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The Urban Review
Published in: The Urban Review 2/2011

01-06-2011

Acting White: A Critical Review

Author: Kitae Sohn

Published in: The Urban Review | Issue 2/2011

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Abstract

The hypothesis of acting White has been heatedly debated and influential over the last 20 years or so in explaining the Black–White test score gap. Recently, economists have joined the debate and started providing new theoretical and empirical analyses of the phenomenon. This paper critically reviews the arguments that have been advanced to support and refute the hypothesis. This review particularly covers the analyses in economics because the economic analyses are relatively new and usually neglected in other disciplines. Also, nationally representative data are emphasized, whenever possible, to improve the generalizability of the arguments. This review concludes that although the analyses in both non-economics and economics are thought-provoking and compelling in some respect, a substantial body of empirical evidence is inconsistent with the assumptions of and results from the analyses.
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Footnotes
1
Ogbu (2004) elaborated the historical background later, but the essential point is the same as the paper written by Fordham and Ogbu (1986).
 
2
From a recent randomized experiment, the Moving to Opportunity, Sanbonmatsu et al. (2007) find that moving to a better neighborhood improves little, if any, Black students’ educational outcomes and attitudes toward school. The results are in contrast to the previous results from a quasi-experiment, the Gautreaux Program (Rosenbaum 1995).
 
3
The student sorting by academic achievement among Black students is not as clear as that among White and Asian students.
 
4
Cook and Ludwig (1998) adopt five measures of low standing: feels put down by students, threatened at least once last fall, not popular, not part of leading crowd, and not popular with opposite sex. They find only the last measure is statistically significant between predominantly White schools and predominantly Black schools. They define a predominantly White school is as a school where at least 60 percent of the total student population is non-Hispanic White. An analogous definition is applied to the definition of predominantly Black schools. And yet, when Farkas et al. (2002) focus on the first measure only (“feels put down by students”) and use a different definition of predominantly Black schools (schools with less than 25 percent White students), they find a statistically significant negative relationship between the measure of popularity and being Black. These two inconsistent results point out that the relationship between popularity and academic achievement among Black students is sensitive to measures of popularity and definitions of Black/White schools (or segregated/integrated schools) used in the estimation.
 
5
The initial immigrant took place between 1850 and 1882 for Chinese immigrants and between 1890 and 1924 for Japanese immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 forbade Chinese immigration until the law was repealed in 1943. The “Gentleman’s Agreement” of 1907 had limited, and the immigration act of 1924 had terminated Japanese immigration until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 allowed naturalization privileges to Japanese immigrants.
 
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Metadata
Title
Acting White: A Critical Review
Author
Kitae Sohn
Publication date
01-06-2011
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
The Urban Review / Issue 2/2011
Print ISSN: 0042-0972
Electronic ISSN: 1573-1960
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-010-0158-6

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