Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

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University of Chicago Press, 1996 - Education - 411 pages
This innovative portrait of student life in an urban high school focuses on the academic success of African-American students, exploring the symbolic role of academic achievement within the Black community and investigating the price students pay for attaining it. Signithia Fordham's richly detailed ethnography reveals a deeply rooted cultural system that favors egalitarianism and group cohesion over the individualistic, competitive demands of academic success and sheds new light on the sources of academic performance. She also details the ways in which the achievements of sucessful African-Americans are "blacked out" of the public imagination and negative images are reflected onto black adolescents. A self-proclaimed "native" anthropologist, she chronicles the struggle of African-American students to construct an identity suitable to themselves, their peers, and their families within an arena of colliding ideals. This long-overdue contribution is of crucial importance to educators, policymakers, and ethnographers.
 

Contents

Acknowledgments
vii
Prologue
xiii
Stalking Culture and Meaning and Looking in a Refracted Mirror
11
Schooling and Imagining the American Dream Success Alloyed with Failure
37
Becoming a Person Fictive Kinship as a Theoretical Frame
65
Parenthood Childrearing and Female Academic Success
100
Parenthood Childrearing and Male Academic Success
145
Teachers and School Officials as Foreign Sages
188
Retaining Humanness Underachievement and the Struggle to Affirm the Black Self
280
Reclaiming and Expanding Humanness Overcoming the Integration Ideology
323
Afterword
335
Policy Implications
341
Notes
343
Bibliography
371
Index
395
Copyright

School Success and the Construction of Otherness
233

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Page vi - You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies*, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room.

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