Keepin’ it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White
Carter, Prudence L (2005).
New York: Oxford University Press; 240 pages. $29.95. ISBN 0195325230.
The achievement gap between white students and black and Latino students in the United States persists despite public policies and court orders aimed at reducing this gap. In Keepin’ it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White, Harvard Professor Prudence L. Carter seeks to explain why some black and Latino students are more successful in school than others by linking black and Latino individual concepts of their culture and identity with their reactions to the dominant norms institutionalized in schools. Carter draws from survey and interview data entwined with insightful observations of 68 low-income African American and Latino students from Yonkers, New York, to describe how students’ differing styles of merging mainstream (dominant) culture with their individual ethnic (non-dominant) culture affects their success in school.
Carter employs Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and Fordham and Ogbu’s oppositional culture paradigm to discuss and extend previous research on minority attachment with and engagement in school. She seeks to reinforce the concept that “acting white,” a central component of the oppositional culture paradigm, is not a denial of the benefits of education by blacks and Hispanics but is instead a response to a perceived rejection of their individual culture and identity. In addition, she finds with the students she studied that those who are the most successful in school and in the community are the students who are able to make the best use of both their dominant and non-dominant social capital.
Although all students in Carter’s study profess to value education, they respond to the structural expectations and dominant cultural values at school in different ways. Ogbu (2004) also witnessed this dynamic and created five classifications of student attachment to describe it. Carter condenses Ogbu’s five groups into three more distinct groups. As in Ogbu’s groups, only one cohort in Carter’s is completely opposed to adapting to the dominant culture speech patterns and ways of behavior. Carter identifies this group as “non-compliant believers”: students who are not able or willing to comply with mainstream norms and behaviors. Thus, their engagement with and attachment to school is limited, leading to less successful educational outcomes. The second group, which she calls “cultural straddlers,” is comprised of the most successful students. These students can conform to mainstream “white” expectations, and are able to “act black” or “act Spanish” in their communities, a term Carter defines as “codeswitching.” Students do not interpret “acting white” as a desire to excel in school, but instead as a rejection of individual culture and identity. Thus, students who are high achievers but are able to communicate with their peers within the cultural framework of the community are not accused of “acting white.” The third group, the “cultural mainstreamers,” embrace the dominant cultural values and assume that the speech patterns, dress and behaviors of the dominant (middle class white) culture as the norm. They are the most likely to be accused of “acting white” because they do not embrace their own culture and ethnic identity in the same way as non-compliant believers or cultural straddlers.
Perhaps Carter’s most important contribution to the current literature is in chapter 3. In this chapter, Carter considers why so many more males are members of the non-compliant believer group and describes the differences in educational achievement and future job placement of males and females. Success in school is more important today than ever before because in the past, men could make a livable wage working in low-skilled jobs. Today, more than ever before, many jobs require soft skills, such as speaking standard English and dressing in ways that are valued by the dominant culture. Because of this, Carter explains, the social construction of masculinity impairs the ability of some minority males to succeed in the job market. Females in this study were more likely to conform to dominant speech and dress patterns and the expectations for them were higher than those for males. Parents tend to push the girls harder and expect them to make better grades while the males are “babied” (mostly by single mothers). This poses a dilemma for the males who are faced with conflicting expectations. They want to be successful and obtain white-collar employment, but white-collar jobs require males to use soft skills, skills that are not respected in their social construction of what is masculine. The chances of this group succeeding in mainstream society are inhibited by not only their academic achievement, but also by their cultural norms and the conditions in which they are raised.
Although the sample is small (there are only five cultural mainstreamers) and Carter acknowledges that the population studied is not representative, Keepin it Real provides the reader with a rich description of the processes involved in a student’s ability to maneuver between school, where the dominant culture reigns, and their own community. Policymakers and educators should listen to Carter’s call for teachers to become “multicultural navigators” who accept and value different cultures and help parents and students navigate through the often difficult processes involved in schooling. In addition, she calls for partnerships between schools and other institutions where “multicultural navigators” can mentor students and help them be more successful in school, and later in the workplace. With the increasing focus on high academic achievement as a precondition to success in the world of employment, understanding the interplay between competing cultural ideologies is more important than ever before. Educators, researchers and policymakers will benefit from understanding the dynamics described in Keepin it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White.
Ogbu, John (2004). “Collective Identity and the Burden of ‘Acting White’ in Black History, Community and Education.” The Urban Review: 36(1).
Reviewer Information
Stephanie Southworth is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her major areas of interest are educational inequality, race and poverty.