Racial Stratification and Education in the United States: Why Inequality Persists

by John U. Ogbu � 1994

Explains the persistence of inequality between blacks and whites despite changes since 1960, noting why a gap persists in the school performances of the two groups. The article looks at the difference between class stratification and racial stratification and then discusses civil rights, social change, and the educational consequences of racial stratification. (Source: ERIC)

INTRODUCTION

I have heard both white and black Americans on several occasions ask (1) why racial inequality persists and (2) why black Americans continue to lag in school performance and educational attainment after all the improvements in race relations since 1960. They point to new employment opportunities in the private and public sectors for blacks who have a good education, and to the growing number of middle-class blacks. The belief that things should be different now because of improved opportunity structure can be seen in the number of black and white social scientists asserting that social class, rather than race, is now the important factor determining the life chances of black Americans.[1] They further argue that the emergence of an "underclass" phenomenon is the reason for the current problems facing blacks in education, employment, housing, and the like.

The shift from race to class explanation of the economic, educational, and social problems is attractive to both white Americans and middle- class black Americans. For the whites it is compatible with their model of the United States as a society stratified by class. For middle-class blacks it gives a sense of achievement and reinforces their eagerness to distance themselves from those who have not made it or cannot make it. In the past the problem was "racism" and was blamed on whites; today the problem is "poverty" and is blamed on the underclass. A closer examination of the situation indicates, however, that the changes in opportunity structure have not gone far enough or lasted long enough to undo instrumental barriers, let alone other untargeted barriers of racial stratification, and that class has not replaced race as the chief determinant of the life chances of black Americans.

In this article I will argue that the racial inequality persists because changes have occurred mainly in one aspect of racial stratification, in barriers in opportunity structure, but not in other domains; moreover, middle-class and college-educated blacks have been and continue to be the beneficiaries of "a sponsored social mobility" in a labor-market and status mobility system that has not yet become color-blind. Another reason is that mainly white treatment of blacks has been targeted for change but not black responses to

racial stratification. I also argue that the school-performance gap persists because the forces of racial stratification that created the gap in the first place continue to maintain it to some degree. Before taking up these two tasks I will define social stratification and distinguish racial stratification from stratification by social class.  

 

CLASS STRATIFICATION VERSUS RACIAL STRATIFICATION

WHAT IS SOCIAL STRATIFICATION?

When people talk about black-white inequality they often talk in terms of class inequality. But as I will argue, the inequality between blacks and whites is one not of class stratification but of racial stratification. A part of the reason for thinking that it is a class problem lies in the simplistic definition of social stratification and the tendency to confuse social stratification with social inequality and social ranking. Conventional definitions of social stratification with emphasis on the instrumental or economic aspect of stratification, coupled with the cult of quantification in some schools of thought, have resulted in the neglect of symbolic and relational aspects of social stratification.

It is not evident from the literature that social inequality is not the same thing as social stratification. For this reason, it is important to start with this distinction. Social inequality is a universal phenomenon; social stratification is not. The most common bases for social inequality are age and sex. Social ranking of individuals, which exists in stratified societies, should also be distinguished from social stratification. The ranking of individuals as individuals does not constitute or result in social stratification.

A society is stratified when and only when its individual members from different social groups are ranked on the basis of their membership in specific social groups that are also ranked, or when they are placed in such ranked social groups. It is always groups that are hierarchically ranked in social stratification, not individuals. Social stratification, then, is an arrangement of social groups or social categories in a hierarchical order of subordination and domination in which some groups so organized have unequal access to the fundamental resources of society.[2]

A stratified society is a society in which there is a differential relationship between members of its constituent groups and the society's fundamental resources, so that some people (e.g., white Americans), by virtue of their membership in particular social groups, have almost unimpaired access to the strategic resources, while some other people (e.g., black Americans), by virtue of their own membership in other social groups, have various impediments in their access to the same strategic or fundamental resources. In addition, the different social groups in the hierarchy are separated by cultural and invidious distinctions that serve to maintain social distance between them. In a stratified society there is usually an overarching ideology, a folk or/and scientific "theory" embodying the dominant group's rationalizations or explanations of the hierarchical ordering of the

groups.[3] Subordinate social groups do not necessarily accept the rationalizations of the system; however, they are not entirely free from its influence.[4]

There are several types of social stratification that may coexist within the same society, such as American society. They include social class, ethnic, racial, caste, and gender stratifications. The bases for formation of the different types of stratification are economic status, cultural heritage, and social honor or esteem. Different systems of stratification may be compared with regard to the following features: basis or reasons for stratification (from the society or dominant group's point of view), presumed source of the factor on which stratification is based (such as whether it is extrinsic or intrinsic to the groups and their members), mode of recruitment of members, status summation, mobility across strata, symbols of identity, and degree of internal stratification.[5] In this article I focus only on social class and racial stratifications.  

CLASS STRATIFICATION

Conventional Perspectives

There is no commonly accepted definition of class, although we can generally distinguish between two perspectives: Marxist and non- Marxist.[6]

In the Marxist view, social class refers to a group's relation to the means of production and power struggle.[7] The ideas of "class conflict," "class struggle," and "economic exploitation" are important ingredients in the Marxist notion of class stratification. There are difficulties in using the Marxist class perspective to explain racial inequality in the United States.

One problem is that the Marxist framework is so dependent on relation to means of production and economic status that it ignores the existence of other types of social stratification. Some justify the lack of recognition of other forms of stratification by claiming that the ultimate source of inequality in U.S. society is corporate capitalism. The latter makes social class the fundamental form of stratification and inequality because it is based on economic differences and exploitation. They argue that racism, castism, and sexism are merely expressions of economic or class inequality.[8] The problem with this view is that anthropologists have documented the existence of caste and other forms of stratification in precapitalist societies and in societies without corporate capitalism.[9] Furthermore, class stratification based on economic status and stratification based on noneconomic factors can and do coexist in the United States, Britain, India, Japan, and elsewhere.[10]

Another problem is that the Marxist framework erroneously assumes that the labor market is color-blind, caste-blind, and gender-blind. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that "the corporate economic market" has not historically treated blacks, other racial minorities, and females like their white male peers.[11] Nor do "exploited" white workers treat black and other racial minority co-workers as co-sufferers and equal. This

has been fully documented in the case of Chinese workers in California, and in the case of black workers nationwide.[12]

For non-Marxists, social classes are synonymous with socioeconomic status (SES) groups. A social class refers to a segment of society's population differentiated by education, occupation, and income, the interaction of which is believed to result in a particular life-style and a set of power relations. By defining social classes as SES groups, researchers usually assume that individuals who meet the criteria of their class index (namely, education, income, and jobs--instrumental criteria) belong to the same social class (e.g., upper class, middle class, working class, lower class, underclass, etc.) and that the individuals so included will manifest some assumed appropriate class behavior. The main research approach is correlational because of the belief that members of the same SES group will manifest the same values and patterns of behavior.[13]

One problem in applying class stratification to the analysis of racial inequality lies in the temporality of class membership in contrast to the permanence of racial group membership. Consider, for example, that on July 19, 1982, Dan Rather reported on CBS evening news that in one year, 1981, about 2 million Americans "fell" into or joined the underclass because their income slipped below the official poverty line. No such sudden mass recruitment has ever been reported between racially stratified groups. Furthermore, note that some of the 2 million "new recruits" of the underclass included retired middle-class people whose pension income fell below the poverty line because of inflation. I do not believe that these "former" middle-class Americans would immediately assume underclass values and behaviors. The new recruits to the underclass also included temporarily unemployed skilled workers whose unemployment benefits ran out. They, too, would not suspend their own values and behaviors to take up those of the underclass "temporarily" until they returned to their former life-style when the economy improved. So assigning people to different social classes, especially to the underclass, because of income and a few other instrumental criteria at a particular point in time may not be very meaningful.

We encounter more serious problems when people from different ethnic, racial, caste, and gender groups are lumped into the same SES groups because they have similar education, jobs, and wages. It is quite possible that the members of the different groups differ in some other ways that interfere with the influence the measured values and behaviors assumed to be determined by SES.

An Alternative Perspective

Class stratification is but one type of stratification. Its distinguishing feature is that it is based on economic status, an acquired characteristic.[14] Because the basis for membership in class groups can be acquired by an individual during a lifetime, social classes are open entities. Although they are more or less permanent, the entities have no clear boundaries; furthermore, their membership is not permanent because people are continually moving in and out of them. Children can move up or down the different class strata and thereby can belong to different strata than their parents. Furthermore, children

of an interclass mating can affiliate with the class of either parent. In a system of social class, occupational, social, and political positions are often based on training and ability rather than ascriptive criteria-- at least this appears to be the case in the United States. Vertical mobility, upward or downward, from one ranked stratum to another is legitimated in a class system. Usually, there are built-in means of achieving such mobility.

RACIAL STRATIFICATION

Racial stratification is the hierarchical organization of socially defined "races" or groups (as distinct from biologically defined "races" or groups) on the basis of assumed inborn differences in status honor or moral worth, symbolized in the United States by skin color. The amount of the status honor that members of a given racial group are purported to have is usually determined by the value that members of the dominant group attach to skin color and is interpreted by them as an inherent or intrinsic part of the subordinate racial group and its individual members. The latter are believed to possess this lifelong attribute already at birth. This is in contrast to the extrinsic nature of the attributes of social classes and their members (e.g., economic status), which can be acquired or lost during a lifetime.[15]

Recruitment into the racial strata, that is, the ranked racial groups, is by birth and descent. Racial groups are permanently organized hierarchically into more or less endogamous groups. In the past, marriage between blacks and whites was prohibited; even now that it is legally permitted the rule of descent has not changed. There is a culturally sanctioned rule that children of black and white mating, within or outside marriage, must affiliate with blacks. Throughout the history of the United States, all children of known black-white matings have been automatically defined as black by law and/or custom. In very rare cases do some blacks covertly become whites, through the painful and nonlegitimated process of "passing."[16] There have been some attempts in recent years by some individuals to have the U.S. courts reclassify them from black to white or vice-versa.[17] Thus, it is not very meaningful to point to increasing interracial marriage as evidence that race no longer matters. In a system of racial stratification people are prohibited from changing their group membership. The prohibition is usually rationalized in the dominant group's ideology. In short, membership in racially stratified groups is permanent. The permanent racial groups are visible, recognized, and named. Social integration may occur, but assimilation is not an option, at least for black Americans.

In a racially stratified society, each racial stratum has its own social classes. The social classes of component strata are parallel but not equal. The reasons for the unequal social classes are that the origins of the classes may be different and that members of the racial groups do not have equal access to societal resources that enhance class development. For example, black Americans did not begin their social, occupational, and political differentiation because of differences in training, ability, or family background as did white Americans. Instead, blacks were initially collectively relegated to menial status as slaves without regard to individual differences. For almost a century after emancipation from slavery they also experienced a high degree of status summation. That is, their

occupational and other roles depended more on their membership in a subordinate racial group than on individual education and ability. They were restricted from competing for desirable jobs and social positions. This is an important reason why black Americans are preoccupied with the civil rights "struggle" for equal social, economic, and political opportunities. Here is an important difference between blacks as a subordinate racial stratum and lower- class whites as a subordinate economic stratum. At least in the contemporary United States, there is no conscious feeling on the part of members of any social class in the general population that they belong to a corporate unity or that their common interests are different from those of other classes.[18] American lower-class people do not, for instance, share a collective perception of their social and economic difficulties as stemming from class subordination. Perhaps it is because of the absence of such perceptions and interpretations that I have not observed over the last thirty-two years white lower-class members engaged in a "collective struggle" for better employment, credit rating, housing, political participation, and other opportunities.[19] In contrast, most black Americans see racial barriers in employment, education, housing, and other areas as the primary causes of their menial positions and poverty.

Black Americans, like white Americans, are stratified by class but their social classes are not equal in development and they are qualitatively different. They are unequal in development because, as I have noted, blacks have had less access to jobs and training associated with class differentiation and mobility. As a result, until the 1960s, the people who made up the upper class among blacks were from a few professions, such as law, medicine, business, teaching, and preaching, with the last two comprising almost two-thirds of that class. These were professions that served primarily the needs of the black community. Blacks were largely excluded from other higher-paying professions such as architecture, civil engineering, accounting, chemistry, and management. Before 1960, the black upper class tended to overlap with the white middle-class segment and the black middle class overlapped with the white upper-lower class. The lower class among blacks was made up of an unstable working class, the unemployed, and the unemployable.[20]

The social classes among blacks are qualitatively different because the historical circumstances that created them and the structural forces that sustain them are different from those that created and sustained white social classes. I noted earlier the narrow base of black class differentiation during slavery. After slavery, racial barriers in employment--a job ceiling--continued for generations to limit their base of class differentiation and mobility.[21] These collective experiences resulted in the evolution of shared perceptions among blacks of all social classes that they lack equal opportunity with whites and that it is much more difficult for blacks to achieve economic and social self- betterment.[22]

Another reason for the qualitative difference is that before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s blacks were forced to live in ghetto-like communities.[23] Whites created and maintained the ghettos as clearly defined residential areas of the cities to which they restricted the black population. Blacks of all social classes were forced to share the ghetto life. This shared involuntary residential experience generated a shared feeling of oppression that transcended class boundaries.[24]    

RACIAL STRATIFICATION AND INEQUALITY

RACIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE UNITED STATES: THE TWO SIDES OF THE PHENOMENON

In the last section I noted the differences between class stratification and racial stratification. In this section I will focus on racial stratification in the United States. Specifically, I want to discuss the factors that make up the stratification--treatments of blacks by whites and responses of blacks to their treatment. White treatments and black responses may be grouped in three domains: instrumental, expressive, and symbolic and relational. I have described them in detail elsewhere,[25] and will provide only a summary here.

White Treatments

White instrumental treatments take several forms: economic, political, social, and educational. I use the concept of job ceiling to show how economic discrimination works. A job ceiling consists of both formal statutes and informal practices followed by white Americans to limit black Americans' access to desirable occupations, to truncate their opportunities, and to channel narrowly the potential returns they can expect from their education and abilities.[26] Whites have historically used the job ceiling to deny qualified blacks free and equal competition for the jobs they desire and to exclude them from certain highly desirable jobs that require education and in which education pays off. Whites based their action on (1) the belief that blacks were incapable of doing certain jobs and (2) the idea that permitting blacks in certain positions would result in social equality.[27] The result was that before 1960, blacks were not permitted to obtain their proportional share of such jobs. Further, as a consequence, employment inequality developed in which a disproportionate portion of the black population was restricted to menial jobs below the job ceiling. Other discriminatory instrumental treatment of blacks resulted in inequality in housing, political participation, and education.[28]

Symbolic and relational treatments have to do with white denigration (put down) of blacks culturally, linguistically, intellectually, and socially. Whites tend to believe that there is some undesirable biological, linguistic, cultural, and intellectual inferiority that sets blacks apart. Such beliefs were strong enough that in the past white Americans took steps to protect themselves from contamination by erecting barriers between themselves and black Americans through prohibition of intermarriage and through residential and social segregation. Whites also used blacks for scapegoating and psychological relief by projecting onto them undesirable traits that created aversion to blacks and the belief that they are inferior. The aversion and belief in racial inferiority are probably important reasons for forcing children born of "mixed couples" to affiliate with blacks.

Black Responses

Equally important in maintaining racial stratification are black Americans' perceptions and responses, which also fall into instrumental, expressive, and relational domains.

Instrumentally, blacks developed their own folk theory to explain how American society works differently for them compared with whites. Public pronouncements aside, blacks still believe that there is an institutionalized discrimination against them, so that a black person cannot advance as far as a white person; nor do they really believe that black people get ahead merely by getting an education or acting like a white person.[29] This was brought home to me in 1969 while attending a workshop on black history and culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of my teachers, a black actress, described an incident that expressed this view. She said that she was trying to get blacks into a training program for technicians in the movie industry. One applicant was rejected because she did not speak standard English. The actress said that the applicant was rejected because of racial discrimination and insisted on her admission. She explained that before the late 1960s black people who spoke standard English could not get certain jobs in the movie industry and could not rent or buy homes in parts of Westwood. She concluded by saying that inability to speak standard English or behave like mainstream white Americans in other ways was not the reason for lack of self-advancement among blacks.

During my ethnographic research in Stockton, California (1968-1970), I found similar beliefs among middle-class blacks. The beliefs were expressed, for example, in their stories about the difficulty they faced in trying to buy homes in the more desirable neighborhoods. In 1963 the average cost of homes in North Stockton neighborhoods was about $16,500. Many blacks who were refused the right to buy homes in those neighborhoods were professionals, including teachers, social workers, and medical doctors. They had an average annual family income of about $12,000, far above the city average. They had completed median school years far above the city average. Many white families living in those neighborhoods had incomes well below $12,000 and much less education.[30] Twenty black families successfully crossed the residential caste line in 1963 by buying homes directly from civil rights-minded white residents. Some of these black pioneer residents whom I interviewed in 1969 and 1970 repeatedly recounted the stiff white opposition to their presence and the personal indignities they suffered after moving into their new homes.[31]

Because of such collective experiences of discrimination, blacks appear to believe that they cannot make it merely by following rules of behavior for achievement or the cultural practices that work for white people. So they developed their own "folk theory" of "making it" that goes beyond the strategy of pursuing educational credentials for mainstream employment strategies or saving money to be able to live in desirable neighborhoods, to include several survival strategies. Among the survival strategies that I have observed locally and nationally is "collective struggle" or collective action to change the rules that do not work well for them in education, employment, housing, and other areas. The belief that there is an institutionalized discrimination and the use of collective struggle to eliminate, reduce, or circumvent the barriers so that individual blacks can have access to jobs, housing, and so forth, commensurate with their training and ability continue to some degree.

Black symbolic response to white denigration of their languages and cultures was not simply the adoption of white language and culture. Nor was it merely the development of a different language (e.g., black English vernacular) and culture, or the retention of African cultural and language elements. It also included the development of a distinct black cultural/language frame of reference that is more or less oppositional vis-e-vis what they perceived as the white cultural/language frame of reference. Because black customary behaviors and speech are often erroneously attributed to their lower-class or underclass status, I will discuss their origins and form in detail.

The customary behaviors and communication patterns of blacks fall under what I call "secondary cultural/language differences vis-e-vis white American culture and language."[32] Usually, in a racial stratification, the cultural/language differences that existed at the beginning of racial domination are reinterpreted by the subordinate racial group in opposition to the customary behaviors of the dominant group for several reasons. One is that the subordinate group may be prohibited from behaving like the dominant group, forced to do so, or denied the rewards that go with such behaviors. Black Americans experienced all three treatments.

Black Americans brought from Africa precontact cultural/language differences with white Americans.[33] Later, however, they developed secondary cultural differences because of the way they perceived and interpreted their "social reality." Both during slavery and in postslavery subordination, blacks developed some distinct customary behaviors and assumptions permeating various domains of their lives, including religion, subsistence, language and communication, politics, folklore, and social relations. These were often in opposition to white American customary behaviors and assumptions in the same areas.

Black responses in religion and language will serve as examples. Reverend Calvin Marshall described in an interview with Time magazine the perceived "social reality" giving rise to the black version of Christianity and church institution. According to him,

the man [White Americans] systematically killed your (i.e., black) language, killed your culture, tried to kill your soul, tried to blot you out--but somewhere along the way he gave us Christianity and gave it to us to enslave us. But it freed us because we understood things about it and we made it work for us in ways that it never worked for him.[34]

Holt suggests that black Americans developed their church into an institution within which to resist "the dehumanizing oppression, degradation, and suffering of slavery."[35] The black church promoted self-worth, dignity, and a viable identity among them and helped them overcome their fears. It became a forum where blacks developed unique language codes and communication styles to conceal their true feelings and aspirations from whites, deceive whites, maintain their sense of collective identity and self-worth, and put down whites "without Whites knowing that they are the real objects of ridicule."[36]

Black English vernacular provides another example of the emergence of an oppositional frame of reference. During slavery blacks were forced to speak English rather than their native African languages because white slave owners feared that blacks might conspire to revolt. However, the slaves learned to speak English in such a way that the slave-owners still did not know what was going on.[37] The slaves used certain words that had different and opposite meanings to them and to the slave-owners to keep the latter off guard. This practice continued after slavery so that even today blacks still use their English language to keep white society off guard. For example, a black person may use the word bad when he actually means good.

Under racial stratification the subordinate racial group develops an oppositional cultural adaptation by inventing new customary behaviors with new codes or norms and by reinterpreting its presubordination customary behaviors. Both are accomplished through "cultural inversion." Cultural inversion is a process whereby subordinate group members come to define certain forms of behaviors, events, symbols, and meanings as inappropriate for them because these are characteristic of their oppressors. At the same time they define other forms of behaviors, events, symbols, and meanings, often the opposite, as appropriate for them. What is appropriate for racial minority group members tends to be defined in opposition to what is considered appropriate for the dominant racial group, their "oppressors." For this reason, the issue of cultural and language differences between the two racial strata is no longer merely that members of each group behave or speak differently so that they do not understand each other. It is not merely that members of the subordinate racial group do not know or do not have access to the cultural practices of the dominant group. Rather, the issue is that members of the oppressed or subordinate racial group have come to ascribe secondary meanings to the differences in the customary/language behaviors and, as a result, the latter have become symbols of affiliation or opposition. That is, the minorities now interpret their members' participation in certain activities, behaving in certain ways, possessing certain objects, expressing certain ideas, or being in certain situations either as evidence of a bona fide membership in the minority group or as evidence that the individual has lost his or her black identity and has "assimilated" into white cultural identity or as evidence of disloyalty and collusion with the enemy.[38]

The target areas in which an oppositional cultural frame of reference is applied appear to be those traditionally defined as prerogatives of white Americans, first defined by whites themselves and then acceded to by blacks. These are areas in which it was long believed that only whites could perform well, and few blacks were actually given the opportunity to try or were rewarded well when they succeeded. They are also areas in which the criteria for performance have been established by white Americans, and competence in performance is judged by white people or their black representatives, and reward for performance is determined by white people according to white criteria. Intellectual performance (IQ test scores), scholastic performance, and performance in high-status jobs in mainstream economy represent such areas.[39]

The evidence for this problem comes from autobiographies, accounts of personal experiences, and research among blacks in academia and in the corporate world. A

number of authors explicitly state that they themselves or other blacks they know or have studied view successful participation in mainstream culture or the white cultural frame of reference as threatening to their cultural identity.[40] According to Taylor, some blacks in corporations find it in their best interests to embrace overtly the behavior of whites, but "the flight into White role behavior is . . . highly costly" because for a black person to be accepted in the top echelons of corporations, he or she must think, manage, behave like a majority person and "be white, except in external appearance."[41] Writing about black female executives, Campbell states that these women are forced to pull away from their black cultural identity, and consciously modify their speech, laughter, walk, mode of dress, and choice of car to conform to mainstream requirements. And as the women rise in the corporate ladder "they become isolated from those in their old world."[42] Davis and Watson also repeatedly remark on the "phenomenal estrangement of corporate Blacks from Black cultural traditions, their own families and communities and their own pre- corporate life styles, ways of dressing and sense of humor."[43] We shall see later how this problem is perceived in education.

It is true that today many black Americans appear to behave like mainstream white Americans in many areas of life and that many speak standard English. I have also found that many of the same people behave and talk differently--"behave black" and "talk black"--in appropriate contexts. But the point I wish to stress is that other black Americans who practice mostly the black customary behaviors and talk black vernacular most of the time are not doing so because of their lower- class or underclass status. The differences between blacks and whites in customary behaviors and language are not merely class differences. Nor are the differences confined to adolescents. They are found among adults in the community.[44]

For my purpose, the most significant feature of black relational responses to racial stratification is the degree of distrust of white Americans. The history of black-white relationships abounds with many episodes that have left blacks with the sense that they cannot trust white Americans or trust the societal institutions controlled by whites.[45]  

 

CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND PERSISTENCE OF RACIAL INEQUALITY

CHANGES IN WHITE TREATMENT

People think that the civil rights revolution of the 1960s changed the opportunity structure of black Americans. For that reason, blacks and whites ought to be equal by now. Some researchers compile statistics from the census to study the gap between blacks and whites in education, high-status jobs, income, housing, and middle-class status and they often find that the gap is not closing.[46]

A favorite explanation of the persisting inequality is that it is now due to class status, rather than racial barriers. According to this school of thought, macroeconomic changes

(e.g., "industrial restructuring") have eliminated many unskilled jobs that blacks formerly did and created new types of jobs requiring education and skills that blacks do not have. Furthermore, the exodus of educated and middle-class blacks from the black community or ghetto has created a concentration of poverty that, in turn, has produced an underclass population not capable of acquiring the education and skills with which to take advantage of the new job opportunities.[47]

One should reject this explanation because it is not based on studies of actual experiences of black Americans in the opportunity structure. Rather, it is based on studies of "changes in American institutions," "economic restructuring," and the assumed new work-skill requirements. Research focusing on actual black experience shows that blacks still face employment barriers where economic restructuring has taken place and where it has not; that well-educated blacks and those with less education face more employment barriers than do their white peers; and that the passage of legislation for equal opportunity is one thing, and implementation and compliance are another. Moreover, blacks who are employed still face more barriers in advancement.[48]

An alternative explanation considers several factors. First, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s did not improve the opportunity structure for all segments of the black community. The people who benefited most through "a sponsored social mobility" are college-educated and middle- class blacks. They were and continue to be the target of affirmative action and other special programs in education, employment, promotions, positions in community programs, special appointments, and the like. Blacks without college education, lower-class blacks, and/or inner-city blacks are largely unhelped by these programs.[49]

Second, the civil rights revolution did not usher in an era of color- blind labor-market forces causing blacks to be hired above the job ceiling because they have the education and ability or skills required by the restructured economy. A close examination of the situation shows that black advancement since 1961 has been primarily due to noneconomic forces. The evidence comes from case studies of hiring practices and treatment of blacks in specific industries as well as in federal, state, and local government agencies throughout the nation. Indeed, the evidence suggests that economic restructuring and mainstream market forces had almost nothing to do with the changes in black employment.

What are the nonmarket forces and noneconomic forces that have brought about gains in black employment since 1961? They include executive actions (e.g., President Kennedy's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, 1961; affirmative action programs); legislative actions (e.g., Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the war on poverty; etc.); pressures applied by civil rights groups and collective struggle of the black community (e.g., civil rights suits filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, boycotts and sit-ins, etc.); the Vietnam War, which caused labor shortages; efforts by various public institutions, such as public schools and universities, especially institutions receiving state and federal monies, to "racially balance" their personnel; and an increase in social programs for the poor and minorities.

Some noneconomic forces had direct or indirect impact on the employment practices of private business establishments, especially among those with federal contracts. It was largely because of these noneconomic factors that American corporations increased their recruitment visits to colleges and universities, including black colleges, beginning in the later part of the 1960s, to recruit black college graduates.[50] I observed the influence of the noneconomic forces during my ethnographic research in Stockton, California (1968-1970). At that time, Stockton public schools and other local agencies receiving state and federal funds periodically sent representatives to recruit Mexican-Americans from the Southwest and blacks from the South in order to meet their "racial/ethnic balance" requirements. The noneconomic forces still operate today in the public and private sectors under various concepts.

The effects of these noneconomic, nonmarket forces can be seen in the increases in black representation in high-level jobs. Thus, between 1960 and 1971 the number of blacks in the two top occupational categories nearly doubled.[51] In the top category, the professional and technical occupations, the increase was about 128 percent for blacks, whereas it was only 49 percent for the general population. In the second highest- paying occupational category--managers, officials, and proprietors--the number of blacks increased almost 100 percent, although the increase for all employees was only 23 percent. Most of the increases in black employment above the job ceiling happened after 1966, that is, after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law. I conclude from these observations that blacks did not make their new advances because of normal market or economic forces or because mainstream employers decided to ignore race and change their hiring and promotion practices. In fact, subsequent studies of the experiences of blacks hired above the job ceiling show that many employers were merely complying with the law and that black employees were aware of this.[52]

Furthermore, studies of actual experiences of blacks on the job indicate that in many instances they are neither advancing nor getting adequate opportunity for on-the-job training for future advancement in comparison with their white peers.[53] This was also the experience of the "new middle-class" blacks working in Fortune 1000 companies.[54] In 1989 The New York Times reported complaints by black school superintendents that they were not evaluated as individuals on the basis of education, ability, and performance but as members of a collectivity--as blacks; black lawyers interviewed by Matuso in Washington, D.C., in 1989 complained that they lagged behind their white peers in opportunity structure. In a study of black elites, including university professors, Benjamin found that many still face "the color line" in advancement.[55] Individual black professionals write about their frustrations and in some cases the result is tragic. Consider the case of a black manager reported by Davis and Watson. The manager "was passed over for promotion three times--the last time by a less-educated, less experienced white male whom he had trained. The Black manager killed himself."[56] Other "racial" problems facing contemporary middle-class blacks have been reported by Cose.[57] I conclude from my own research and other studies focusing on actual experience of blacks that even among the highly educated and skilled, racial stratification is still a factor determining their instrumental treatment.

Some changes have also taken place in the symbolic and relational treatments of blacks. A poll conducted by Newsweek in 1978 showed that although whites' beliefs in black inferiority had been decreasing significantly since 1960, a large portion of whites still believed that blacks are inferior to whites. About 25 percent of the whites polled said that blacks had less intelligence than whites; about 15 percent thought that blacks were inferior to whites.[58] According to Sniderman and Prazza, some whites still believed this in the 1980s.[59] Intermarriage between blacks and whites, especially among highly educated blacks, is increasing; usually it is the well-educated black males who marry out.[60] It should be added that some of the black males marrying out are at times the only "successful" members of their own families. For example, we encountered one mother in my current ethnographic research who complained that the only one of her nine children who finished college married a white woman and disappeared; another black mother with six children told a similar story. Then, the offspring of the "mixed couples" are still compelled to affiliate with blacks. From the point of view of these mothers and other blacks in the community, interracial marriages are not necessarily a sign of positive change. Finally, blacks who move into "white communities" find that they face "assimilation blues."[61] The persistence of other symbolic and related treatment has been reported by Cose.[62]  

CHANGES IN BLACK RESPONSES

There have also been some changes in black responses since the 1960s, but not always in the expected direction. Consequently, these changes have not really enhanced equality in terms of education, employment, and income or class status. In the instrumental domain, black response has varied. Among well-educated middle class blacks, some began to think that social class has replaced race in determining the life chances of blacks, and that equally qualified blacks and whites now have equal opportunity in employment, advancement, and remuneration. Often proponents of this view forget that they may owe their high-status positions to the nonmarket forces described earlier. For example, some may have been recruited to their positions because of "affirmative action" or "extraordinary opportunity" to recruit "underrepresented minorities." They may have been recruited because their institutions were directly or indirectly pressured to hire them. Although they have the academic and professional qualifications for their positions, the actual attainment of those positions may have been "sponsored." Other middle-class blacks continue to encounter racial barriers in employment, advancement, and remuneration; as such, they believe that race is still a significant factor.[63] As for the masses, most of whom have not experienced any significant improvements in their opportunity structure, they continue to respond instrumentally as before, often resorting to survival and alternative strategies, including drug dealing.[64]

The change in black symbolic response has also not all been in the expected direction. Prior to the 1960s, black quest for identity took at least three forms: accommodation and acquiescence, or at least nonovert opposition in the tradition of Booker T. Washington; ambivalence and opposition expressed in struggle for integration in the tradition of DuBois; and oppositional identity expressed in separatist movements in the tradition of Garvey and the Black Muslims.[65]

The civil rights mobilization of the 1960s increased and reinforced the oppositional qualities of black collective identity. For blacks the mobilization removed the stigma of being black, increased race pride, and generated much-needed ideology, namely, that "black is beautiful," to minimize the fear of other social costs to those black Americans who wanted to express openly or to be what they had always felt covertly. Public acknowledgement and expression of oppositional identity were not limited to activists or to the grass roots. It has reached every segment of the black community, although the change occurred more slowly in some segments. For example, I found during my research in Stockton (1968- 1970) that middle-class blacks had difficulty identifying themselves as "black" or accepting the slogan "Black is beautiful" and wearing their hair "natural." When I returned to Stockton for a restudy eleven years later, this was no longer the case. Most middle-class blacks in the city identified themselves as black and were wearing their hair natural. Thus, whereas in 1969 when the Black Teachers Alliance was formed, fifty- five of the one hundred black teachers in the Stockton Unified School District did not join because the word "black" symbolized being "militant," by 1981 almost all the black teachers in the city were members of the alliance.

The change in the direction of opposition has permeated the work of black artists and scholars. Baker reports that in the field of theater there has been a replay of the course of some events that occurred during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. At that time black dramatists stopped trying to please white audiences; they instead directed their attention to the black folk tradition and to contemporary issues of black life. He goes on to say that during the second half of the 1960s a significant portion of black Americans became disillusioned with the goals of integration, abandoned time-honored middle-class values, and instead adopted Black Power as a vehicle for spiritual liberation.[66] After the civil rights revolution, blacks also began to revise their history, so that new interpretations of the role and contributions of African and African-American heritages to American culture began to emerge.[67] At least among the masses, cultural and language frames of reference have probably not become less oppositional, as can be seen in some ethnographic studies.[68]

Two changes in relational responses are worth mentioning. Both are related to the so-called social dislocation of the ghetto.[69] It has been argued that with the decline of racial barriers, increase in employment opportunities in high-status jobs for blacks with college education and skills, and decline in housing discrimination, middle- class blacks moved out of the ghetto. The consequences are the dislocation of the ghetto, the concentration of poverty, and the emergence of the "underclass."

An alternative interpretation is that because blacks "were forced" to live in the ghetto for so long, some have come to interpret educational and economic success as "tickets" to disaffiliate with their community and to affiliate with mainstream whites, both physically and socially. Behavior of some middle-class blacks tends to create tension between "successful" ones who move out of or flee from the ghetto and the less successful ones who remain behind. Based on my ethnographic studies in the community, my impression is that people who remain in the ghetto, especially the youth, do not admire those who socially disaffiliate. Thus, the problem of role models for contemporary inner-city youths

is not that there are no middle-class blacks physically resident as neighbors; rather the problem is that the people in the inner city interpret the social disaffiliation with the community negatively.[70]    

PERSISTING CLASS ANALYSIS OF BLACK-WHITE INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

Neither the changes in the white treatments of blacks nor in the black responses are sufficient to move blacks and whites toward equality, even in the instrumental domain, which has been the focus of public policies and where most changes have occurred. But public policies have not had a significant impact in changing white treatments of blacks in the symbolic and relational domains. And public policies and intervention programs hardly recognize black instrumental, symbolic, and relational responses.

Class analysis, I contend, cannot throw much light on the persistence of racial inequality. But why does class analysis continue as the basis for explaining the persistence of the inequality? I have discussed some of the reasons elsewhere, and will summarize them here.[71] One reason lies partly in two misconceptions of the race situation in the United States. One misconception is the extension of European immigrants' experiences to racial minorities, especially involuntary minorities who did not come to the United States with expectations similar to those of European immigrants.

The other misconception is the confusion of socioeconomic success with "assimilation" into the mainstream white American society. There are, for instance, people who argue that when blacks acquire "basic cultural knowledge and specific educational skills" they will not only get better jobs than their parents but also become assimilated into the mainstream society and achieve full citizenship.[72] However, they present no evidence that white Americans want to assimilate blacks who have good education, skills, and good jobs. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that white Americans do not want to assimilate blacks. The latter was pointed out decades ago by Myrdal. According to him, white Americans consider black Americans to be unassimilable in the sense that it is not desirable to assimilate blacks in the way that European immigrants were assimilated.[73] As some contemporary middle-class blacks have learned when they tried to assimilate, assimilation is neither a matter of a black person's choice nor a pleasant experience.[74] Achieving socioeconomic success is not synonymous with assimilation and a minority person does not have to assimilate to be successful. From my comparative study of minority groups I have found that some groups (e.g., Chinese-Americans, East Indians, etc.) have achieved socioeconomic success without being assimilated.

Another reason for preferring class analysis is the influence of egalitarian ideology and the mythology of individualism, based primarily on white American experience. Maquet has correctly noted that such an ideology and such a mythology tend to form a screen that prevents their bearers from seeing the system that underlies their own behaviors in conforming to superior and inferior roles.[75] Still another reason is the belief that poverty is primarily the result of instrumental barriers: lack of access to good jobs, education, housing, and the like. Such instrumental barriers are, of course, the easiest

target for public policy and remedial efforts. But this perception ignores the symbolic and relational barriers erected by whites against blacks as well as black people's own responses to such barriers.

I conclude from the preceding discussion that class analysis is not an adequate guide if one wants to understand why the inequality persists. The inequality between blacks and whites is due to racial stratification. Racial stratification does not rest alone on instrumental barriers erected by the whites; it also depends on white relational and symbolic treatments of blacks and on black Americans' own instrumental, relational, and symbolic responses. For these reasons, targeting and removing instrumental barriers will reduce but not entirely undo the racial stratification. Furthermore, to progress at a satisfactory pace toward equality, blacks, like some other minorities, must begin to distinguish between instrumental success and assimilation and between instrumental means or behaviors toward their goals and noninstrumental means or behaviors compromising their cultural identity.

 

EDUCATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF RACIAL STRATIFICATION

CLASS ANALYSIS OF SCHOOL-PERFORMANCE GAP

As in the case of racial inequality in general, the preferred mode of analysis of the educational gap between blacks and whites is class.[76] While researchers may treat race as one "variable," there is usually no reference to racial stratification. Indeed, this concept does not appear in the index of some of the most influential books on public policies and programs in minority education since the 1960s.

We can identify two forms of class analysis corresponding to the non- Marxist and Marxist concepts of class stratification respectively: correlational and cultural reproduction/resistance analyses. In correlational analysis social class is equated with socioeconomic status (SES). Correlational analysts appear to believe that children's school success depends on appropriate family background or attributes that can be correlated with school adjustment and performance. Because middle- class children are more successful in school, these researchers assume that middle-class attributes are more conducive to school success than lower-class or underclass attributes. And since they classify most black children as belonging to the lower class, they attribute the lower school performance of black children to their lower-class or underclass background.[77]

One major difficulty with correlational studies is that they cannot explain why black and white children from similar social-class backgrounds perform differently in school. Correlational studies using black and white samples show two things: (1) within the black sample, as within the white sample, middle-class children do better in school and on standardized tests than do lower-class children; (2) however, when black children and white children from similar SES are compared, black children at every class level do less well than white children.[78] That correlational studies cannot explain the gap in the

school performance of blacks and whites of similar social class is illustrated by the following study.

This was a study of a southeastern suburban elementary school located in an area where black households had higher educational attainment, better job status, and higher income than white households; yet the school performance of black children lagged behind that of the whites. Specifically, in this suburban community about twice as many black adults as whites had college degrees and about one and one-half times as many blacks as whites held managerial and professional jobs; black unemployment was almost the same as white unemployment. The average annual income of a black household was about 39.1 percent higher than the average annual income of a white household, a difference of about $10,000 per household in favor of blacks. In terms of class status, most black parents were of higher socioeconomic status than white parents. Still, black children lagged behind their white peers in the school district in academic achievement. Thus, in 1980-1981, the third-grade students at the elementary school (80 percent black), scored at the 2.6 grade equivalent level, or about the tenth percentile nationally, while the county or school district average was 3.1 in grade-level-equivalent score. In the same year, the fifth-grade students at the elementary school scored at 4.7 grade equivalent level or about the thirty-eighth percentile nationally, whereas the school district average was 5.2.[79]

The cultural reproduction/resistance school is usually associated with Marxist-oriented researchers. One version, which points to some resistance or opposition in the relationship between school culture and that of the students, suggests a more useful approach. As this theory is reformulated by Willis, working-class students fail in school because they consciously or unconsciouly reject academic work as being effeminate (recognizing manual labor as masculine and ideal). These students repudiate school by forming a counterculture, which eventually impedes their school success and their chances of getting high-status jobs after leaving school. Working-class students are said to reject school knowledge because they do not believe that the kind of education they are receiving will solve their problem of subordination.[80] The Willis study introduced "resistance" as a force of human agency in the process of the reproduction of class inequality through schooling. As Weis points out, this has helped researchers shift their attention to the day-to-day attitudes and behaviors or "lived culture" of students.[81] It is precisely because of the introduction of students and school personnel as human agents actively involved in the process of cultural reproduction or resistance that this kind of study is relevant to the educational problems of racially stratified groups.

However, although resistance theory goes some way toward explaining the school failure of working-class youths, it too has some problems when applied to racial minorities. For example, in her study of black youths in Philadelphia, Weis found a paradox: Black youths accepted academic work and schooling, but behaved in ways that ensured that they would not, and did not, succeed. Weis recognized the difficulty of explaining black students' behavior within the framework of social class and repeatedly referred to "racial struggle" in black American history. Nevertheless, she still ended up explaining the school failure of black youths within the framework of "class struggle," saying that the problem ultimately arises from "the material conditions" of blacks.[82]

There are two problems with the Marxist class analysis. One is that by and large Marxist researchers avoid explaining the discrepancies in the school performance of children from different racial/caste origins who belong to the same SES groups. Alternately, they erroneously treat the lower school performance of different types of subordinate groups as the result of resistance of an exploited working class. On the other hand, the cultural reproduction/resistance researchers are silent about the school success of Asian-American working-class students. On the whole, Marxist-oriented researchers do not have a satisfactory explanation for the paradox of both high educational aspirations and lower school performance among black students.

Cross-cultural comparisons suggest that class analyses do not shed much light on the educational experiences of racial and castelike minorities, not only in the United States but also in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere.[83] A more satisfactory approach must take into account the unique features of the stratification systems that distinguish racial minorities from social classes.    

SCHOOL PERFORMANCE GAP TRANSCENDS TIME AND CLASS BOUNDARIES

An enduring educational gap is one major consequence of the racial stratification between blacks and whites. However, in contemporary thinking the tendency is to discuss the academic problems of black children as if they are the product of black underclass status, or inner- city environment, or both. The assumption is also that these are "new problems" that emerged when the "better class" of blacks moved out of the ghetto.[84] A closer look at the evidence suggests otherwise. The historical and persistent nature of the lower school performance of black children is well reflected in two school movements: school desegregation and compensatory education.

The school desegregation movement had as one of its goals the improvement of black school performance. Note, however, that a few years before Brown v. Board of Education several southern school districts began to publish the test scores of blacks and whites, and to use the lower test scores of blacks to oppose school desegregation.[85] In relatively affluent urban black communities, like Durham, North Carolina, and relatively poor ones like Memphis, Tennessee, black students lagged behind their white peers; and in both cities desegregation was intended to close the performance gap. It did not necessarily do so.[86] In the North the situation was no better.[87]

Compensatory education to improve the school performance of urban blacks began in St. Louis in 1956 and was operating in New York City by 1959. By 1961 this intervention strategy had spread to many other northern cities, even though there was no strong evidence that it was closing the gap between black and white children in school performance.[88]

Another educational consequence of racial stratification is that even today the school-performance gap is not limited to poor blacks living in the inner cities. And it never was. As I pointed out earlier, it is true that among blacks, as among whites, middle-class children do better than those from the lower class. But even this type of within-group

comparison by social class shows some racial difference. The correlation between SES and academic performance is not as strong among blacks as it is among whites. For example, a study of some 4,000 high school graduates in California in 1975 found that among blacks and Mexican- Americans, children from affluent and well-educated families were not benefiting from their parents' achievement. Like children from poorer families, the middle-class children had difficulty achieving academic qualification for college admission.[89] In their analysis of the 1987 California statewide test results, Haycock and Navarro found that eighth- grade black children whose parents had completed four or more years of college did less well than other black children whose parents had attended but not finished college.[90] Of particular note is that when blacks and whites come from similar SES background, at every level blacks consistently perform lower than their white counterparts.[91]

The performance of blacks on professional examinations such as teacher certification exams provides additional evidence that the problem is not confined to poor blacks.[92] I was once attending a professional meeting where there was an extensive discussion of a state-mandated test for licensing. Many in attendance who had doctoral degrees said they failed the test several times and passed it only after the norm was lowered for minorities. But as would be expected, when we began to discuss black educational issues in general, my colleagues spoke as if the difficulty of passing academic and standardized tests were limited to the black underclass.

The problem of the school performance gap is found among blacks who live in affluent suburbs, including such places as Alexandria County, Virginia; Arlington County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Prince George's County, Maryland. In my current research in Oakland, California, black students attending the city's elite high school, Skyline, have an average GPA of 1.92 and an average GPA of 1.62 in the courses required to get into the University of California system. The comparable figures for Chinese and white students in the same school are 2.97/2.74 and 2.74/2.48 respectively.[93] I need to add that many of the affluent school districts have an impressive array of remedial programs intended to close the gap in the school achievement.

There are three worrisome features of black school performance. First, while all minorities may start lower than their white peers in the early grades, Asian students improve and even surpass their white peers eventually; for black students, on the other hand, the progression is in the opposite direction: The gap widens between them and their white peers in subsequent years.[94] Second, of all subgroups that I have studied, black males fare the worst. Third, not only are the average black GPA and other test scores lower than those of their white counterparts, but black students are often disproportionately underrepresented in courses that would enhance their chances of pursuing higher education.[95]  

HOW RACIAL STRATIFICATION ENTERS INTO BLACK EDUCATION

The school-performance gap was created by forces of racial stratification: white treatment of blacks in the educational domain and black responses to schooling. The gap remains as long as these forces remain. How do these forces get into black education and maintain the gap?

There are three weays in which racial stratification enters into and adversely affects black education. One is through societal educational policies and practices. The societal channel includes denying blacks equal access to education through unequal resources, segregation, and the like--common phenomena in the past. This ensures that blacks do not receive equal education in terms of quantity and quality. If the U.S. society or one of her local communities provides blacks with less and inferior education, then blacks cannot perform as well or go as far as whites in school. This societal and community practice of unequal access was instrumental in the school desegragation movement.[96] The practice appears to be largely reversed, as the federal, state, and local school systems provide extra funds for special programs to improve minority educational achievement.

The other societal practice is denying blacks equal rewards with whites for their educational accomplishments through a job ceiling and related barriers, as discussed in the section on stratification and inequality. This probably historically discouraged blacks from developing "effort optimism" in the pursuit of education. It may also have forced some to seek self-advancement through nonacademic routes.

The second way that racial stratification enters into black education lies in the way black students are perceived and treated in the specific schools they attend. These treatments include tracking, testing and misclassification, representation or nonrepresentation in textbooks and curriculum. Cultural, linguistic, and intellectual denigration is also part of the problem. I have described elsewhere the within-school treatment of black children in the schools I studied in Stockton, California, and how such treatment affected their adjustment and performance.[97] One incident will illustrate how the perception and treatment may result in an unequal educational outcome. In early 1969 I discovered with some neighborhood people that first-grade children in the neighborhood elementary school had not started to learn to read the book designated for that grade. On inquiry we were informed that the children's performance on the "reading-readiness test" showed that they were not yet ready to read; they might be ready to read in March. On the other hand, first-grade children in the white middle-class schools in other parts of the city started on the same reader in September. In May of 1969 both groups of children would be given a state-mandated test based on the same reader. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how poor black and Mexican-American children in my study school would perform on that test.

Racial stratification also enters into and adversely affects black education through black people's own perceptions and responses to their schooling in the context of their overall experience of racial subordination. The factors involved in this, third process is what I call community forces. I will elaborate on this mechanism because it is the least recognized, studied, or discussed.

Black Americans have not been helpless victims of racial subordination, as can be seen in the well-documented history of their "collective struggle."[98] The way they have responded or adapted to their minority status, discussed in the earlier part of this article, has to some extent generated educational orientations and strategies that may not necessarily enhance school success, in spite of people's verbally expressed wish to succeed, namely, to get good grades in their schoolwork and obtain good school credentials for eventual good jobs and decent wages as adults.[99]

The community forces arise from the three domains of black adaptation described earlier. The instrumental adaptation generates perceptions of opportunity structure that affect how blacks perceive and respond to schooling. For example, until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, many black people did not see people around them who "had made it" because of their education, contrary to the claims of "underclass" theorists. In Stockton, California, hardly any of the adolescents I studied in the late 1960s knew anyone, except teachers, who had "become somebody" or become successful because of their education. Yet there had been no "exodus" of educated and professionally successful middle-class blacks from the city.[100] Many black parents in Stockton explained that they did not continue their education because "education did not promise to pay." One father said that he grew up in a town in Florida where college-educated blacks worked in the post office and at other low- prestige jobs; so he decided to go into the Navy. In my research both in Stockton and in Oakland, California, I have come across middle-class blacks who said that if they were white they "would have been farther along" or more successful. Blacks compare themselves unfavorably with whites and usually conclude that, in spite of their education and ability, they are worse off than they should be because of racial barriers, rather than lack of education or qualification.[101]

One professional interviewed by Matusow in Washington, D.C., illustrates this problem. He was a young lawyer who grew up in Alabama, believing that the civil rights revolution of the 1960s had indeed brought equal opportunities for blacks and whites. He took his education seriously, attended Princeton University, and eventually became a lawyer. But when he began to practice he began to feel that he could not be as successful as his white peers.[102]

It is true that in spite of the historical experience of blacks in the opportunity structure, black folk theories for getting ahead stress the importance of education. But this verbal endorsement is not to be accepted at face value. It is often not accompanied by appropriate or necessary effort. I have previously mentioned the paradox of high educational aspiration and inappropriate academic behaviors discovered by Weis in her research in Philadelphia.[103] My students and I encounter the same phenomenon in various locations in California: The students verbally assert that making good grades and obtaining school credentials are important. They also say that in order to make good grades, one must pay attention in class, do what teacher says, answer questions in class, and do homework. However, from our observations in the classroom, in the family, and in the community I must conclude that many do not do these things.[104] I have suggested that the reason for this lack of adequate and persevering effort is probably that, historically, blacks were not adequately rewarded for their educational achievement. So

they may not have developed a widespread effort optimism or a strong cultural ethic of hard work and perseverance in pursuit of academic work.[105] Furthermore, the folk theories stress other means of getting ahead under the circumstances that face black people. But these alternative or "survival" strategies appear to detract from and conflict with their pursuit of formal education.

There are also factors arising from symbolic adaptation that do not particularly encourage striving for school success among lower-class as well as middle-class blacks. One such factor is how blacks perceive or interpret the cultural and language differences they encounter in school. I suggested earlier that black culture embodies a kind of oppositional cultural frame of reference vis-e-vis white American culture. Thus, for some blacks cultural and language differences between blacks and whites are consciously or unconsciouly interpreted as symbols of group identity to be maintained, not barriers to be overcome. Moreover, they tend to equate the school culture (e.g., the curriculum and required behaviors) and standard English with white culture and language. They therefore perceive school learning not as an instrumental behavior to achieve the desired and verbalized goal of getting a good education for future employment, but rather as a kind of linear acculturation or assimilation, detrimental or threatening to collective identity. Some are afraid to behave according to what they see as the white cultural frame of reference for fear it may result in loss of minority cultural identity. This problem has been reported in studies of black students in high school, junior college, and graduate school and parents in adult school.[106] A black professor told Weis that "a lot of Black students see [academic work] as a White world. (If I tell students, `you're going to be excellent--often times excellence means being--White--that kind of excellence is negative here.'"[107] Based on his research findings in New York City, Labov explains that for some black youth accepting school values is equivalent to giving up self- respect because academic participation is equated with giving up black cultural identity.[108]

Apparently, some black educators and others agree with this interpretation that academic work is "white" because they, too, complain that the school curriculum and language of instruction are "white." A careful study of the writings of some black scholars who are proposing changes in the education of black children indicates that their proposals are more or less based on the assumption that the school curriculum, standard practices, and standard English are white and detrimental to black children's cultural identity. Among them are advocates of Afrocentric curriculum and cultural infusion.[109] I think that Claude Steele, a black psychologist at Stanford University, expresses the assumption of these black educators very well in a 1992 article in The Atlantic Monthly:

One factor is the basic assimilationist offer that schools make to Blacks: You can be valued and rewarded in school (and society), the schools say to these students, but you must first master the culture and ways of the American mainstream, and since that mainstream (as it is represented) is essentially White, this means you must give up many particulars of being Black--styles of speech and appearance, value priorities, preferences--at least in mainstream setting. This is asking a lot.[110]

The equation of the school curriculum, the standard classroom behaviors and instructional language, the standard English, with white American culture and language results in conscious or unconscious opposition or ambivalence toward learning and using instrumental behaviors to make good grades and obtain the school credentials that the students say they need and want. This phenomenon, which has to do with identity choice, is a dilemma that cuts across class lines. It may partly explain the low school performance of some middle-class black students.

Racial stratification also affects black education through black relational adaptation. I will briefly point out two aspects of this. First, the deep distrust that blacks have developed for the public schools and those who control them--white Americans or their minority representatives--adversely affects communication between blacks and the schools and black interpretations of and responses to school requirements. Second, among blacks themselves, the practice of physical and social disaffiliation with the community by the academically and professionally successful middle class raises the question in the mind of community people about the real meaning of schooling.    

IMPLICATIONS

From a comparative perspective, the persistence of black-white inequality in general and in education in particular is due to racial stratification, not class stratification. The barriers to equality caused by racial stratification go beyond those of jobs, income, housing and the like. These are the most obvious and are targets of public policies and efforts to achieve equality. There are other complex and subtle aspects of racial stratification in white treatment of blacks and black perceptions of and responses to their social reality, including their responses to schooling, that need to be better recognized, understood, and targeted for change.

Focusing on education, to promote a greater degree of academic success and good social adjustment, (1) it is essential to recognize, understand, and remove the obstacles from society and within the schools described earlier; and (2) it is equally necessary to recognize, understand, and attend to the community forces or the obstacles arising from black responses to racial stratification described above. At the moment, the role of community forces is the least known and the knowing is most resisted. Yet it is among the things that most distinguish immigrant minorities who are doing relatively well in school from nonimmigrant minorities who are not doing as well. There are two parts to the problem of the school-performance gap. Community forces constitute one part.

Notes

1 Michael B. Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993): C. Jencks and P. E. Peterson, eds., The Urban Underclass (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1991); Joint Center for Political Studies, "Defining the Underclass: Researchers Ask Who is Included and What Are the Policy Implications," Focus, June 1987; "The Black Conservatives," Newsweek, March 9, 1991, pp. 29-33; "What Black Conservatives Think of Reagan: A Symposium," Policy

Review 34 (Fall 1985): 27-41; "Redefining the American Dilemma: Some Black Scholars Are Challenging Hallowed Assumptions," Time, November 11, 1985, pp. 33-36; W. J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978); idem, "The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited But Not Revised," in Caste & Class Debate, ed. C. V. Willie (Bayside, N.Y.: General Hall, 1979), pp. 159-76; and idem, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

2 Gerald D. Berreman, "Race, Caste, and Other Invidious Distinctions in Social Stratification," Race 13 (1972): 385-414; Morton Fried, "On the Evolution of Social Stratification and the State," in Culture and History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 313-731; and Arthur Tuden and L. Plotnicov, eds., Social Stratification in Africa (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 1-29.

3 Tuden and Plotnicov, Social Stratification in Africa.

4 Gerald D. Berreman, "Caste in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Organizational Components," in Japan's Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality, ed. George DeVos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 275-307.

5 Gerald D. Berreman, "Social Inequality: A Cross-Cultural Analysis," in Social Inequality: Comparative and Developmental Approaches, ed. G. D. Berreman (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 3-40.

6 See John U. Ogbu, "Class Stratification, Racial Stratification and Schooling," in Class, Race and Gender in U. S. Education, ed. L. Weis (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 163-82.

7 S. Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (New York: Praeger, 1981); S. Bowles and H. Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and O. C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959; orig. pub. 1948).

8 Cox, Caste, Class and Race ; E. W. Gordon and C. C. Yearkey, "Review of Minority Education and Caste," Teachers College Record 81 (Summer 1980): 526-29; and C. C. Yearkey and G. S. Johnson, "Review of Minority Education and Caste," American Journal of Ortho-psychiatry, 49 (1980): 353-59.

9 See C. Hallpike, The Konso of Ethiopia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); J. J. Maquet, The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); N. S. Nadel, "Caste and Government in Primitive Society," Journal of Anthropological Society of Bombay 8 (1954): 22; John U. Ogbu, "Education, Clientage, and Social Mobility: Caste and Social Change in the United States and Nigeria," in Social Inequality, ed.

Berreman, pp. 277-306; D. Richter, "Further Consideration of Caste in West Africa: The Senufo," Africa 47 (1980): 37-44; and D. M. Todd, "Caste in Africa?" Africa 47 (1977): 398-412.

10 John U. Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978); and idem, "Education, Clientage, and Social Mobility."

11 See Bennett Harrison, Education, Training, and the Urban Ghetto (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); G. Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944); Paul H. Norgren and Samuel E. Hill, Toward Fair Employment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; Stephan Thernstorm, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973); and Phyllis Wallace, ed., Equal Employment Opportunity: The AT&T Case (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977).

12 S. Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston Twayne Publishers, 1991); and E. C. Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); P. S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974); and William B. Gould, Black Workers in White Unions: Job Discrimination in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

13 Richard J. Herrnstein, I.Q. in the Meritocracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); C. Jencks et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books, 1972); Melvin L. Kohn, "Social Class and Parent-child Relationships: An Interpretation," in Life Cycle and Achievement in America, ed. R. Laub Coser (New York: Harper, 1969), pp. 21-48; and M. M. Tumin, ed. Readings in Social Stratification (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

14 Berreman, "Social Inequality."

15 Ibid.

16 Berreman, "Race, Caste, and Other Invidious Distinctions."

17 John H. Burma, "The Measurement of Negro Passing," American Journal of Sociology 52 (1947): 18-22; and E. W. Eckard, "How Many Negroes `Pass'?" American Journal of Sociology 52 (1947): 452-500. For an example of recent attempts by some people to be racially reclassified by the courts, see V. R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986).

18 Myrdal, An American Dilemma.

19 Ibid.; and Ogbu, "Class Stratification, Racial Stratification and Schooling."

20 St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, vols. 1 & 2 (New York: Harper 1970); Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; and idem, The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in an Urban Neighborhood (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

21 R. Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980); Arthur M. Ross and Herbert Hill, Employment, Race, and Poverty: A Critical Study of the Disadvantaged Status of Negro Workers from 1865 to 1965 (New York: Harcourt, 1967); Norgren and Hill, Toward Fair Employment; and Ogbu, Minory Education and Caste.

22 B. Matusow, "Together Alone: What Do You Do When the Dream Hasn't Come True, When You're Black and Middle-Class and Still Shut Out of White Washington, When It Seems Time to Quit Trying?" Washingtonian, November 1989, pp. 153-59, 282-90; C. T. Rowan, "The Negro's Place in the American Dream," in The American Dream: Vision and Reality, ed. J. D. Harrison and A. B. Shaw, (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1975), pp. 19-23; J. Sochen, ed., The Black Man and the American Dream: Negro Aspirations in America, 1900-1930 (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1971); and idem, The Unbridgeable Gap: Blacks and Their Quest for the American Dream, 1900-1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972).

23 St. Clair Drake, "The Ghettoization of Negro Life," in Negroes and Jobs, ed. L. A. Ferman, J. L. Kornbluh, and J. A. Miller (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 112-28; and Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste.

24 Drake, "Ghettoization of Negro Life"; and R. E. Forman, Black Ghetto, White Ghetto, and Slums (Englewood-Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).

25 Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; idem, "Diversity and Equity in Public Education: Community Forces and Minority School Adjustment and Performance," in Policies for America's Public Schools: Teachers, Equity, and Indicators, ed. (Norwood, N.J.: ABLEX, 1988), pp. 127-70.

26 R. A. Mickelson, "Race, Class, and Gender Differences in Adolescent Academic Achievement Attitudes and Behaviors" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984); and Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste.

27 V. W. Henderson, "Region, Race, and Jobs," in Employment, Race, and Poverty, ed. Ross and Hill, pp. 76-139.

28 See Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; idem, "Structural Constraints in School Desegregation," in School Desegregation Research: New Directions in Situational Analysis, ed. J. Prager, D. Longshore, and M. Seeman (New York: Plenum Press, 1986), pp. 21-36; and idem, "Castelike Stratification as a Risk Factor for Mental Retardation in

the United States," in The Concept of Risk in Intellectual and Psychological Development, ed. D. C. Farran and J. D. McKinney, (New York: Academic Press, 1986), pp. 19-56.

29 Matusow, "Together Alone"; and Ogbu, The Next Generation.

30 Bernard Meer and Edward Freedman, "The Impact of Negro Neighbors on White Homeowners," Social Forces 45 (1966): 11-19; Ogbu, The Next Generation, p. 44; idem, "Racial Stratification and Education: The Case of Stockton, California," IRCD Bulletin, 12 (Summer 1977): 10.

31 Ogbu, "Racial Stratification and Education," pp. 10-11.

32 John U. Ogbu, "Minority Status, Cultural Frame of Reference, and Schooling," in Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations, ed. D. Keller- Cohen (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, Inc., 1994), pp. 361-84; and idem, "From Cultural Differences to Differences in Cultural Frame Of Reference," in Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, ed. P. M. Greenfield and R. R. Cocking, (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), pp. 365-91.

33 M. J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990; orig. pub. 1941).

34 Time, April 6, 1970, p. 71; cited in Grace S. Holt, "Stylin Outta the Black Pulpit," in Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America, ed. T. Kochman, (Urbana: University of Illlinois Press, 1972), p. 189.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 190.

37 C. E. Becknell, Blacks in the Workforce: A Black Manager's Perspective (Albuquerque, N.M.: Horizon Communications, 1987), p. 35; Grace S. Holt, " `Inversion' in Black Communication," in Rappin and Stylin' Out, ed. Kochman, pp. 152-59.

38 D. Holland and J. Valsiner, "The Ontogeny of Culture: Cognition, Symbols, and Vygotskys Developmental Psychology (Unpublished ms., Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1988).

39 Ogbu, "Minority Status," p. 372.

40 Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981); F. Campbell, "Black Executives and Corporate Stress," The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 12, 1982, pp. 1-42; G. Davis and C. Watson, Black Life in Corporate America: Swimming in the Mainstream (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1985); Jacqueline Mitchell, "Reflections

of a Black Social Scientist: Some Struggles, Some Doubts, Some Hopes," Harvard Educational Review 52 (1982): 27-44; and S. A. Taylor, "Some Funny Things Happened on the Way Up," Contact 5 (1973): 12-17.

41 Taylor, "Some Funny Things Happened," pp. 16, 17.

42 Campbell, "Black Executives," pp. 68-69, 70.

43 Davis and Watson, Black Life in Corporate America, pp. 5, 10-11, 38- 39.

44 See Becknell, Blacks in the Workforce; T. Kochman, Black and White Styles in Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and L. Luster, "Schooling, Survival, and Struggle: Black Women and the GED" (Ph.D. diss., School of Education, Stanford University, 1992).

45 P. R. Abramson, The Political Socialization of Black Americans: Critical Evaluation of Research on Efficacy and Trust (New York: The Free Press, 1977); E. F. Frazier, The Negro in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Alice Stanback, "The Testing of a New Integrative Model of Cognition within the Context of a Continually Existing Educational Problem" (Ph.D. diss., Biola University, 1992), and R. C. Twombly, Blacks in White America since 1865: Issues and Interpretations (New York: David MacKay, 1971).

46 R. Farley and W. R. Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); G. D. Jaynes and R. M. Williams, eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989); and W. L. Reed, ed., African Americans: Essential Perspectives (Westport, Conn.: Auburn House, 1993).

47 W. J. Wilson, "The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited but Not Revised," in Caste & Class Controversy, ed. C. V. Willie, (Bayside, N.Y.: General Hall, 1979), pp. 159-74.

48 P. Moss and C. Tilly, Why Black Men Are Doing Worse in the Labor Market: A Review of Supply-Side and Demand-Side Explanations (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1991); U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Unemployment and Underemployment: Clearinghouse Publications, No. 74 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982); and B. B. Williams, Black Workers in an Industrial Suburb: The Struggle against Discrimination (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

49 Ogbu, "Structural Constraints in School Desegregation."

50 Wilson, "Declining Significance of Race."

51 A. F. Brimmer, "Economic Development in the Black Community," in The Great Society: Lessons for the Future, ed. E. Ginzberg and R. M. Solo, (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 146-73.

52 A. M. Ross, The Negro Employment in the South: Vol. 3, State and Local Governments (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973).

53 Williams, Black Workers.

54 E. W. Jones, "Black Managers: The Dream Deferred," Harvard Business Review, May-June 1986, pp. 84-93.

55 New York Times 1989; Jones, "Black Managers": Matuso, "Together Alone"; L. Benjamin, The Black Elite: Facing the Color Line in the Twilight of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1991); Davis and Watson, Black Life in Corporate America, p. 3; and J. Nelson, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience (Baltimore: Penguin, 1993).

56 Davis and Watson, Black Life in Corporate America, p. 74.

57 E. Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? (New York: Harper-Collins, 1993).

58 Newsweek, "Black Youth: A Lost Generation?" August 7, 1978, pp. 22- 34.

59 P. M. Sniderman and T. Prazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 40.

60 San Francisco Examiner, October 17, 1993, p. A1.

61 J. Johnson, "Poll Finds Blacks and Whites `Worlds Apart' on Race Issues," The New York Times, January 12, 1989, p. 17; B. D. Tatun, Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987); and L. Williams, "An Uneasy Mingling: When Talk at Parties Turns to Racial Issues," The New York Times, October 31, 1988, pp. B1, B12.

62 Cose, Race of a Privileged Class.

63 Benjamin, Black Elite; Davis and Watson, Black Life in Corporate America; Jones, "Black Managers"; and Matusow, "Together Alone."

64 Ogbu, "Education, Clientage, and Social Mobility."

65 R. L. Hall, Black Separatism in the United States (Hanover, N.H.: University of New England Press, 1979); and S. Sygnnertvedt, The White Response to Black Emancipation:

Second Class Citizenship in the United States since Reconstruction (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

66 H. A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

67 See H. A. Baer, The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984); and J. E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

68 S. Fordham and John U. Ogbu, "Black Students' School Success: Coping with the Burden of `Acting White,'" The Urban Review 18 (1986): 176- 206; Luster, "Schooling, Survival, and Struggle."

69 W. J. Wilson, "Cycles of Deprivation and the Underclass Debate," Social Service Review, Dec. 1985.

70 John U. Ogbu, "School Achievement of Urban Blacks" (Paper prepared for the Committee on Research on the Urban Underclass, Social Science Council, San Francisco, Calif., March 8-9, 1991).

71 Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; and idem, "Diversity and Equity in Public Education."

72 Joint Center for Political Studies. "Poverty and Public Policy: Recent Experiences in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe" (unpublished ms. Washington, D.C., 1989), p. 23.

73 Myrdal, An American Dilemma, pp. 154-55.

74 Matusow, "Together Alone"; and Tatun, Assimilation Blues.

75 Maquet, Premise of Inequality in Ruanda.

76 C. C. Bond, "Social Economic Status and Educational Achievement: A Review Article," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 12 (1981): 227-57; J. S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966); Ogbu, "Review" (American Journal of Orthopsychiatry); F. Mosteller and D. P. Moynihan, eds., On Equality of Educational Opportunity (New York: Random House, 1972); R. Rist, "Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The Self- fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education," Harvard Educational Review 40 (1970): 411-51; and W. J. Wilson, "Race, Class and Public Policy in Education" (Unpublished Lect., prepared for the National Institute of Education, Vera Brown Memorial Seminar Series, Washington, D.C., 1980).

77 G. C. Bond, "Social, Economic Status and Educational Achievement: A Review Article," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 12 (1981): 227-57.

78 Ogbu, "Class Stratification, Racial Stratification, and Schooling," pp. 163-82.; M. L. Oliver, C. Rodriguez, and R. A. Mickelson, "Brown and Black in White: The Social Adjustment and Academic Performance of Chicano and Black Students in a Predominantly White University," The Urban Review 17 (1985): 3-24; and M. Slade, "Aptitude, Intelligence or What?" The New York Times, October 24, 1982, p. 22E.

79 S. P. Stern, School Imposed Limits on Black Family Participation: A View from Within and Below (Paper presented at the eighty-fifth annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, December 4-7, 1986).

80 Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working- Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

81 L. Weis, Between Two Worlds: Black Students in an Urban Community College (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

82 Ibid., see also Ogbu, The Next Generation; and Jennifer Johnson-Kuhn, "Working Hard/Hardly Working: Motivation and Perceptions of Success in a Fifth-Grade Classroom" (Honor Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1994).

83 M. A. Gibson and J. U. Ogbu, Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991); Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; John U. Ogbu, "Equalization of Educational Opportunity and Racial/Ethnic Inequality," in Comparative Education, ed. P. G. Altbach, R. F. Arnove, and G. P. Kelly (New York: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 269-89; idem, "Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities in Comparative Perspective," in Minority Status and Schooling, ed. Gibson and Ogbu, pp. 3-33; and N. K. Shimahara, "Social Mobility and Education: The Burakumin in Japan," in ibid., pp. 327-53.

84 Wilson, "Race, Class and Public Policy."

85 "Under Survey," Southern School News, 3 (1952): 2.

86 D. C. Clement et al., Moving Closer: An Ethnography of a Southern Desegregated School. Final Report (Washington, D.C.: The National Institute of Education, 1978); T. W. Collins and G. W. Noblitt, Stratification and Resegregation: The Case of Crossover High School. Final Report (Washington, D.C.: The National Institute of Education, 1978); John U. Ogbu, "Desegregation in Racially Stratified Communities-- A Problem of Congruence," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 9 (1979):290-94; and idem, "Structural Constraints in School Desegregation."

87 H. A. Ferguson and R. L. Plaut, "Talent: To Develop or to Lose," The Educational Record 35 (1954):137-40; and Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste.

88 E. W. Gordon and D. A. Wilkerson, Compensatory Education for the Disadvantaged: Programs and Practices: Preschool to College (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1966); and Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste.

89 K. P. Anton, Eligibility and Enrollment in California Public Higher Education (Ph.D. Diss., Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1980).

90 R. Haycock and S. Navarro, Unfinished Business: Report from the Achievement Council (Oakland, Calif.: The Achievement Council, 1988).

91 M. Slade, "Aptitude, Intelligence or What?"

92 L. Bond, Personal Communication, April 15, 1994; "Second Lawsuit Filed against California Teacher Test," FairiTest Examiner 7 (1993):14; J. A. Hartigan and A. K. Wigdor, eds., Fairness in Employment Testing (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989); and M. A. Rebell, "Disparate Impact of Teacher Competency Testing on Minorities: Don't Blame the Test Takers--or the Tests," in What Should Teacher Certification Tests Measure?, ed. M. L. Chernoff, P. M. Nassif, and W. P. Gorth (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987), pp. 3-34.

93 Alexandria County Public Schools, 1992-1993 ITBS/TAP Achievement Test Results, July 1993 (Alexandria, Va.: Alexandria County Public Schools, Monitoring and Evaluation Office, 1993); Arlington County Public Schools, Report on the Achievement and Participation of Black Students in the Arlington Public Schools, 1986-1990 (Arlington, Va.: Division of Instruction, Office of Minority Achievement, 1991); Fairfax County Public Schools, Annual Report on the Achievement and Aspirations of Minority Students in the Fairfax County Public Schools, 1986-87 (Fairfax, Va.: Office of Research, 1988); Montgomery County Public Schools, School Performance Program Report, (Rockville, Md.: Office of Evaluation, 1993); Success for Every Student Plan: Second Annual Report on the Systemwide Outcomes (Rockville, Md.: Office of Evaluation, 1993; Prince George's County Public Schools, Black Male Achievement: From Peril to Promise, Progress Report, December 1993 (Upper Marlboro, Md.: Office of Research and Evaluation, 1993); 1993 Maryland School Performance Program Report (Upper Marlboro, Md.: Office of Research and Evaluation, 1993); and Ogbu, "School Achievement of Urban Blacks."

94 Berkeley Unified School District, An Equal Education for All: The Challenge Ahead. A Report to the Berkeley Board of Education by the Task Force on School Achievement, June 12, 1985 (Berkeley: Board of Education, 1985).

95 Prince George's County Public Schools, Black Male Achievement: From Peril to Promise. Report of the Superintendent's Advisory Committee on Black Male Achievement (Upper Marlboro: Office of the Superintendent, 1990), p. 65.

96 H. A. Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste; U.S. Office of

Civil Rights, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools: A Report, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968).

97 Ogbu, The Next Generation; and idem, Minority Education and Caste. See also C. M. Payne, Getting What We Asked For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Schools (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987); and Rist, "Student Social Class."

98 A. Lynch, Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance (Chicago: Third World Press, 1992); A. D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984); Dorothy K. Newman et al., Protest, Politics, and Prosperity: Black Americans and White Institutions, 1940- 75 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); and Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste.

99 See Johnson-Kuhn, "Working Hard/Hardly Working"; Luster, "Schooling, Survival, and Struggle"; John U. Ogbu, Understanding Community Forces Affecting Minority Students' Academic Efforts (Report prepared for the Achievement Council, Oakland, California, 1984); idem, "Variability in Minority School Performance: A Problem in Search of an Explanation," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 18 (1987): 312-34; idem, "Overcoming Racial Barriers to Equal Access," in Access to Knowledge: An Agenda for Our Nation's Schools, ed. J. I. Goodlad and P. Keating (New York: The College Board, 1990), pp. 59-89; and Weis, Between Two Worlds.

100 Ogbu, The Next Generation.

101 See Ogbu, "Racial Stratification and Education"; Johnson-Kuhn, "Working Hard/Hardly Working"; Luster, "Schooling, Survival, and Struggle"; J. U. Ogbu, "Minority Education Project: a Preliminary Report, 1994" (unpublished ms., Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley); and Ogbu, The Next Generation.

102 B. Matusow, "Together Alone: What Do You Do When the Dream Hasn't Come True, When You're Black and Middle-Class and Still Shut Out of White Washington, When it Seems Time to Quit Trying?" Washingtonian, November 1989, pp. 153-59, 282-90.

103 W. A. Shack, On Black American Values in White America: Some Perspectives on the Cultural Aspect of Learning Behavior and Compensatory Education (Paper prepared for the Social Science Research Council, Sub-Committee on Values and Compensatory Education, 1970-71).

104 Weis, Between Two Worlds; J. Mitchell, "Visible, Vulnerable, and Viable: Emerging Perspectives of a Minority Professor," in Teaching Minority Students, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 16 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983), pp. 17-28; and Luster, "Schooling, Survival, and Struggle."

105 Ibid.; pp. 100-01.

106 Weis, Between Two Worlds; Mitchell, "Visible, Vulnerable, and Viable": and Luster, "Schooling, Survival, and Struggle."

107 Weis, Between Two Worlds, pp. 100-01.

108 W. Labov, "Rules for Ritual Insults," in Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America, ed. T. Kochman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 265-314.

109 See A. W. Boykin, "The Triple Quandary and the Schooling of Afro- American Children," in The School Achievement of Minority Children: New Perspectives, ed. U. Neisser (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), pp. 57-92; E. M. Clark, A Syllabus for an Interdisciplinary Curriculum in African-American Studies (Oakland, Calif.: Merritt College and Berkeley Unified School District, 1971); A. G. Hilliard, "Why We Must Pluralize the Curriculum," Educational Leadership 49 (December 1991- January 1992): pp. 12-16; A. G. Hilliard, L. Payton-Stewart, and L. O. Williams, Infusion of African and African American Content in the School Curriculum: Proceedings of the First National Conference, October 1989 (Morristown, N.J.: Aaron Press, 1991); A. W. Nobles, "The Infusion of African and African-American Content: A Question of Content and Intent," in Infusion, ed. Hilliard, Payton-Stewart, and Williams, pp. 4-26; and Portland Public Schools, African-American Baseline Essays (Portland, Oreg.: Portland Public Schools, 1990).

110 C. M. Steele, "Race and the Schooling of Black Amerians," The Atlantic Monthly, April 1992, pp. 68-75

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 96 Number 2, 1994, p. 264-298http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 34, Date Accessed: 1/28/2010 8:20:25 PM