>How exactly does this apply to, say, the African American segment of the population, many of whom have been in the US for hundreds of years and most of whom know no other language than English?
There's an extreme anti-education element to black culture in the US. Caring about and one's education and working hard in school is derided as "acting white". It doesn't apply to everyone, of course (I knew black Americans at Georgetown and Stanford), but it's significant enough to bring down aggregate measures quite a lot. I've also seen studies showing that black parents spend less time helping their children with schoolwork than white and Asian parents.
The US school system isn't perfect (the inability to fire bad teachers, largely because of unions, is, in my opinion, among the biggest problems in the country), but it's not totally or even primarily at fault for the education problems among black people.
Also:
>There's something a little creepy about saying there's nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.
You're misrepresenting this, not sure if it's deliberate, but this is done for the sake of comparing the US to Europe, which is pretty reasonable and not crypto-racist as you imply.
There's an extreme anti-education element to black culture in the US. Caring about and one's education and working hard in school is derided as "acting white".
This is a very popular meme in tech circles, based mainly on John Ogbu's work, but if you actually look at the literature in the area, the results are all over the place. Roland Fryer at Harvard is a proponent of the "acting white" theory, but even he didn't agree with Ogbu and he had to "adjust" the definition of acting white to show a trend: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Empiric...
Erika Fisher: "According to the students themselves, their lack of academic success is not seen by them as a way to be anti-White or proBlack by any means. .. When asked how they felt about the high-achieving students, underachievers claimed to respect their determination and commitment to academics. They cite individual personality differences rather than a racial or ethnic divide as the cause of the achievement disparity between the groups." http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3626/is_200507/ai_n1...
They pointed out in that articles West Indian born generally grow up with their fathers. I think this is important. Here is some statistics of being fatherless:
15.3 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
4.6 times more likely to commit suicide
6.6 times more likely to become teenaged mothers
24.3 times more likely to run away
15.3 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
6.3 times more likely to be in a state-operated institutions
10.8 times more likely to commit rape
6.6 times more likely to drop out of school
15.3 times more likely to end up in prison while a teenage
73% of adolescent murderers come from mother only homes
6.3 times more likely to be in state operated institutions
70% of Black Americans are raised in a single parent household and if you can combine that with the above statistics, the picture is not pretty.
The problem with single-parent housing has more to do with the reduction in income than lack of an authority figure/role model: A substantial body of research has demonstrated that, once income differences are taken into account, differences between children in single mother and two-parent families are far less pronounced." http://www.alabamapolicy.org/pdf/currentfamilystructure.pdf
The other thing is that West Indians and African immigrants outperform everyone (including Asians).
I totally agree with it being an income issue, but I only had statistics about fatherless.
If others are looking for a reference on what he is talking about regarding West Indian and African Black Immigrants see below:
About 8 percent, or 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, they said, but somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of black undergraduates were "West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples."(Foreign Born blacks only make up about 1% of the US population)
http://thesouthern.com/news/opinion/editorial/page/article_2...
I'd agree that the US school system is not be the primary reason for education problems among blacks, but neither is the "extreme anti-education element." This element isn't exclusive to blacks and I don't see it as significant enough to bring down aggregate measures for blacks. That's too easy. Most black parents want their kids to do well in school. Unfortunately single parent households are prevalent in the black community. When a single parent is struggling to pay bills and keep food on the table that doesn't leave a lot time for helping with homework.
Also, the lack of black role models has an impact. Artists and athletes are the overwhelming majority of the successful blacks that we see and I wouldn't consider them most of them to be role models. How many blacks do you see out front in the most successful companies? The psychological impact is hard to quantify, but it's there. Why should a black kid be an engineer when he can be a rapper? This isn't necessarily "extreme anti-education" it's more pro-do-what-I-see-as-successful. This loop has existed for hundreds of years in various forms and is incredibly hard to break. Black kids desperately need to see success in areas other than entertainment and sports.
Why do black people need their role models to be black? Plenty of white kids in my day looked up to Michael Jordan as an incredibly hardworking athlete.
The "acting white" derision is pretty much exclusive to blacks, as far as I know. It's certainly not present among Asians or white people. I'm actually not sure about Hispanics but I've never heard of education being frowned upon by them. I don't know what you mean by "that's too easy", but I've heard it cited as the main problem in socio studies, by people like Bill Cosby, and in firsthand accounts in things like reddit AMAs.
"Acting white" is a black concept by definition. But poor whites absolutely do have an analogous cultural stigma: the concept of 'showing up' your parents/family/friends by doing better than them. You may have also heard this expressed as 'thinking they're better', general discouragement of learning, some uses of 'putting on airs', etc.
As for role models, it's more important for minorities to see people like themselves in those roles, strictly because culture is otherwise telling them there are things they cannot and/or are not allowed to do, because of who they are.
It's not that a would-be black scientist needs a black scientist to be inspired to pursue science. Nor a would-be gay politician needs a gay politician to be inspired to pursue public service. It's that a would-be black scientist or gay politician benefits from seeing anyone like themselves doing what they want to do, so they can know our culture is full of shit when it says they can't.
It's far, far easier for a child to believe the lies and be discouraged from a challenging path if there is no evidence out there to disprove what the culture is telling them.
In Australia, this is known as the 'Tall Poppy Theory'. The idea is that the tall poppy is the first one to get cut. Staying alive means staying at the exact same level as everyone else.
It's an awful pattern, but is hardly restricted to one cultural or racial milieu. Class systems everywhere are predicated on the same basic idea: you're supposed to know your place, and you're not supposed to forget it.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to play semantics with the phrase "acting white" - I've never heard of the whole "showing up" thing. I'm surprised to learn of it. That, uh, sucks. The only similar meme in my memepool is rural people feeling a bit miffed/abandoned by relatives or friends who move to a big city, but I didn't get the impression that this had to do with money or education.
Yeah, I actually have (though I didn't think of it when I wrote my previous comment). But I've heard it only in a joking fashion. And certainly not to do with education or success - more often to do with food or cartoon preferences than anything else, I think.
>Why do black people need their role models to be black? Plenty of white kids in my day looked up to Michael Jordan as an incredibly hardworking athlete.
I didn't mean to say that their role models should only be black. Sorry if I wasn't clear on that. For a black kid, I think the impact of seeing someone who's black and successful is huge. Think about the numbers of black kids who started playing golf because of Tiger Woods. Like I said, it's hard to quantify but it makes a difference.
>The "acting white" derision is pretty much exclusive to blacks, as far as I know. It's certainly not present among Asians or white people. I'm actually not sure about Hispanics but I've never heard of education being frowned upon by them. I don't know what you mean by "that's too easy", but I've heard it cited as the main problem in socio studies, by people like Bill Cosby, and in firsthand accounts in things like reddit AMAs.
The "acting white" derision most certainly exists in other minorities besides blacks. I've seen in it first hand in in some form or another. I'd contend that the "acting white" derision and the "extreme anti-education" sentiment are not necessarily the same thing.
It exists in some Native American groups as well, where people who "act white" are called Apples (red on the outside, white on the inside), similar to how blacks who "act white" are called Oreos. Sadly, both groups often find it easier and more attractive to blame racism for all their problems than to actually consider that there culture is part of the problem.
Ah, I didn't know that and that is unfortunate. I've never really met any Native Americans or otherwise been exposed to their modern culture. I've heard an Asian friend jokingly refer to herself as a banana (yellow outside, white inside) but I got the impression that this was not a serious/pervasive thing in the same way as the Oreo slur. If the "apple" thing is that serious then that's very unfortunate.
Oh, I'm not that it exists but the assertion was that the use of "oreo" was pervasive - I'm not convinced of that given thadisputingt I've never heard anyone use that term in real life.
For what it's worth, my ex-girlfriend (an African fugee) was called an oreo (among other things) by African Americans who didn't approve of her lifestyle.
Again, it exists, but if in 38 years of growing up black, going to school with blacks, living, working, playing sports, dating, etc with blacks, I've never heard it, and I don't know anyone who has heard it, I really can't consider it "pervasive".
Lots of things exist, but aren't pervasive - terrorism for example.
How many blacks do you see out front in the most successful companies?
The son of a black man who abandoned his child is running the country. That should be a start. Obama, for that matter, lacked a significant role model (i.e., his father) altogether. Fortunately, he told the NAACP to make up 'no excuses' [1].
"No matter how you reform schools, it's not going to solve the problem," he said in an interview. "There are two parts of the problem, society and schools on one hand and the black community on the other hand."
Professor Ogbu's latest conclusions are highlighted in a study of blacks in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb whose school district is equally divided between blacks and whites. As in many racially integrated school districts, the black students have lagged behind whites in grade-point averages, test scores and placement in high-level classes. Professor Ogbu was invited by black parents in 1997 to examine the district's 5,000 students to figure out why.
"What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don't know how their parents made it," Professor Ogbu said in an interview. "They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children."
For example, he said that middle-class black parents in general spent no more time on homework or tracking their children's schooling than poor white parents. And he said that while black students talked in detail about what efforts were needed to get an A and about their desire to achieve, too many nonetheless failed to put forth that effort.
Those kinds of attitudes reflect a long history of adapting to oppression and stymied opportunities, said Professor Ogbu, a Nigerian immigrant who has written that involuntary black immigrants behave like low-status minorities in other societies.
Not surprisingly, he said, the parents were disappointed when he turned the spotlight on them as well as the schools. Peggy Caldwell, a spokeswoman for the Shaker Heights City School District, said that minority families cared deeply about their children's academic achievement and the district was working with education experts to reduce the racial achievement gap. She noted that while Professor Ogbu called most of the black families in the district middle class, 10 to 12 percent live in poverty.
John Ogbu, a Nigerian-American anthropologist, conducted research on this subject.
And no one was able to replicate his findings. Even Roland Fryer, who is a proponent of the "acting white" theory concluded "We, like Ferguson (2001), Cook and Ludwig (1997), and Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998), find scant empirical support for the oppositional culture hypothesis described in Fordham and Ogbu" in http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Empiric...
There's an extreme anti-education element to black culture in the US. Caring about and one's education and working hard in school is derided as "acting white". It doesn't apply to everyone, of course (I knew black Americans at Georgetown and Stanford), but it's significant enough to bring down aggregate measures quite a lot. I've also seen studies showing that black parents spend less time helping their children with schoolwork than white and Asian parents.
The US school system isn't perfect (the inability to fire bad teachers, largely because of unions, is, in my opinion, among the biggest problems in the country), but it's not totally or even primarily at fault for the education problems among black people.
Also:
>There's something a little creepy about saying there's nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.
You're misrepresenting this, not sure if it's deliberate, but this is done for the sake of comparing the US to Europe, which is pretty reasonable and not crypto-racist as you imply.