ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I use findings from my research in a Black community called Howard to illustrate two critical aspects of Black students’ collective identity and its effects on their academic engagement. The first is that Black students’ attitudes and behaviors are rooted within their community, where they are shared among their parents and other adults. Hence, Black students’ collective identity is not merely a product of students’ interactions with their peers and transactions with their schools. Most current work on oppositional culture and schooling focuses on students’ attitudes and behavior in school and assumes that students’ attitudes and behaviors are the results of their transactions with the public school. Another assumption of critics of the Fordham-Ogbu thesis is that Black students reject good grades or striving to make good grades because these would be “acting White” (Bergin & Cooks, 2002; Carter, 1999; Horvat, 2001; Horvat, 2003; O’Connor, 1997; Cook & Ludwig, 1997, 1998). The second critical clarification this chapter will address concerns Blacks’ poor performance. Black students’ poor school performance occurs not because they reject good grades or view striving to make good grades as “acting White”; rather, they reject certain dominant groups’ attitudes and behaviors that I believe are conducive to making good grades.
