Beyond Acting White - Annotated by Erin McNamara Horvat & Carla O'Connor (Paperback)

About the Book

Beyond Acting White broadens the extant conversation on the Black-White achievement gap that has been dominated by the notion that Blacks underperform in school because they fear (being accused of) 'acting white.' The authors elucidate the limitations of this explanation by pr...

Book Synopsis

Beyond Acting White broadens the extant conversation on the Black-White achievement gap that has been dominated by the notion that Blacks underperform in school because they fear (being accused of) 'acting white.' The authors elucidate the limitations of this explanation by presenting new research that theorizes race as a social phenomenon, unmasks the heterogeneity of the Black experience, and contends with the specifics of social context in the culture and organization of schools and communities.

Review Quotes

This fine work focuses on high-achieving black students, a group that is too often ignored or worse, treated as nonexistent. [Horvat and O'Connor] break new scholarly ground, living up to their claims of moving beyond typical treatments of the acting white hypothesis.

This volume makes an essential contribution to the study of racial inequality by systematically assessing the explanatory power of the "acting white" thesis. Alternative sites of racialization, gendered self concepts, and the black immigrant experience are only a few of the dimensions Lamont considers in analyzing this ill-conceived theory and proposing imaginative alternatives.

About the Author

Erin McNamara Horvat is Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia PA. Professor Horvat's research agenda has explored how race and class shape access throughout the educational pipeline. She has used the work of Pierre Bourdieu extensively as a theoretical frame for her work and is interested in applying and extending Bourdieu's theoretical concepts. She has written recently on the role of social capital in shaping families' interactions with schools. Other recent work with YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School and YouthBuild USA has explored how to move students who have left school prematurely back into the educational pipeline. Her work has been published in Sociology of Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly and American Educational Research Journal.

Carla O'Connor is Associate Professor of Education, University of Michigan. She conducts research on the educational experience and outcomes of Blacks in the U.S., particularly Black students' experience with academic success. Amongst other studies, she has examined how social narratives and historically dynamic opportunity structures shape the processes by which Blacks experience success in school despite race-, class-, and gender- based constraints. She is currently conducting a qualitative longitudinal examination of how Black students negotiate their racial identity in relation to achievement performance as they transition to life after high school. She has published her work in the American Educational Research Journal, Sociology of Education, and the journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies.