Do black kids lag because of culture or racism? Ogbu's new book.

Great Debates
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John U. Ogbu’s book, “Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb” hasn’t been published yet, but it’s already controversial. Ogbu – who helped popularize the notion that hardworking black students are often put down by their peers for “acting white” – said

People like Ronald Ross strongly disagree. Ross, a “distinguished fellow for urban education reform” at the New York office of the National Urban League, is credited with turning around the school system of Mount Vernon, N.Y. in the few years of his recent superintendency.

So, is the problem black culture or racism?

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I might add that my answer would be racism. I’m sure Prof. Ogbu has a point, but the schools have to take the students as they are. Culture is really difficult to change. If there are aspects of culture that interfere with education, it’s the schools’ responsibility to deal with it.

Teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats who expect less from black students or who have given up on them or who base their choice of educational methods on factors other than effectiveness – all these people need to shape up.

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december: So, is the problem black culture or racism?

Yikes, december, could you possibly make the question any more vague and fuzzy? To address your topic, we’d have to have reliable answers to at least the following questions:

  1. Do black schoolchildren underperform academically compared to the general population? In what way(s) and to what extent?

  2. If the “underperforming” phenomenon exists, does it persist even when the samples are corrected for socioeconomic class and other factors separate from race?

  3. If so, what are the potential causes of such an apparently race-specific phenomenon? Are “racism” and “black culture” really the only, or major, two potential causes?

  4. What is the evidence for racism affecting black students’ academic achievement? In what way(s) and to what extent?

  5. What is the evidence for “black culture” affecting black students’ academic achievement? In what way(s) and to what extent?

Go find some properly-supported answers to those questions, december—it will probably help to look for some more substantive sources than rumors about a yet-unpublished book and a documentation-free speech—and then we can start a debate.

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I very rarely post in GD so if my comment is not up to snuff feel free to beat me later

My peers put me down for acting “white” But it didn’t make me fail school or anything, BIG poppa was never my role model or any of the other rappers in my time.

I would have to say that sometimes its probably a combo of both racism and black culture. I really don’t believe int he whole " The Man is trying to hold me down as a black person" theory. But there is definatley racism out there. I agree with december about the teachers who need to shape up. Not saying that there are not any good teachers out there because there are plenty- its just weeding out the few bad apples.

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I gather that Ogbu’s book has figures on this.

Yes, Ogbu’s research was done in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where all the kids came from middle class or upper middle class homes.

These are good questions, which I see as material for debate here.

At this moment, my only source is the quotes in the cited article from Ross.

There is Ogbu’s book, which isn’t even out yet. I have an impression that some others have written about this, but I don’t have cites at hand.

The book was reported in an New York Times article – hardly a rumor (unless you have joined me on the Times-trashing team :wink: ). If I had more information, I’d include it. I hope what’s here is a sufficient basis to begin a debate.

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december: I gather that Ogbu’s book has figures […] At this moment, my only source is the quotes in the cited article […] I have an impression that some others have written about this, but I don’t have cites at hand […] If I had more information, I’d include it.

Sorry, but this is no help at all.

I hope what’s here is a sufficient basis to begin a debate.

You better hope that somebody else takes pity on your investigative impotence and provides some actual data to debate about. Chanukah’s over, so I ain’t helping out on this one. :smiley:

In the meantime, what we are left with is DN’s perfectly reasonable opinion that “sometimes it’s probably a combo of both racism and black culture.” Fine, and I bet we can all agree with that; but if you want to discuss this issue beyond the level of personal impressions and anecdotal evidence, you’re going to need data.

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In my sphere of reference, black kids don’t lag…dumb kids lag. I lagged in high school, and I’m white. My parents blamed my friends and my school. Lots of kids excelled in my school, both black and white. I just had a very short attention span, but my parents blamed everyone but me. I don’t think of myself as dumb now, but in HS, you really couldn’t tell the difference. It’s just easier to blame someone else than to admit your kid is dumb (or has attention problems). I’m sure if we were black, my mom would have been the first to cry ‘racism!’

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I don’t think there is much dissent on this one. The answer seems to be ‘Yes’, and “Pretty much across the board”, respectively. Cite.

Also yes. Although I would not necessarily argue that socio-economic class is not connected with race.

Thomas Sowell, Education in America, compares the top quintile of black students with the top quintile of other, in school performance. Even at the top, whites and Asians outperform blacks.

If I get a chance, I can perhaps dig up some online cites for the differences corrected by socio-economic class.

Standard disclaimer -
Please don’t assume from any of this that I think blacks are inferior or any of that.

Regards,
Shodan

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I blame it 100% on black culture. In my school, which is in a very diverse suburb of Baltimore, there is roughly a 45-45 black-white ratio. I’ve noticed that among the black population, it generally isn’t “cool” to get good grades, or to put any effort into school whatsoever. Most people who cut class or walk in the halls aimlessly are blacks. I couldn’t count the number of blacks in the advanced/higher learning classes (Advanced Placement, Gifted & Talented, whatever you want to call it) on one hand (out of about 1500 people who go to my school). I also only see pregnant blacks and hispanics (which isn’t school related, but still deals with intolerance). Blacks at my school tend to be very racist towards whites, probably because of our differences in culture.

My dad told me once about when he was an RA in his dorm at University of MD. He had to submit a report evey month dealing with the major problems in his dorm. While you’d think it would be drugs, gambling, or partying, he said it was the clash between upscale, smart, suburban blacks and the less smart, affirmitive action, “ghetto” blacks. The ghetto blacks hated the suburban blacks because they we’re “giving in to the white man” and some other crazy bullshit. They said the suburban blacks are traitors basically because they were succeeding in life and wearing polo shirts and sweaters and not baggy jeans and gold chains.

I agree with Ogbu completely; the short summary of his views basically summarizes my affluent suburban school situation.

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Hoping Splanky has asbestos underwear…
:rolleyes:

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Hey, I tried to keep this thing on the plane of factual evidence and rational debate (and so did Shodan). Doesn’t often work for december OP’s, though.

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In my experience at many integrated public schools in the NY area, the blocks to education have been cultural and economical. I haven’t seen any latent racism preventing black kids from suceeding, though this doesn’t mean there isn’t any, but does imply it is at best a minor factor.

Buttressing this, though still anecdotal, would be my experiences, both as a student and as the son of a teacher, with black immigrants and their entirely different culture. My personal data says once they make it past their linguistic handicaps, they compare favorably (or better than) their economic white counterparts.

I haven’t seen any studies that outright make this comparison, and I’m not holding my breath for hard data on this touchy subject.

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I actually thought the OP was fine.

If vulnerable to abuse…

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Splanky, could there be a socio-economic factor there?

My junior high’s school district was made up of middle class white neighborhoods and a couple poor neighborhoods primarily composed of black and hispanic families. As such, the school, while diverse, was composed of kids from different types of separate neighborhoods, the 40-50% white population being in the nice neighborhoods, and the 20-30% black population and 20-30% hispanic population being in the poor neighborhoods.

The vast majority of troublemakers, detention regulars, remedial students, violent kids/bullies, class skippers, etc., were black and hispanic. Of the few white kids who also acted in such a way, just about all of them were of the few white kids from the poor neighborhoods, and all of them hung out with the kids who lived near them. All of the black and hispanic friends I had in junior high were good students and most lived in the nicer neighborhoods.

While one could argue that it is a cultural thing concerning ethnicity, it could also be viewed as a cultural thing concerning socio-economic status, a poor culture, so to speak. In the case of my junior high, it seemed to me that it was more a matter of poor culture than ethnic culture, but because the categories of “poor” and “black/hispanic” overlapped so much, it could easily be seen as a matter of ethnic culture.

It appears that the study cited in the OP concerns a middle class area, and assuming that it is a middle class area unlike where I lived (which had separate middle class and poor sections), there could be an argument that ethnic culture is a larger factor than it may be. Still, given my experience (not that one person’s experience makes a rule), I can’t help but think that socio-economic situation and ethnicity are often closely linked, and that it’s hard to separate them when examining the cause of things such as poor performance in school. I guess we would have to wait for the book to come out to see how the study was made.

This thread does have some characteristics of an IMHO type thread, but I’m sure enough people will provide enough debatable posting material to keep it in GD :slight_smile:

shudders as he imagines being parsed, then nervously presses “Submit Reply”

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I think racism and internal oppression go hand-in-hand in a self-fullfilling-prophesy kind of way.

Black students’ are more likely to be labeled as learning disabled and mentally retarded. They are more likely to be put into special education and remedial tracks.

http://www.ascd.org/readingroom/edlead/0212/22.html

http://mail.math.ucsb.edu/pipermail/emeli-l/2001-May/000144.html

http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~meyers/education-term.html

Often black kids get shunted into remedial/vocational tracks,while the honors classes are full of white kids. I noticed it in both middle and high school. There were a couple of times when I was mistakenly put into “bad” classes even though I always had good grades, and I had to get my mother to fix the situation.

I went to a high school that was 60% black, 40% white. But the AP classes were always 80-90% white. And not all of those kids deserved to be there. For every stupid white kid in one of those “good” classes, there was a smart black kid in one of the “bad” classes who no one noticed. But at my school, the white students were usually more well-off than the black students, and their parents had clout at the school (because most of the black kids were “bussees”). If you put Jimmy Jr. in the average English class, Jimmy Sr. would threaten to make heads roll, so Jimmy Jr. was always automatically put into the honors/AP classes. I saw this happen so often that I know it has to happen in other places.

What happens when your teachers have low expections? You start to have low expections. What happens when all the white kids are in the gifted program? You start thinking that to be “black” is to be stupid. And then you only perpetuate the stereotypes of negro inferiority by accepting these assumptions.

(I also think there’s a difference in the level of benefit of doubt given to white and black kids. If a white kid flails in school, they are labeled “lazy” or “disinterested”, but “very bright”. If a black kid flails, they are assumed to be incompetent and stupid. I saw this distinction made throughout my entire school career. Very frustrating!)

I also think there’s a cultural component involved, but not in the way mentioned by the OP. This is a big generalization, but I think black families are more likely to encourage a balance of interests. Do well in school, but don’t go crazy with it to the point where you’re stressed out and don’t have time to develop yourself in other ways When I was in high school, most of the extracurriculars were dominated by black students. Cheerleading, sports, marching band, service clubs, student government…very few white students participated in those activities at my school. Perhaps excurricular performance isn’t important, but I think there is something said for well-roundedness.

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When the word “culture” is used what does that signify? Does a rich white kid and poor white one have the same culture? I don’t think so. I think too many people assume that there isn’t a significant “cultural” difference between poor and rich black people, and so they extrapolate what goes on in one group’s head to another. Bad idea, I think.

But anyway…

The education system in Atlanta where I grew up was highly influenced by racial politics. My K-12 experience was spent in a rather affluent, predominately white part of town, and during that time “white flight” was the dirty little secret that everyone knew was going on but no one dared to speak about. Lots of the white kids who had been going to my school were whisked off to other school districts or to local private schools, much to the consternation of the school administrators. There was a lot of pressure for the system to keep white kids (and their parents) from running way, and I could see the shady manifestations of this pressure.

In elementary school it wasn’t so bad. There was a program called Challenge that was intended for the gifted kids and it was predominately white, but there was enough black kids in it (usually middle-classed) that it wasn’t overwhelmingly so. In middle school, however, where the one-class a day formula shifted to multiple classes, things began to look much more racially and socio-economically segregated.

My middle school was about half white and half black. The school set up classes based on a “team” system, and it was tacitly understood that all the smart kids were in team 1 and 2 (which had, coincidentally, all the good teachers) and all the dumb kids were in team 3 (which was run by crazy, irresponsible, incompetent teachers). And strangely enough, the smart teams were disproportionately white and/ or middle class, and the dumb team was mostly full of blacks and/or poor kids.

Someone could easily look at such a set up and conclude that perhaps the white/rich kids were simply smarter than the black/poor kids, and that’s why things were grouped like that. But I lived in the system and I know that’s not how things went. Some of the dumbest people I know were on the “smart team”. They had bad grades and didn’t volunteer themselves in class, were content in sitting in the back of the room making spitballs instead of taking notes, and yet they were considered to be smart and therefore deserving of good educations. And disproportionately, these slackers were white. If I had a nickle for everytime I heard someone say Johnny was “really smart, he just doesn’t apply himself”…argggh!

I spent most of my time on the “smart team”, but one year I was put on the “dumb team” for reasons unrelated to grades (I made great grades) or aptitude (I was very bright). Knowing what I know now, I believe my race and my home address (southside Atlanta) played a big part in how my classes that year were scheduled. But I thank God that most of the time I was tracked in a way that was favorable to my goals and educational experience, because bad luck could have easily sent me down a path of mediocrity.

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To start out, I’m sorry if my post was too biased. This is Great Debates, I know, my post was very IMHO. But if you think about it, any straight information on this topic will be biased.

Banger, I agree that it could have socio-eco factors, but I think that fits in with culture. I think that a poor social/economic upbringing also fits in with something else- lack of family/proper upbringing. The same people you see cutting classes or flunking out are the terribly rude ones who cuss out teachers, get in fights, make destructive decisions, or whatever. It makes me stop and think if their parents knew how to raise a child properly. This is exactly what Ogbu is pointing out- parents don’t have enough time to raise their children because they are out supporting them by working. This also fits in with the socio-economic idea.

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Right. But to call that the product of “black culture” and not “socio-economic culture” is where you are blurring lines that don’t need to be blurred.

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Well, now that Jay-Z is principal for the day at various schools, the problem will go away.