ABSTRACT
One of the most important research traditions in modern social science began in 1974, when John Ogbu first published the results of his observations of low-income, African American school children in Stockton, California. What he found was a peer-group culture that did not support, and in fact opposed, students’ efforts to succeed in school. Through a sustained research program over the following 30 years, Ogbu greatly expanded upon his initial observations. The research area Ogbu pioneered has focused on an African American “oppositional culture,” in which doing well in school is negatively sanctioned as “acting White.” In recent years, this has emerged as one of the most important, and also one of the most controversial, areas of social science. It is important because it may at least partially answer one of the most perplexing social science and public policy questions of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Why do African American children in inner-city schools perform so poorly? And what can we do to improve the school performance of these children, so that they can attain employment that enables them to participate in the mainstream of American life? It is controversial because its findings have been questioned by other researchers, and its supposed “blaming the victim for not trying hard enough” appears, at least to some social scientists, to come uncomfortably close to being both “unhelpful” and politically incorrect.
