Cultural expression and black students' attitudes toward high achievers

Continuities across continents: Assessing African American cultural themes among Black and Coloured South Africans

Much of the scholarship concerning African American culture is premised on the notion that it is a legacy of African origins but there has been essentially no attempt to document that relationship empirically. This paper briefly reviews existing evidence for cultural continuity in the Diaspora and then compares the responses of Black and Coloured South African and African Americans on measures of culture emic to African American populations. The observed patterns of psychometric performance, participants' responses, and the predictive utility of the measures employed were consistent with the thesis that despite inevitable variation, these three groups of the African Diaspora share similar orientations on the cultural themes assessed. This research hopes to initiate empirical work on the continuity thesis as it applies to connecting African American culture with a legacy of Africa and as related more broadly to the study of global Diasporas.

Race-acting: The varied and complex affirmative meaning of “acting Black” for African-American adolescents

In the field of psychology, deficit theoretical frameworks for studying African-American students dominate mainstream psychological theorizing and research. This is particularly the case within research explaining the academic achievement gap between African-American and White students. The aims of the present study are to adopt a culturally responsive theoretical framework to study one of the most widely used explanations for the African-American achievement gap, “the ‘acting White’ hypothesis,” as well as to further interrogate the more globally generalizable concept of “race-acting” and what specifically it means to “act Black.” The data were generated from an open-ended survey question as part of a larger longitudinal mixed-method study. One hundred and fifteen African-American middle school students participated. Researchers used a thematic content analysis to systematically analyze the data and concluded, based on their multiple interpretations, that the meaning of race-acting is varied and complex. Academic Intelligence was discovered as a prominent and affirmative theme for what it means to these adolescents to “act Black” and, with the exception of two themes (i.e., Ghetto and Superiority), what it means to these adolescents to “act Black” and to “act White” was the same. One implication of the study is that the concept of “race-acting” has utility for guiding future theoretical and methodological development about racialized belief systems of all groups living in racialized societies and culturally specific identity processes for African-Americans.