Acting White Theory: Black Academic Achievement Based on Other Factors: Do black students purposefully underachieve because they attribute being smart to "acting white"? For more than a decade, academics, policymakers and cultural critics have publicly chided black children for having an anti-intellectual attitude, based on the "Acting White Theory."
The Acting White Theory originated in the 1980s with Dr. John Ogbu's ethnographic research and is commonly used to explain present-day "achievement gaps" between black and white students. Today the Acting White Theory has its own Wikipedia entry and was mentioned by then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2004, when he said, "Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
The Acting White Theory seems to have particular cachet among flatulent black people who feel a certain disdain toward the less refined (pejoratively "ghetto") aspects of the black community. Many of them have been called "sellouts," which reinforces a key tenet of the Acting White Theory. Other scholars, such as Edward Rhymes and Michael Eric Dyson, push back against the theory. In his book Acting White?
