Blacked Out

Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

Bibliographic Data

ID4753464
AuthorsJean Harris, Jean Vera Harris
Year1996
Volume65
Issue2
Pages243
Publication date1996-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofBlacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, Signithia Fordham, 1996
VenueThe Journal of Negro Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-2984 • E-ISSN: 2167-6437
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2967319
OpenAlexW1970580761
LanguageEN
Citations received1

Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, by Signithia Fordham. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 411 pp. $22.95, paper. Reviewed by Jean Harris, Olympic College. At a time when the standardized test scores and educational attainment levels of African American students have been shown to lag stubbornly behind those of European Americans despite a spate of remedies directed at teachers, educators, and curriculum, a study that sheds light on how African American adolescents define and evaluate the cost of academic success should be of immediate interest to educators and policymakers. Moreover, anthropological research by an African American scholar who has herself traversed the oft-mined terrain of educational institutions should be must reading for ethnographers, psychologists, and general readers who want to understand Black student achievement, underachievement, and what Cose (1993) has dubbed the rage of the Black middle class. Such are the elements of Blacked Out, a study of success in the Black community that uses a high school as its field research site. In Blacked Out, Fordham expands upon her earlier argument, first posited in the 1980s, that Black students' academic and out-of-school behaviors must be understood in light of an ethos that, on one hand, values Black identity and, on the other, defines achieving academic success as acting (Fordham, 1988; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). True to form, she rejects simplistic arguments that success for African Americans is dependent solely upon desire and ability. She rejects as well the notion that African Americans who resist conventional notions of success do not want to live out some aspects of the American Dream. Instead, she contends that, for Black students, academic success and academic underachievement are processes of resistance that enable African Americans to maintain their humanness in the face of a stigmatized racial identity. As Blacked Out reveals, this resistance manifests among African American adolescents as both conformity and avoidance. Employing the holistic perspective that is the hallmark of her discipline, Fordham examines the myriad cultural, sociohistorical, and psychological processes that affect student academic success at Capital High, a pseudonym for a school of almost two thousand students located in Washington, D.C. Core data for this study were collected by means of participant observation, interviews, and field notes Fordham gathered over a four-year period with 33 key informants, their peers, and nonfamilial adult members of the school community. Additional data came from questionnaires she administered to a large sample of other students and school personnel. Fordham maintains in Blacked Out that, among African Americans, differences in childrearing practices and gender socialization are associated with differences in levels of academic achievement and in preferred resistance strategies. As background to her study, Fordham traces historical events that have influenced African American cultural practices and social structure, delineating four eras that have elicited varying responses from different strata within this group: the enslavement era (ca. 1609-1865); the First Emancipation (1866-1959), or the period after the Civil War when slavery was legally abolished, yet people of African descent were forbidden to and assume citizenship on a par with European Americans; the Second Emancipation, the 26-year transition period corresponding roughly to the years 1960-1986, during which time Black Americans were obligated to act White in order to compete with European Americans; and the neosegregation or contemporary period, which Fordham observes others have called the era of the new racism, with its emerging and not yet clearly defined parameters. For example, acknowledging that fictive kinship has been an organizing principle among Black families since the time of official enslavement, Fordham argues that the egalitarian ethos of cooperation and sharing fostered by this principle stands in opposition to the individualistic ethos of the schools

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