Response to Review of Keepin’ it Real:
School Success Beyond Black and White
Prudence L. Carter
Citation: Carter, Prudence L.. (2007). "Response to Review of Keepin’ it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White." Children, Youth and Environments 17 (2). Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/
I breathe a sigh of relief and gratitude whenever reviewers capture well the intentions of my arguments. I will respond to this review by sharing some background details that arose during the development of Keepin’ It Real. Certainly, the work of the late anthropologist John Ogbu has influenced my thinking, in addition to that of Signithia Fordham, Pierre Bourdieu, Patricia Hill Collins and many others. While Professor Ogbu and I disagreed about the role of oppositional culture in educational outcomes and minority achievement, I respected and desired his opinions of my work. Therefore, I suggested his name to my editor at Oxford University Press as a potential manuscript reviewer in early 2003 before his untimely death. Professor Ogbu reviewed my manuscript and did not maintain anonymity. He challenged me on many things that I had written, even arguing that I misrepresented some of his ideas. Certainly, the latter was not my aim.
Unbeknownst to me, Professor Ogbu had begun to develop a new typology that included five classifications of identity for Black Americans: the assimilationists, the accommodators without assimilation, the ambivalents, the encapsulated, and the resisters. Curiously, he did not mention this typology in his rather lengthy and critical review of my manuscript.
I became aware of Ogbu’s new framework well after Keepin’ It Real was in production at Oxford University Press. In a question posed to me at a session of the 2005 AERA meeting in Montreal, a graduate student mentioned the posthumous article published in The Urban Review (see Ogbu, 2004). I left Montreal, located Professor Ogbu’s article, and read it with great interest, but not in time to acknowledge in the book that Ogbu had also surmised that “black” cultural identity is much more diverse than it is often depicted in the educational research literature. Meanwhile, Professor Ogbu’s and my thoughts on the issues of culture, race, identity, and education had begun to converge on some dimensions. I believe that Keepin’ It Real provides some of the first empirical evidence to support both Professor Ogbu’s and my classifications of “black” cultural identities.
Obviously, my work is not generalizable, given its modest sample size. And I note the reviewer’s comment (as well as others) that the number of “cultural mainstreamers” in my study is quite small. While writing the book, I resisted the temptation to fold this group into the larger group of “cultural straddlers” (which one of the anonymous press reviewers had suggested) because the behaviors and commentary coming from those five mainstreamers were qualitatively and significantly different from the straddlers. Finally, gender is indeed a critical component to the oppositional culture story, too, and when I began this study as my dissertation research about eight years ago, I did not anticipate that it would have such significance. In fact, I hadn’t even considered it. That’s the beauty of inductive research, however. Themes and patterns will emerge organically. For more work on the subject of gender and oppositional culture, I refer the reader to Lundy and Firebaugh (2005).
Overall, Keepin’ It Real reflects my decision in favor of theoretical and conceptual specificity at the risk of lower statistical power. Now the time has come for survey researchers and quantitative methodologists to think in terms of heterogeneity and intersectionality — that is, to examine the differences among various cultural-identity types of black and Latino male and female students more widely.
References
Lundy, G. F., and G. Firebaugh (2005). "Peer Relations and School Resistance: Does Oppositional Culture Apply to Race or to Gender?" Journal of Negro Education, 74(3), 233-245.
Ogbu, J. (2004). "Collective Identity and the Burden of 'Acting White' in Black History, Community, and Education." The Urban Review 36(1), 1-35.