John Ogbu was a Nigerian-born Anthropologist (d. 2003). In 1997, the University of California Berkeley professor and a research assistant moved to Shaker Heights in Cleveland, OH for nine months to study underperforming black American students.
After that time, their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn't socio-economics, school funding, or racism that accounted for the students' poor academic; it was their own attitudes and those of their parents'.
Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as “acting white.” Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn't deny that there may be anti-black sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.
He wrote a book about this, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement. For this effrontery on the perpetual victim class in America, he was denounced in the usual strident terms.
This article goes into some detail about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment