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The label "acting white" and the dismissal of white values are bound up in questions of black identity. "If you see a black girl," explains Kareema Matthews, a street-smart 14-year-old from Harlem, "and she's black, not mixed or anything, and she wants to act like something she's not, in these days nobody considers that good. She's trying to be white. That's why nobody likes her. That's how it is now." But when asked what it is to be black, Kareema pauses. "I don't have the slightest idea."
The right attitude, according to the targets of ridicule, would be shown by skipping class, talking slang and, as Tachelle says, "being cool, not combing your hair. Carrying yourself like you don't care." Social success depends partly on academic failure; safety and acceptance lie in rejecting the traditional paths to self-improvement. "Instead of trying to come up with the smart kids, they try to bring you down to their level," says eighth-grader Rachel Blates of Oakland. "They don't realize that if you don't have an education, you won't have anything -- no job, no husband, no home."
It is a sad irony that achievement should have acquired such a stigma within the black community. Hard work, scholarship and respect for family values have long been a cornerstone of black identity. In the years before the Civil War, many black slaves risked their lives learning how to read. In 1867, just four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans founded Morehouse and Howard universities. According to the Bureau of the Census, between Reconstruction and 1910, the literacy rate among Southern blacks climbed from 20% to 70%. "There has always been a strong pressure toward educational achievement," says Mae Kendall, director of elementary education for the Atlanta public schools. Kendall, who grew up in semirural Thomasville, Ga., recalls, "My mother was not a lettered woman by any means, but she said, with a good education, you could turn the world upside down. That was a strong common linkage among all black people, and it was instilled early on."
Some education experts associate the rise of the culture of anti-achievement with the advent of public school desegregation and the flight of the black middle class to the suburbs. That left fewer role models whose success reinforced the importance of education and more children from families who found little grounds for hope in schools that were decaying.
The civil-rights movement did produce pockets of progress: the number of black managers, professionals and government officials rose 52% in the past decade. Black enrollment in colleges has climbed steeply. In 1990, 33% of all black high school graduates went on to college, in contrast to 23% in 1967. Since 1976, black Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have increased by a greater percentage than those of either whites or Asians. Still, blacks have higher truancy rates, and in spite of the gains, the test scores of African Americans remain the lowest among large ethnic groups. The high school dropout rate among young blacks averages 7.7%, nearly twice that of their white peers, at 3.9%.