Race and school achievement in a desegregated suburb: reconsidering the oppositional culture explanation

Abstract

Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this ‘school structures’ argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and are cognizant of racial patterns of track placement within the local school context, the authors found no evidence that Black students oppose school achievement. These findings are important because they shed light on some of the educational dilemmas that Black students encounter, which have received limited attention in prior work on oppositional culture. These dilemmas include cross‐race peer pressure from Whites among high‐achieving Black students and dilemmas of low achievement among Black students who struggle academically. Based on the findings, future lines of research are suggested that might help researchers better understand racial achievement disparities in such contexts.

Acknowledgement

Work on this paper was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Dean's Dissemination fund at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency or institution.

Notes

1. Tyson and her colleagues do not argue that oppositional culture is necessarily pervasive in desegregated contexts but that the ‘burden of acting White’ may be fueled by dynamics that are set in motion by ‘institutionally imposed and sustained patterns of achievement by race’ (Tyson, 2006, p. 84). As a result, oppositional culture and the ‘burden of acting White’ are more likely to be found in such contexts.

2. Fordham and Ogbu (1986) suggest that high‐achieving Black students in desegregated schools get pressure from both sides, arguing that ‘the burden of acting white becomes heavier when academically successful black students face both pressures from black peers to conform, and doubts from whites about their ability’ (p. 199). The experience of doubts about their ability has received limited attention in the oppositional culture literature.

3. White students continue being popular as their grades improve.

4. This paragraph builds on a set of premises related to the burden of acting White outlined in Tyson et al. (2005).

5. An index of dissimilarity measures how closely neighborhoods in a city or region reflect the area’s overall population demographics. The number indicates how many people would have to move for individual neighborhoods to reflect the diversity of the larger area.

6. Even though we made this decision, we thought that the term ‘acting White’ might be raised by the students we interviewed. Surprisingly, it was not.

7. The first and third authors, along with two graduate students, coded all of the data for this paper. We followed a process by which a common understanding of each code/node was established and reconfirmed this common understanding by discussing coded text.

8. At Riverview, students receive a GPA boost for taking honors and advanced placement classes. An honors students who receives an ‘A’ is given 4.5 on a 4.0 scale and AP students are given 5.0 on a 4.0 scale for an ‘A’ grade. Ostensibly this is to encourage students to challenge themselves by taking more difficult classes without the threat of hurting their overall GPA.

9. In this case, Terrence might have learned to manage his high achievement perhaps by camouflaging it (not fitting the high‐achieving stereotype).

10. Tyson (2006) reports that some low‐achieving Black students engage in ‘face‐saving strategies’ designed to persuade other students that they are higher achievers than they are.

11. See Tyson et al. (2005) for a discussion of generalized, racialized, and class‐based oppositionality.