2008 Woodie Awards
On Tuesday Harvard economist Roland Fryer came to Princeton to give a talk on the above subject. The subject is on how some African American and Hispanic students are perceived as “acting white” by their peers because they get good grades in school. It happens that popularity (or an index of popularity), when correlated with grades, rises for white students across all GPA levels–so the higher the GPA the higher the popularity among whites–but for blacks popularity rises and then dips down when GPA passes 3.5 (see graphs on page 5 of Fryer’s article). What this says is a black high school student’s popularity is negatively correlated with his or her grades after he or she has obtained a sufficiently high grade, forming a hump on the graph. A similar humped graph also shows the popularity/GPA correlation for Hispanic students. How big of an issue is this?
Fryer certainly thinks it’s a very deep issue, with deep and hard to change forces at work. Even after controlling for fixed effects, such as the income of the student’s parents, which school the student attended, school size, etc., these correlations persist. Furthermore, when schools are separated between public and private, the humped correlation disappears among minorities but is almost identical as before for public schools, so the negative stigma of “acting white” is predominantly in public schools. In fact, the cost in popularity of minorities “acting white,” or attaining better grades, exists even in interracial schools. Perhaps there are social pressures at work here and Fryer beleves these are the main culprits.
I think Fryer has a point. Personally, “acting white” is an issue at my former high school (Princeton High) where there is, at the very least, a perceived stigma among select groups of minorities that doing well in school or seeking help on an assignment goes against the flow. How do I know? People tell me what they hear in the hallways. It may be the mentality that because one is different from high achieving students (where there are very few minorities in the advanced placement classes for example), it is in your best interests to be different from them, not just in who you are or in the color of your skin, but also in your attitude towards education, an opposites attitude. This is a self reinforcing phenomena that’s nearly impossible to break out of if left by itself.
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