Oh my fucking god. I cannot stand the far left

[Kimstu]

@Tfletch1

@Wesley_Clark

This is somewhat off topic, but how do you feel about the subset of black people who have responded to the civil rights movement that gave them freedoms and opportunities by embracing criminality, out of wedlock pregnancy, rejecting education and literacy as being ‘too white’, etc?

I mostly lurk on this board, but have been here for several years. I know I’ve seen your posts. I never before pegged you as a racist, but this paragraph is your standard racist trope right there.

And while we’re talking about this, it’s worth pointing out that the standard conservative-centrist trope of large numbers of black Americans disdaining academic achievement on the grounds that it’s “acting white” has been repeatedly debunked.

You’ve probably heard it before: Too many black students don’t do well in school because they think being smart means “acting white.” […]

While the “acting white” theory used to be pretty popular to bring up in debates about black academic achievement there’s a catch: It’s not true.

At best, it’s a very creative interpretation of inadequate research and anecdotal evidence. At worst, it’s a messy attempt to transform the near-universal stigma attached to adolescent nerdiness into an indictment of black culture, while often ignoring the systemic inequality that contributes to the country’s racial achievement gap. […]

The “acting white” theory also validates a particular social conservative worldview by placing the blame for disparate academic outcomes squarely on the backward ideas of black children and black cultural pathology, instead of on harder-to-tackle factors like socioeconomic inequality, implicit racial bias on the part of teachers, segregated and underresourced schools, and the school discipline disparities that create what’s been called the school-to-prison pipeline. […]

A prime example of a shaky study on this topic, according to Toldson, was Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer’s 2006 research paper “Acting White: The Social Price Paid by the Best and the Brightest Minority Students*.“* […]

But the numbers didn’t actually add up to support the “acting white” theory, Toldson said. To start, the most popular black students in his study were the ones with 3.5 GPAs, and students with 4.0s had about as many friends as those with 3.0s. The least popular students? Those with less than a 2.5 GPA.

It seemed that the “social price” paid by the lowest-achieving black students was actually far greater than the price in popularity paid by the highest academic achievers. […]

Fryer’s research found that the very highest-achieving black kids were the least popular — but this likely had much less to do with beliefs about acting white and more to do with the fact that the very smartest kids of any race tend to suffer social stigma. […]

In a 2003 study titled “It’s not a black thing: Understanding the Burden of Acting White and Other Dilemmas of High Achievement,“ published in the American Sociological Review , researchers concluded that the smartest black and white students actually had similar experiences and that the stigma was similar across cultures […]

TL;DR:

• Do black American teens as a group look down on being smart or achieving academic success? No.
• Do some black American teens get bullied for “acting white”? Yes, but on the basis of social behavior—how you dress, what your interests are, where you live, and other aspects of your overall social “coolness factor”—rather than whether or not you’re good at school.
• Do some very high-achieving black students get bullied for “acting white”? Yes, but again, it’s because of their perceived general “uncoolness”, not because of their high academic achievement.
• Do very high-achieving black students get bullied by their same-race peers more than very high-achieving white students? No. Across all races, very high academic achievement often correlates with other interests that are seen as “nerdy” and “uncool”. The most dedicated bookworms are very seldom the most popular kids, whatever their race.

So the idea that black Americans themselves are significantly impeding the cause of racial equality by fostering some kind of genuinely influential “oppositional culture” that tries to sabotage black students’ academic achievement on the grounds that it’s “acting white”, while it may appeal to a lot of white Americans who don’t want to engage with the realities of persistent systemic racism. is a myth.