white staff, meaning that where previously teaching and principal jobs in black community schools provided locally-based professional jobs (where some of the brightest of the community might serve as role models), the elimination of these positions led to educated black professionals pursing "mainstream" industry jobs and moving into the suburbs, resulting in an African American "brain drain."
I'm not sure that I buy Buck's line of thinking wholesale; it seems that identifying the core problem as "belligerent youth subculture" (in Ford's words) is giving up on the logical train of thought too early on in the process. Ford seems to push the envelope a bit further by looking at institutions outside of schools (namely the police), but keeps generally within the bounds of Buck's issue with black "culture." But this is maybe just a semantic disagreement over whether this documented "culture" is a symptom or the actual problem. The important issue raised by both Buck and Ford is that desegregation as has been applied has had unintended negative consequences. The solution may be, as suggested by Buck, to embrace experimentation (read: vouchers) and soften contemporary orthodoxy regarding integration as the primary (and sometimes sole) objective, something that Ford points out may be necessary anyway given the most recent Supreme Court rulings against continued voluntary integration efforts. But it is also important to note, as Ford does not, that equally well-documented were the very real, measurable negative effects of segregated schools on African American youth. Buck and Ford may critique Brown v. Board of Education in retrospect, but the Supreme Court made that ruling, and subsequent desegregation rulings, with careful attention to the fact that separate was, in fact, inherently unequal. Any "experimentation" or reformed thinking regarding how to best (or, perhaps, whether) desegregate America's rapidly re-segregating schools must keep in mind that even if past desegregation did not actually produce equality, equality was the goal. And it should still be a goal today.
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