It is very definitely a serious issue:
Acting White Hoover Institution
Acting White blackcommentator.com
A Good-School, Bad-Grade Mystery 1998 Washington Post report on (and repeated by) the Shaker Heights OH schools, where the theory of “acting white” has been very thoroughly discussed
Every time I hear about “acting white”, I get very confused. When I was in school, the kids that struggled were teased. The kids who did well were not taunted for ‘acting white’.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There were lots of things that a child could do that would get them called that. If a child spoke without any slang, or in a manner that didn’t include certain ways we spoke in “the hood”. If a child dressed a certain way. There was something about certain children who were raised in the suburbs, and then moved into the city that the other kids considered “white”.
But it wasn’t academic success that got the label “acting white”. If you were called on to read aloud, and you struggled, immediately the other kids would say, “Aw, N!gga, you can’t read!”
I can only speak of my own experience, of course.
According to the author of the first article to which I linked (and i’ve seen similar statements in the dozens of locally published commentaris on the Shaker Heights schools (since they are local), “acting white” is most often (possibly only) a problem in well integrated schools, most frequently public schools. Black only (and overwhelmingly majority black) schools and private schools do not seem to suffer this particular phenomenon.
That explains it then. I have only ever attended mostly black schools.
As an “advantaged” white male, I can attest to this notion.
My own father, for whatever misguided notions, did his best to instill in me a few key “facts” (paraphrased):
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99% of all people are total fucking idiots for working 1/3 of their waking lives, “just to put a roof over their head”.
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College is bullshit, it won’t ever help you in the real world.
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Your (my) own intrinsic intelligence is enough to succeed.
I AM smart. I did succeed. Several times. And I might again. But right now I’m struggling like ass it and totally sucks. Right now, I could really use that degree. I could have used ANY work ethic. And maybe I could have used a little less ego about my IQ.
edit: I put “advantaged” in quotes because I wasn’t I was middle class all the way. My day was “upper middle class” though… my grandparents bought both newspapers in town, combined them, etc… He didn’t realize what I saw.
“day” = dad…
The money was gone by the time I was born… but my dad did start and maintain several very successfull businesses… the dickhead just forgot to pay his damned taxes.
As for the original question…
I’d be more inclined to give some kind of “break” to people in the ghetto if I could believe that the current state of poor black America is at a natural midway point in their process of recovering from the damage of slavery and discrimination. If, in effect, every year that passed since the end of slavery and Jim Crow healed the wounds a little more, and brought black America more and more into the mainstream, either through their own agency or through government programs. For some classes of black Americans, that seems to have been the case: middle and upper class blacks are richer and more powerful and mainstream than ever before – the process for them seems nearly complete, in fact. African immigrants have been a huge success story. (My first year in college I had four roommates: two white guys from rural areas, and two black guys who were the children of African immigrants. Both of the black guys were far, far richer than any of us whites.) But the large black underclass seems to have gotten worse in some ways, even as institutional and cultural racism have drastically declined. (And say what you want about how prevalent racism still is, it’s still a lot better than it used to be.) In America in Black and White, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom talk about how the black crime rate in the US soared in the 1960s, even as black income was quickly rising and institutional racism was being dismantled. Even more disturbingly, the disparity in black and white murder rates consistently rose in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement, at least up through the '90s when the book was published (I don’t know the latest figures). Shouldn’t time and distance have made that disparity decline? In other areas, you have things like the news blip from a couple months ago that a black child born into slavery 150 years ago had a higher chance of being born into a 2-parent home than a black child born today! Black and white culture are increasingly divergent: according to this article, “more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year.” In and of itself that shouldn’t matter, but given historical trends of assimilation, it’s a worrying sign. (The article notes: “What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-income, undereducated, teenage mother from a black neighborhood.”) The test-score gap has narrowed and widened again, even though, again, opportunities and income have increased.
Anecdotally, I’ve witnessed some of this decline in my own life. I used to work at a grocery store in a ghetto-ish neighborhood in Chicago (a couple miles from where Cabrini Green used to be). I was the only white employee. I talked a lot with my fellow co-workers and customers, and there was a significant difference in the attitudes and outlook of the older generation and the younger generation. A lot of the older folks were dismayed at what had happened to their neighborhood, and angry at what they saw in the younger generation. A lot of the younger people fit exactly into the worst stereotypes of the ghetto. (As ever, I’m not talking about everyone in any one group – I do remember a nice girl about my age who was working her way through college, and a great 30-something guy in the produce department who was married and supporting his two young kids.) In another case, I’ve known an older black woman from Baltimore for a long time. She was born poor, didn’t have much opportunity for education, and married very young. But she stayed married, worked incredibly hard, raised her daughter, and survived. Things were going okay, but then her granddaughter got into drugs, had a kid out of wedlock, got into some trouble with the law. This woman took her great-grandson in, but he ran around and disobeyed her, fell in with a bad crowd, and is currently in jail. Should this woman’s granddaughter and great-grandson be given a “break” even though they squandered their opportunities and made a worse life for themselves than their grandmother, who started life facing much more discrimination and much, much narrower opportunities? (Incidentally, I’ve noticed that this kind of thing is a common theme in black popular entertainment – strict, conservative grandparents trying to take care of their grandchildren.)
If things have indeed gotten worse, it makes me think that the depth of the problem today is to a significant degree not just the fault of the past crimes commited against black Americans, but, again, a result of the poisonous ghetto culture that has been allowed to grow and fester throughout the country. I’m not completely absolving whites or American society for the situation, but blaming them for the full degradations of the ghetto seems to me a bit like Robert Mugabe blaming the nightmare he’s gotten his country into on white colonialism: colonialism undoubtedly played a part in the origins of the problem, for which Britain bears some residual responsibility, but ultimately the bulk of the current situation rests squarely on his shoulders.
Hope that all made sense. 
I think that this is a legitimate observation, but is actually the point of this thread. We have, thankfully, not had many participants claiming that it is “all” the fault of slavery and Jim Crow or that it is an explicitly black problem. What we appear to face is a unique situation in which the majority of people from all immigrant/ethnic enclaves (including black people) have escaped those locales and their attendant poverty, but that for some reason, a specific subgroup of blacks have failed to make the same transition. Simplistic claims about slavery, Jim Crow, laziness, criminal attitudes or whatever do not seem to provide either adequate explanations as to why the condition continues or how it can be fixed, and I suspect that that the OP was seeking answers to both questions that went beyond the simplistic or trite.