OK, so I’m about to air some of my race’s dirty linen in public, not for the sake of self-embarrassment, but for the sake of amelioration. Hopefully, via a better understanding of a certain aspect of black culture, positive change can be brought about.
Something that has puzzled me for the last 65 or so years of my life is the phenomenon among some black youth (and sadly, some adults also) of equating success with whiteness, and accusing those blacks who seek to achieve success of “acting white.” Come on, black folk, you know some folks who do this — don’t try to act like you don’t.
It starts in the primary grades where the student who wants to do well and achieve in school is called out for “acting white” by the student(s) that do not wish for some reason to buy into the education process. I have intimate, firsthand experience with this phenomenon since starting in third grade I began to be so accused.
Third grade was when the first I.Q. assessment tests were administered in by Cleveland Public schools back then, and I must have scored pretty well since it wasn’t long before I was sent to another school and placed in what was called then called “Enrichment Class,” which later morphed over to “Major Work Class” to — I don’t know what they call it now.
But there I was, and my peers on the block didn’t like it one damn bit. Fortunately, my father was a successful business owner and, although he had only a third grade education, he was an excellent role model (along with my mother who had taught me to read by the time I was three), so my attitude toward my detractors was, “Hey, I can’t help it if you’re a dumb-ass motherfucker, but I ain’t getting on that train to nowhere with you.” I never quite actually said that in those words, but looking back, I wish now that I had. Maybe some of my now dead childhood friends might have listened, and perhaps still be alive.
The kids in the enrichment class were really bright, and I soon discovered that I was the dumbest kid in the smart kids’ class. But we all, every one of us (since we all were black and from all over the near east side of Cleveland), were accused in our home communities of “acting white.”
I now know that the kids hurling those accusations were simply masking their own insecurities and jealousies over their lack of brainpower. They couldn’t do as well as the more gifted students so, like crabs in a barrel, they wanted to keep everyone down there on the killing floor of life with them. But is that assessment accurate?
It goes a bit deeper, as I’ve discovered by reading Kenneth Stampp’s fine book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. See my previous posting for a review of this amazing book.
Slavemasters created a two-tier system on their plantations — some would argue that in many cases it was a three or four-tiered system, but that’s a question for another day. For the most part, though, there were “field Negroes” and “house Negroes.” While the house Negroes might have had a somewhat better life out of the hot sun, got to wear better clothes, and were fed better by virtue of access to scraps off the master’s table, they still at the end of the day had to reside among the field Negroes, who often said to them, “Whoa, wait a minute, son, just because you allowed in they house, don’t forget that to them you still a slave and a nigger, so don’t you go to thinking that you better than us, don’t go to start ‘acting all white’.”
So “acting white” was initially used by blacks in a positive manner, a way to keep the race from stratifying. But somewhere along the line, its meaning has shifted, or maybe it hasn’t. What my accusers in third grade might have been trying to say was, “Just because you’re smarter than me doesn’t mean that you’re better than me.” And in that, they were absolutely right, I am no better.
Nonetheless, that still leaves the disturbing equating of whiteness as somehow being better, which on its face is sheer and utter nonsense.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.