Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital HighThis 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 |
School Success and the Construction of Otherness | 233 |
Other editions - View all
Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High Signithia Fordham Limited preview - 1996 |
Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High Signithia Fordham Limited preview - 1996 |
Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High Signithia Fordham Limited preview - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
academic effort academic performance academic success acting white adults advanced placement program African ancestry African-American adolescents African-American community ambivalence Anthro avoid behavior Black adolescents Black Americans Black community Black History Month Black students brainiac Capital community Capital High Capital High School Capital students claims colorphobia conformity constructed cultural curriculum daughter dominant ethnographic existing father feel female students fictive kinship system Fieldnotes friends gender girls grades high-achieving females high-achieving males high-achieving students human imagined imagined community insists Interview June 17 Kaela lack larger society lives male students March 17 March 23 McGriff mean mother Nekia norms Ogbu parents peers perception person PSAT race racialized identity racism resistance response Rita school context school officials Second Emancipation seek social students at Capital talk teach teachers things tion trying underachieving males underachieving students Washington Wendell White Americans
Popular passages
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.