Jason L. Riley is an African American writer and a member of the editorial board of
The Wall Street Journal. Writing for
The American, online magazine of the
American Enterprise Institute, Riley summarizes the findings of University of California anthropologist John Ogbu, a Nigerian-American who studied black and white achievement in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Ogbu writes:
None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as white students. (snip) When blacks and whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, one sees that black students at every class level perform less well in school than their white counterparts.
He (Ogbu) concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books.
Ogbu found that black high-school students “avoided certain attitudes, standard English, and some behaviors because they considered them white. They feared that adopting white ways would be detrimental to their collective racial identity and solidarity."
"Unfortunately, some of the attitudes labeled ‘white’ and avoided by the students were those that enhanced school success.” The behaviors and attitudes to be avoided included, for example, enrolling in honors and advanced-placement classes, striving for high grades, talking properly, hanging around too many white students, and participating in extracurricular activities that were populated by whites.
Riley concludes this way:
“We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too,” Martin Luther King Jr. once told a congregation. “We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.” Learning to value education is one of those things.
The article is excerpted from Riley’s new book,
Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Hat tip to
Lucianne.com for the link.
