Black Conservatives and the Politics of Self-Abuse
by Tim Wise
August 08, 2008
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An examination of data from the 1980s and early 1990s found that blacks were just as likely as whites to aspire to college and expect to attain a college degree. Furthermore, and contrary to the common claims that black youth harass other blacks who do well in school for "acting white," blacks do not appear to incur social penalties from their peers for doing well in school, any more so than students who are white. An even more recent study, conducted by the Minority Student Achievement Network, looked at 40,000 students in grades 7-11, and found little if any evidence that blacks placed lesser value on education than their white peers. For example, according to the study, black males are more likely than white, Hispanic or Asian males to say that it is "very important" to study hard and get good grades: indeed, white males are the least likely to make this claim. The researchers also found that blacks were just as likely to study and work on homework as their white counterparts.

Even in high-poverty schools, disproportionately attended by inner-city students of color, attitudes towards schooling are far more positive than generally believed. Students in high-poverty schools are four-and-a-half times more likely to say they have a "very positive" attitude towards academic achievement than to say they have a "very negative" attitude, and 94 percent of all students in such schools report a generally positive attitude towards academics.There is also no evidence that black parents take less interest in their children's education, or fail to reinforce the learning the takes place in the classroom. Once again, NCES statistics indicate that black children are more likely than whites to often spend time with parents on homework.

In their groundbreaking volume, The Source of the River, social scientists Douglas Massey, Camille Charles, Garvey Lundy and Mary Fischer examined data for students of different races enrolled in selective colleges and universities. Their purpose was to determine the different social context in which students of color grew up as opposed to white students in these top schools. Among the issues examined was the degree to which differential performance in college could be attributed to blacks or their families placing less value on academic performance than their white and Asian counterparts. After all, this claim has been made by some like McWhorter, Steele, and a plethora of white reactionaries who seek to explain the persistent GPA gaps between blacks and others in college. Yet, as Massey and his colleagues discovered, the black students had parents who were more likely than white or Asian parents to have helped them with homework growing up, more likely than white or Asian parents to have met with their teachers, equally likely to have pushed them to "do their best" in school, more likely than white parents to enroll their kids in educational camps, and equally or more likely to have participated in the PTA. Black students' parents were also more likely than parents of any other race to regularly check to make sure their kids had completed their homework and to reward their kids for good grades, while Asian parents were the least likely to do either of these. Likewise, the authors found that black student's peers in high school had been more likely than white students' peers to think studying hard and getting good grades were important, and indeed white peers were the least likely to endorse these notions. Overall, the data suggests that if anything it is white peer culture that is overly dismissive of academic achievement, not black peer culture.

While many of these studies have focused on middle class and above African Americans families, and while it is certainly possible that lower income and poor blacks may occasionally evince a negativity towards academics, this can hardly be considered a racial (as opposed to economic) response-since low income whites often manifest the same attitudes.

What's more, such a response, though not particularly functional in the long term, is also not particularly surprising, seeing as how young people from low-income backgrounds can see quite clearly the way in which education so often fails to pay off for persons like themselves. After all, over the last few decades, black academic achievement has risen, and the gap between whites and blacks on tests of academic "ability" have closed, often quite dramatically. Yet during the same time, the gaps in wages between whites and blacks have often risen, sending a rather blatant message to persons of color that no matter how hard they work, they will remain further and further behind.

In other words, to the extent that blacks, to any real degree, occasionally manifest anti-education attitudes and behaviors, the question remains to be answered, where did they pick up the notion that education was not for them? Might they have gotten this impression from a curriculum that negates the full history of their people, and gives the impression that everything great, everything worth knowing about came from white folks? Might they have gotten this impression from the tracking and sorting systems that placed so many of them, irrespective of talent and promise, in remedial and lower level classes, because indeed the teachers themselves presumed at some level that education -- at least higher level education -- wasn't for them? Might they have gotten this impression from the workings of the low wage economy, into which so many of their neighbors and family members have been thrown--even those with a formal education? Or better yet, maybe they got this impression from the black conservatives who regularly bash them: persons who demonstrate that an education doesn't necessarily make you smart after all.

Whatever the case, let it be said clearly and regularly that the propaganda dispensed by such folks is not only poisonous in its implications, and in the way it reinforces existing beliefs of white Americans vis-a-vis people of color, but also that it is based on utterly false analysis, distorted data, and the hope on the part of its purveyors that the rest of us will never wise up to their game