Blacks in the White Establishment

The ongoing struggle by African Americans to gain access to high-level educational and career opportunities from a presumably penitent White society is chronicled in this book with an eye to the unforeseen consequences. Authors Zweigenhaft and Domhoff make provocative use of the title's question-posing stance to explore whether or not African Americans are successfully integrated into the White power structure. If not, why not? they ask; and if so, what is the price of membership? Answers to these and other relevant questions are offered via personal reflections from African American veterans of the White educational establishment. The experiences under analysis are those of some of the more than 5,000 graduates of A Better Chance, Inc. (ABC). ABC was created with government and private funding during the civil rights thrust of the 1960s, and it has continued into the present in an abbreviated, less enthusiastically funded form. This study blends ABC program data with interviews conducted from 1986 to 1988 to create an interesting and insightful portrait of Black students' transitions into lily-white prep school culture, the shifting and often difficult relations they experienced with White schoolmates and with friends and family back home, and their subsequent college and career triumphs and disappointments.In the chapter entitled From the Ghetto to the Elite, Zweigenhaft and Domhoff detail how promising African American students aged 13 to 16 (as well as some Latino, Asian, and Native American students) were removed from their urban, low-income home and school environments and placed in prestigious, wealthy New England preparatory schools. Ninety-nine percent of ABC's early graduates went on to college, compared to only 40% of their inner-city high school peers. Students like Vest Monroe (1988), who wrote of his experiences in Brothers--Black and Poor: A True Story of Courage and Survival, were part of a select group of 430 ABC students who in 1966 made their first journey into the elitist world of schools such as Andover, Exeter, Concord, and St. George's academies. BIacks in the White Establishment? includes Monroe's anecdotal account of a doomed attempt to replicate at home the formal eating style he had acquired while at school. According to Monroe, he was quickly advised by his sister, Why don't you leave that St. George's bulls*** at St. George's? This example vividly illustrates the unanticipated dilemmas of growing up in two culturally separate worlds. Another ABC graduate, who attended the MacDuffie School, relates a poignant memory of her first day on campus, when, as she recalled, a White student promptly informed her that she had never been near anyone Black other than her maid. Other ABC students describe the turmoil associated with leaning how to talk, dress, and act properly in the elite private school environment, and the cultural clashes that emerged as a result

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• Making It by Faking It

  Open Access•Robert Granfield•Journal of Contemporary Ethnography•1991

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