Signithia Fordham

PDFFO | The authors review their previous explanation of black students' underachievement. They now suggest the importance of considering black people's expressive responses to their historical status and experience in America. “Fictive kinship” is proposed as a framework for understanding how a sense of collective identity enters into the process of schooling and affects academic achievement. The authors support their argument with ethnographic data from a high school in Washington, show more D.C., showing how the fear of being accused of “acting white” causes a social and psychological situation which diminishes black students' academic effort and thus leads to underachievement. Policy and programmatic implications are discussed. |

Basic premise: Some minorities experience a disproportionate amount of school failure. Why?

1. Adaptation in adult life to limited social and economic opportunities.
a. White American control of schooling.
b. Substandard schooling ("compulsory ignorance" required of slaves)
c. Job ceilings, so that even when they succeed in school, they have limited access to job
opportunities and wages commensurate with their academic accomplishments.
i. Result: disillusionment about the value of schooling.
ii. Result: distrust of the public school system and intentions of educators.
2. In response to substandard schooling and barriers in the adult opportunity structure, black Americans
develop "survival strategies" and other coping mechanisms.

3. One of these strategies is that some individuals in certain minority populations are ambivalent about
success.
-- "You must be twice as good to go half as far."
-- "Don't get the big head, don't blow your own horn."
-- Our main point in this paper is that black students do poorly in school because they experience inordinate ambivalence and affective
dissonance regarding academic effort and success. Why is this so, because
-- white Americans traditionally refuse to acknowledge that black Americans are capable of intellectual achievement, and because
• black Americans subsequently begin to doubt their own intellectual ability,
• begin to define academic success as white people's prerogative, and
• begin to discourage their peers, perhaps unconsciously from emulating white people in academic striving. |

This is an outline of the material |

SA - https://www.librarything.com/work/33169794/book/275221764 | https://www.librarything.com/work/33164411/book/275152793 | https://www.librarything.com/work/33151953/book/275015731 | https://www.librarything.com/work/33142121/book/274893245 | https://www.librarything.com/work/33140545/book/274870996 | https://www.librarything.com/work/32883371/book/271718143 | https://www.librarything.com/work/32814915/book/270898456 | https://www.librarything.com/work/32814555/book/270892944 | https://www.librarything.com/work/32806357/book/270782283 | https://www.librarything.com/work/32735859/book/269796331|
RT - African American
BT - Society
NT - Anxiety
UF - The journal article addresses psychological concerns within the African American Community.
SN - This PDF was downloaded from the internet server/database where the journal is stored. (This entry does not reference a hierarchical list) show less