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Straddling Boundaries:
Identity, Culture, and School
Prudence L. Carter
Harvard University
This article presents the results of an investigation of the following questions: How do lowincome African American and Latino youths negotiate the boundaries between school and
peer group contexts? Do variable forms of negotiation exist? If so, what are they, and how do
they manifest? In addressing these questions, the author posits two arguments that directly
challenge the acting white thesis. The first is that black and Latino students academic, cultural, psychological, and social experiences are heterogeneous. This article examines three
groups of low-income African American and Latino students who differ in how they believe
group members should behave culturallythe cultural mainstreamers, the cultural straddlers,
and the noncompliant believers. Second, this article returns to the sociological signification of
four dimensions of the phenomenon of (resistance to) acting white and highlights the varied
responses of the three groups to the social boundaries that collective identities engender and
that status hierarchies in schools produce. Straddlers appear to traverse the boundaries
between their ethnic peer groups and school environments best. The analyses are based on a
combination of survey and qualitative data that were collected from a series of in-depth individual and group interviews with an interethnic, mixed-gender sample of 68 low-income,
African American and Latino youths, aged 1320.
Sociology of Education 2006, Vol. 79 (October): 304328 304
R
ace, ethnicity, culture, and identity: We
can almost guarantee that these four
social factors play a role in the academic
well-being of all studentscomplexly so. Yet
verifiable explanations for why and how they
matter continue to elude social science
researchers and educators. For most, if not all of
us, our socialization as racial and ethnic beings
begins early in life, and much of this socialization occurs during the compulsory years of
schooling, from preschool to high school, and
even further during the collegiate years and
beyond. Racial and ethnic identities emerge in
the contexts of macrostructural, cultural, and
individual-level forces; they are neither static
nor one dimensional; and their meanings, as
expressed in schools, neighborhoods, peer
groups, and families, vary across time, space,
and region (Dolby 2001; McCarthy 1993; Yon
2000). But perhaps, more critically, what is relevant in the field of educational research is how
ethnic and racial identity and the concomitant
cultural behaviors matter to educational outcomes. This question has been most pressing
when researchers have examined the significantly lower levels of educational achievement
of racial and ethnic minority students, such as
African Americans and various ethnic groups
that are categorized under the panethnic label
Latino (Kao and Thompson 2003).
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Straddling Boundaries 305
From academic texts to newspaper articles, scholars and writers have contended
with identity-based and cultural explanations
for the observed achievement gap among
African American, Latino, and white students
(Datnow and Cooper 1997; Ford and Harris
1992; Jencks and Phillips 1998; Lewin 2000).
One of the most popular cultural explanations that has been offered is the resistanceto-acting-white thesis. With the 1986 publication of their often-cited and well-received
article, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) defined
the contours of a continuous debate.
Specifically, they discussed how African
American students residing in an impoverished neighborhood in Washington, DC,
came to define achievement-oriented behaviors and attitudes as acting white and were
therefore resistant to studying hard and getting good grades. Fordham and Ogbu concluded that many African American students
have come to perceive high academic
achievement as the territory of white students, since whites are believed to be the primary beneficiaries of opportunity in U.S. society. Hence African American students, they
argued, perceive academic excellence as a
form of whiteness.
The acting-white thesis exemplifies a certain component of Ogbus cultural-ecological
theory, one of the most dominant theoretical
frameworks in the race, culture, and achievement literature explaining why involuntary
or native minority students perform less well
in school than do voluntary or immigrant
minority students. Briefly, Ogbu (1978, 1988,
1991; see also Fordham and Ogbu 1986;
Ogbu and Simons 1998) posited that the
descendents of persons who were involuntarily brought to the United States via slavery,
conquest, or colonization react negatively to
continual experiences with subjugation,
racism, and discrimination. And as a form of
collective resistance, these descendants reject
behaviors that are considered to be the
province of the dominant white middle class.
Consequently, they develop a cultural identity that departs from that of middle-class
whites, which these students view as threatening to their minority identity and group
solidarity (Ogbu 1991:16, 2004:5).1
The prevalent narratives about native
minorities school achievement generally
tend to differ from those of some immigrant
minority youths, who are more often characterized as assimilative and willing to subscribe
to the cultural codes of academic success
(Gibson 1988; Ogbu and Simons 1998;
Waters 1999; Zhou and Bankston 1998).
Some researchers, however, have been careful to explode the model minority myth
and to note the diversity in educational experiences and ethnic orientations within immigrant minority groups (Lee 1996). For example, segmented assimilation theorists have
argued that depending on contextual and
social factors, immigrant minority youths can
pursue a mobility trajectory by emulating
middle-class white society (acculturation),
availing themselves of resources in a productive ethnic enclave, or undermining their
attainment by adopting the adversarial stance
of a downwardly mobile native minority culture (Portes and Zhou 1993). Nonetheless,
the spectrum of cultural orientation and identity, as it pertains to school achievement, is
seemingly much wider and more diverse for
immigrant students than for native minority
students.
When researchers apply binary markers to
ethnic and racial minority studentsfor
example, native minority versus immigrant
minority, oppositional minority versus model
minority, acting black versus acting white
their explanations frequently obscure the heterogeneous cultural and educational experiences of students within various ethnoracial
groups. While psychologists have conceptualized and observed multiple dimensions in the
identities of African Americans (Phinney and
Devich-Navarro 1997; Sellers et al. 1998),
many sociological studies have tended to
mask the diversity in academic experiences
and cultural approaches, especially when
they did not analyze the behavioral variations
within these groups.
This article reports on an investigation of the
following questions: (1) How do low-income
African American and Latino youths negotiate
the boundaries between school and peergroup contexts? (2) Do variable forms of negotiation exist? (3) If so, what are they, and how
do they manifest? In addressing these questions, I also posit two arguments that directly
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306 Carter
challenge the acting-white thesis: First, black
and Latino students academic, cultural, psychological, and social experiences are heterogeneous.2 That is, multiple frames of ethnoracial
identity and cultural orientation exist among
African American and Latino students that supplant either purely assimilative or assimilative
versus oppositional stances in society. Relying
on a multidimensional perspective of racial
identity, I show how three groups of black and
Latino students in a similar economic position
differ in their interpretations of how race and
culture affect their day-to-day academic and
personal lives. These students differ in their
racial and ethnic ideology and in their cultural
orientations. Here, ideology concerns the individuals beliefs, opinions, and attitudes about
how they feel group members should act,
which would include students perspectives
about what it means to act white or act black
or act Spanishthe phrase invoked by Latino
students in this study (Sellers et al. 1997).3
Some students may filter most of their interactions with whites and others outside their
group through the lens of their racial and ethnic identities, while others may be less apt to
invoke race and ethnicity and to view experiences through other social identities (OConnor
1999). In an article published after his death,
Ogbu (2004:28) conceded a similar point
when he discussed five conceptual categories
of black Americans and claimed that only one
of the five categories . . . among both adults
and students is explicitly opposed to adopting
white attitudes, behaviors and speech; he
referred to this group as the resisters.4 This article, in comparison, presents actual empirical
evidence of the coexistence of students who
share the same social-class backgrounds but
who maintain different racial and ethnic ideologies and school behaviors.
Second, this article returns to the sociological signification of phenomena, such as (resistance to) acting white, and highlights how student agents respond to the social boundaries
that collective identities engender and that status hierarchies in schools produce. Generally,
studies using qualitative methods have focused
more on either confirming or disconfirming
that acting white pertains to academic achievement or on providing a list that enumerates the
concepts various meanings (Bergin and Cooks
2002; Horvat and Lewis 2003; Neal-Barnett
2001; OConnor 1997; Tyson, Darity, and
Castellino 2005). As a result, black and Latino
students practices have been detached from
their structural, political, and cultural significances or, rather, the interracial and intraracial
group dynamics that are played out for students inside the school and within peer groups.
The analyses presented here interrogate the
sociological meaning behind four specific
dimensions of (resistance to) acting white: (1)
language and speech codes; (2) racial and ethnic in-group/out-group signifiers centered on
cultural style via dress, music, interaction, and
tastes; (3) the meanings of group solidarity
symbolized by the racial composition of students friendship and social networks at school;
and (4) interracial dynamics about the superiority of whites and the subordinance of racial
and ethnic minority groups. The findings highlight the complexity of the (resistance to) acting-white phenomenon and shift the focus
away from an overly simplistic equivalence of
this phenomenon with the rejection of academic excellence.
Finally, the findings indicate that the students who strike the best academic and social
balance are those whom I refer to as cultural straddlers. Straddlers understand the functions of both dominant and nondominant
cultural capital (Carter 2003) and value and
embrace skills to participate in multiple cultural environments, including mainstream
society, their school environments, and their
respective ethnoracial communities. While
straddlers share cultural practices and expressions with other members of their social
groups, they traverse the boundaries across
groups and environments more successfully.
The straddler concept illuminates another
place on the spectrum of identity and cultural presentations for African American and
other ethnic minority youths that splinters the
acculturative/oppositional binary divide.
SOCIAL BOUNDARIES,
IDEOLOGIES, AND IDENTITY
Scholars and researchers continue to write
about acting white on the basis of meanings
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Straddling Boundaries 307
in the literature that are regarded as acceptable by the research community (etic),
whether or not these meanings actually capture and explore the constructed accounts,
descriptions, and interpretations of black and
Latino youths themselves (emic). Some have
linked resistance to acting white to black and
Latino students teasing their coethnic peers
for being smart (Fordham and Ogbu 1986;
McWhorter 2001); others have conflated acting white with low popularity among samerace peers when black and Latino students
maintain high grade point averages (GPAs;
Cook and Ludwig 1998; Farkas, Lleras, and
Maczuga 2002; Fryer and Torrelli 2005); and
others have associated it with racializing certain cultural forms, such as tastes in dress and
music and linguistic codes (Bergin and Cooks
2002; Neal-Barnett 2001). Meanwhile, in continuing to use narrow measures of the concept,
large-scale survey analyses produce contrasting, mixed, or ambiguous results about the
existence of oppositional culture and the acting-white effect as causes of black and Latino
students relatively lower achievement than
Asian and white students (Ainsworth-Darnell
and Downey 1998; Farkas et al. 2002; Fryer
and Torelli 2005; Massey et al. 2003).
Given the nature of U.S. racial history, it
should come as no surprise that behaviors
pertaining to acting white are examples of
boundary making and the maintenance of
particular ethnospecific styles and tastes. An
important area of sociological research,
boundary making constitutes the production
and maintenance of cultural identities among
members of a racial group (Lamont 2000;
Lamont and Molnr 2002). Social psychologists working on group categorization and
identification have examined the ingroup/out-group boundaries that individuals
draw to differentiate themselves from each
other by drawing on criteria for community
and a sense of shared belonging within the
particular subgroup (Jenkins 1996; Tajfel
1982). Social groups develop both tangible
and symbolic social boundaries, and these
social boundaries, as Barth (1969) described,
entail criteria for determining membership
and ways of signaling membership and exclusion. On the one hand, social boundaries may
serve positive functions for racial and ethnic
students, since these students use different
cultural resources instrumentally to gain
acceptance as authentic (or real) members
of a social group, to foster social solidarity, or
to provide themselves with alternative means
to judge their self-worth and to maintain high
self-esteem (Crocker and Major 1989). On
the other hand, social boundaries, as they
interact with specific school practices, may
correspond to either how welcomed or
included students feel in their schools. For
example, some black and Latino students
may believe their teachers evaluations of
them are based on the degree to which they
embrace particular dominant or white cultural codes that these students perceive as
other and not them.
The schools cultural environment can
engender an assimilationist ideology, which
presupposes that the proper ends in education will have been achieved when minority
groups can no longer be differentiated from
the white majority in terms of education, economic status, or access to social institutions
and their benefits and when nonwhite students act, speak, and behave as much as possible like the white middle class (Rist 1977;
Sager and Schofield 1984). In the meantime,
many black, Latino, and other nonwhite students may not view their cultural codes as
incongruent with academic achievement or
see whites as the social group to emulate fully
(Deyhle 1995). On the surface, this last point
appears to converge with Ogbus thesis about
an oppositional cultural identity among select
racial and ethnic minority groups; it differs
substantively, however, since I argue that
blacks, Latinos, and other subordinated
groups can both believe and engage in education fully and still critique the norms of
assimilation that exist in most schools (cf.
Gurin and Epps 1975).
Nonetheless, many black and Latino students also differ in how they either critique or
approach the norms of conformity pertaining
to certain cultural codes. Having developed a
multidimensional model of racial identity
(MMRI), Sellers et al. (1998) argued that
members of any group will vary in their
beliefsor ideologyabout how other group
members should act or behave when it comes
to race and culture.5 In a systematic analysis
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308 Carter
of interviews with 68 low-income African
American and Latino youths who were in
middle school, high school, or college or had
dropped out of school and who lived in New
York, I found significant variation in the ideological dimension of the students racial and
ethnic identities as they discussed their racial
and ethnic statuses in society and the cultural differences among students at school.
Although I found that all the youths maintained self-concepts in which their racial or
ethnic identity was a central component,
three types of ideological profiles emerged. I
refer to these types as the cultural mainstreamers, the noncompliant believers, and
the cultural straddlers. The descriptions of
these ideal types capture the differences in
the sociocultural and ideological approaches
discussed by others who have considered the
phenomena of assimilation, opposition and
resistance, and some form of accommodation
without assimilation (Darder 1991; Dawson
2001; Gibson 1988; Mehan, Hubbard, and
Villanueva 1994). Each group differs in how
its members approach and handle white
cultural, economic, and political dominance.
Cultural mainstreamers emphasize both the
similarities between racial and ethnic minority groups and whites and the incorporation
of the former into the opportunity structure.
The students in my study were characterized
as cultural mainstreamers if they generally
expected group members to act according to
traditional assimilationist values, which call
for minority groups to accommodate to and
ultimately be absorbed into American
schools, workplaces, and communities
(Gordon 1964). Cultural mainstreamers
accept the ideology that members of a nondominant group should be culturally, socially,
economically, and politically assimilated, yet
they can be racially and ethnically aware.
In contrast, noncompliant believers subscribe to a dominant achievement ideology
and are even aware of the cultural norms prescribed for academic, social, and economic
success. However, they favor their own cultural presentations (for example, black or
Puerto Rican) and exert little effort to adapt
to the cultural prescriptions of the school and
white society. In short, while they believe in
the worth of education, they are not necessarily high achievers. Generally, their school
performances range from average to low.
Ideologically, the noncompliant believers are
critical of the systemic inequalities that they
perceive the school to uphold; yet, the term
noncompliant does not necessarily signify
either an antischool mentality or distaste for
high achievement, which most oppositional
culture frameworks suggest. Culturally, the
noncompliant believers choose to embrace
their own class and ethnospecific styles,
tastes, and codes and opt not to conform to
the mainstream (marked as white) and
middle-class ways of being.
The cultural straddlers bridge the gap
between the cultural mainstreamers and the
noncompliant believers. They are obviously
strategic navigators, ranging from students
who play the game and embrace the cultural codes of both school and home community to those who vocally criticize the
schools ideology while still achieving well
academically. The straddler concept corresponds, to a degree, with the bicultural perspective that social psychologists in the
United States have described (LaFramboise,
Coleman, and Gerton 1993; Phinney and
Devich-Navarro 1997)that is, viewing oneself as both an ethnic or racial minority and
an American. In fact, Phinney and DevichNavarro presented a multidimensional (versus
linear) view of biculturalism and found evidence that African and Mexican American
students vary in the extent to which they
identify with their ethnic and national heritages. Some are blended biculturals and
identify with a combination of both cultures,
others are alternating biculturals and move
back and forth between their two cultural
worlds, and still others are separate in their
identity and are embedded primarily within
their ethnoracial culture.
The focus on the straddlers in this article is
less on the psychological (i.e., identity) and
more on the behavioral differences among
the three groups that I discuss, however. The
results presented here are more about how
they negotiate their specific ethnic peer cultures, school environments inscribed with
white middle-class cultural codes, and mainstream U.S. society that is tacitly understood
to be controlled by middle-class whites. I
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Straddling Boundaries 309
describe them as straddlers instead of bicultural because they, like most of us, participate
in myriad cultural environmentsfamily, peer
groups, ethnic community, neighborhoods,
school, interracial settings, the workplace,
and even ideological domains6that require
different types of cultural competencies and
currencies.
Adolescent cultural straddlers simultaneously sustain a strong racial or ethnic identity
and achieve academically by effectively managing their academic success among their
peers (cf. Horvat and Lewis 2003). Some cultural straddlers may resemble Gibsons (1988)
Punjabi Indian students, who viewed the
acquisition of skills in the majority-group language and culture as additive and thus
avoided rejecting their own identity and culture, instead embracing a form of biculturalism that led to their successful participation in
both cultures. Although the cultural straddlers I interviewed sought successful participation in multiple cultural environments,
unlike Gibsons students, they did not avoid
equating certain behaviors with acting white.
Other cultural straddlers resemble the participants in Akoms (2003) study who were high
achievers and critical of systemic inequalities
in schools and society, although the youths in
my study did not necessarily maintain racial
and ethnic ideologies that were linked to a
specific political, cultural, and religious organization like the Nation of Islam.
In what follows, I present an analysis of
these three types of students who vary in
their racial and ethnic ideologies, school performances, and aspirations and show how
they express and deal differently with the acting-white phenomenon. First, I present
results that examine the students educational attitudes and self-reported school performances. These results confirm prior findings
that, overall, African American and Latino students embrace dominant or mainstream
beliefs about the value of education. Using
Mickelsons (1990) attitude-achievement
paradox scale, it also shows that the divergence in black and Latino students
abstract (or normative) and concrete (or
cognitive) educational beliefs is further associated with whether a student is a cultural
mainstreamer, a cultural straddler, or a noncompliant believer. Second, I show how these
three groups differentially discuss and treat
the avoidance-of-acting-white phenomenon
and reveal that this social dynamic has little to
do with the students equating academic
excellence with whiteness and more to do
with the students views about group dynamics and social boundaries among the races at
school.
METHODS
This studys findings draw extensively on a
mixed-methods approach, both survey and
interview data collected from a sample of 68
low-income, native-born African American
and Latino male and female youths, ranging
in age from 13 to 20. The 26 Latinos (38 percent of the 68 participants) were primarily
first- and second-generation Puerto Rican and
Dominican youths, while the ancestral roots of
the 42 African Americans (62 percent of the
participants) stretched mainly from the South
to New York. Slightly more than half the participants (56%) were female, and 69% were
younger than age 18. The participants, along
with other members of their families, were
participants in a larger quasi-experimental
longitudinal and separately funded study of
317 low-income African American and Latino
families from different neighborhoods in
Yonkers, New York. I contacted and sampled
all the youths who had participated in the
larger study and who lived in one of two large
low-income housing complexes that were
located in two different areas of the cityone,
a high-minority and high-poverty area, and
the other, a predominantly white and middleincome area.7 All the participants families
were poor and qualified for government-subsidized housing. At least 90 percent of them
were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent
Children from 1994 to 1998. Over half lived in
homes with an annual household income of
less than $10,000, and 71 percent lived in single female-headed households.
Yonkers, New York, located north of New
York City, is the largest city in mostly suburban
Westchester County (population 189,000 in
1990). Racially diverse and highly segregated,
Yonkers has a public school system that faced
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310 Carter
a major challenge in 1980. The U.S.
Department of Justice, the federal Office for
Civil Rights, and the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People accused
city officials and the Board of Education of
intentionally maintaining racially segregated
schools. In May 1986, Judge Leonard Sand, of
the federal appeals court, ordered the school
district, found guilty as charged, to develop a
plan that would ameliorate the problem of
school segregation. The plan that the Yonkers
Board of Education created sought to bring
about voluntary school desegregation through
choice, centered on magnet schools and a
series of students voluntary transfers to other
schools. School officials instructed black,
Hispanic, and white students to board school
buses and crisscross the city to attend newly
created magnet schools. In this sample, 72
percent of the participants attended one of the
public, magnet middle or high schools in the
restructured Yonkers school district. Fifteen
percent of the participants had already
obtained either a high school diploma or a
general equivalency diploma (GED); 8 percent
had some college experience, and 13% percent were high school dropouts (see Table 1).
More than 80 percent of those who lived
in the housing developments and whom I
contacted responded affirmatively and participated in the study. I interviewed these youths
over a 10-month period from November
1997 to August 1998. On average, the individual interviews lasted about 90 minutes and
consisted of two parts: a survey comprised of
widely used and reliable measures and a
semistructured, open-ended interview protocol. The survey included measures of attitudes and beliefs about the connections
among education, perceptions of discrimination, life outcomes, and career mobility. I
used Mickelsons (1990) abstract and concrete educational attitude measures to ascertain differences in views toward education
and the opportunity structure. The abstract
educational attitude scale measures adherence to the principle of schooling as a vehicle
for success and economic mobility for young
Hispanic and black people. It consists of seven
items with such questions as Young Black
[Hispanic] people like me have a chance of
making it if we do well in school and
Education really pays off in the future for
young Black [Hispanic] people like me. This
scales scores range from a low of 1 (very pessimistic) to a high of 5 (very optimistic), indicating agreement with the dominant achievement ideology.8
The concrete educational attitude scale is
rooted in students beliefs about their family
members experiences and when educational
credentials may not have been fairly rewarded by the opportunity structure. Scale scores
range from a low of 1 (very strong pessimism)
Table 1. School Enrollment, Performance, and Aspirations (N = 68)
Parameter Percentage
Enrolled in School 72
Obtained a High School Diploma or GED 15
Had Some College Experience 8
Dropped Out of High School, no GED 13
Earned Mainly B or Higher Gradesa 49
Enrolled in Academic/College Preparatory Coursesa 31
Enrolled in Special Education Classesa 16
Aspired to Attend College and/or Graduate School 84
Aspired to Hold Professional/Managerial Jobsb 60
a Based only on those who were currently enrolled in middle and high school (N = 49)
b Based on the 1980 National Opinion Research Council occupational codes.
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Straddling Boundaries 311
to a high of 5 (very strong optimism). The
statements to which the students responded
included My parents face barriers to job success, despite their belief in a good education; People in my family have not been
treated fairly at work, no matter how much
education they possess; People like me are
not paid or promoted based on education;
and Studying in school rarely pays off later
with good jobs.9 On this 5-item scale, each
statement would yield an agreement score of
1 to 2 (strong pessimism), a mixed-views
score of 3 to 4, and a disagreement score of
4 to 5 (very strong optimism). While the small
sample precluded any sophisticated statistical
techniques, the analyses I used were sufficient
to discern any meaningful patterns and to
take the reader beyond either an anecdotal or
individual case-study approach.
In the semistructured, open-ended interviews, I inquired about the participants
beliefs about opportunity, educational and
career aspirations, school performance, delinquent behaviors, job attainment, gender
roles, and appropriate ethnic or cultural
behavior among their peers and family (e.g.,
speech, dress, demeanor, and actions), and
racial ideology. Data gathered from three single-sex group interviews, which averaged
about two hours, with the same participants
were used to complement and triangulate the
data gathered in the individual interviews and
surveys. Similarly, these semistructured group
interviews explored the meaning behind
beliefs, attitudes, and actions that deal with
racial and ethnic identity, as well as the participants beliefs about the opportunity structure, race relations, and means to success and
achievement in this society. This approach
allowed opinions and beliefs to volley back
and forth through the group. All the individual and group interviews were tape-recorded,
transcribed verbatim, and coded.
To ascertain the participants racial or ethnic ideology, I asked each one the following
questions: (1) In your family, are there
expectations related to your [racial or ethnic]
background, to how you should act? (2)
What about among your friends? (3) How do
you feel about these rules? What are your
feelings about the ways youre supposed to
behave as a [member of racial or ethnic
group]? (4) What are your feelings about
how youre supposed to behave as a
(racial/ethnic identity)? (5) How much say or
power do you think black [Spanish or Latino]
people have in American life and politics? (6)
Why do you say that? and (7) For you personally, do you think that your chances in life
depend more on what happens to black
[Spanish or Latino] people as a group, or does
it depend more on what you yourself do?
Each student was coded as a cultural mainstreamer, a cultural straddler, or a noncompliant believer on the basis of how he or she
responded to these questions, specifically
how the student felt in-group members
should behave regarding language, dress,
friendships, political attitudes, and so forth.
Although they may have commented on and
recognized the degree of social inequality in
U.S. society, those who maintained an assimilationist perspective on how to incorporate
themselves in school and beyond were coded
as cultural mainstreamers; 5 of the 68 students fell into this category. Those who openly criticized systemic inequalities and
described how they strategically moved
between the mainstream worlds of school
and work and their peers drawing on multiple
cultural codes were characterized as cultural
straddlers; 21 students met these criteria.
Finally, those who criticized systemic inequalities and made explicit comments about
maintaining their own specific ethnoracial or
cultural styles and lambasted other same-race
or co-ethnic peers for choosing to emulate
whites were coded as noncompliant believers; 38 students fell into this category.
In terms of academic achievement, I divided the students into two categories on the
basis of their self-reported GPAs. Of the 49 students who were still in secondary school
(either junior high school or high school),
approximately 20 percent were categorized as
high achieving; these students had achieved
at least one standard deviation above the GPA
of the entire sample. The remaining students
were categorized as lower achievers. I use
lower instead of low to capture the idea that
this group performed less well than the high
achievers, but not at the expense of characterizing the average students (included in this
group) as low achievers.
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312 Carter
Using a phenomenological inquiry that
allowed the students to reveal how they
make sense of the world, given present and
past social experiences (McCracken 1988;
Patton 1990), I decided early in the research
to take a more inductive approach and to
allow the meanings behind resistance to acting white to be revealed. In the process, I
learned that this concept did not play a central role in the common, everyday interactions of a significant percentage of the participants. While half the youths made explicit
references to the idea, others did not invoke
the notion but, rather, negotiated how they
could actively demonstrate their blackness
and Spanishness. At times, the term acting
white arose spontaneously. For example, during an all-female group interview, one
teenager labeled her younger sister as acting
white in front of me because of how she
talked. In that exchange between Joyelle, her
sister Janora, and me, there was an assumption that since I was of their ethnic background, I would understand naturally how
Janora talked white by simply listening to
her speak.10
In other instances, discussions of (resistance to) acting white arose in response to
certain questions about how the participants felt they had to behave according
to their peers. Finally, in some instances, the
participants hesitated to speak explicitly
about race and ethnicity, although they
implied these meanings and waited for me
to probe. These youths mentioned that they
did not want to appear to be too racial
[sic], a phrase they used to describe their
concern about appearing too race conscious. Therefore, in some interviews, whenever I believed that the participants were
hinting at ideas that were pertinent to these
notions, I asked directly about acting
racial/ethnic or acting white, often to
the students relief. In the data that follow, I
present my questions and probes, as well as
comments about gesticulations and voice
inflections, which are critical to understanding many of the meanings and rationales
that these students provided.
FINDINGS
Beliefs About Education and
Achievement
As in prior studies (Ainsworth-Darnell and
Downey 1998; Cook and Ludwig 1997;
Solorzano 1992), the findings confirm that
this group of low-income black and Latino
youths maintained high aspirations and subscribed to the dominant ideology about the
value of education. Using Mickelsons 7-item
scale of abstract educational attitudes (or
dominant achievement ideology), ranging
from a low of 1 (very strong pessimism) to a
high of 5 (very strong optimism), I found a
mean linear scale score of 4.3, which supports
the conclusion that the participants maintained the belief that education is critical to
social mobility. That is 97 percent of the students agreed that high achievement in school
pays off in the future for young black and
Hispanic youths, and 94 percent believed that
education is a practical means to success.
Furthermore, being poor and African
American or Latino did not limit the possibilities of their career choices, although their
actual breadth and knowledge of career
choices were limited. Although they hailed
from families with extremely limited means,
84 percent of these youths wanted to attend
college or a higher level of school, and 60
percent of them aspired to hold professional
and managerial jobs, with physician, lawyer,
and businessperson the top three career preferences (see Table 1).
How did the students compare across the
three racial ideological groups? Table 2 shows
no significant statistical differences among
the three groups in their normative beliefs
about education. In general, all the students
upheld the normative belief that education is
a means to social and economic mobility.
However, the cultural mainstreamers and cultural straddlers were significantly more optimistic than were the noncompliant believers
about the actual impact of education, given
their social circumstancesnamely, that once
they were educated, discrimination would
not impede their full economic attainment.
As Table 2 reveals, in terms of concrete attitudes, the cultural mainstreamers and stradDelivered by Ingenta to :
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Straddling Boundaries 313
dlers had average scores of 3.36 and 3.10,
respectively, and, as I predicted, the noncompliant believers were the most pessimistic,
with a score of 2.76. In addition, the cultural
straddlers had the smallest gap between their
views about educations ideals and their views
about how education influences access to
opportunity, given ones race, ethnicity, and
class-background. In other words, their concrete and abstract attitudes deviated, on average, by fewer points than did those of the cultural mainstreamers and the noncompliant
believers, which implies that the cultural
straddlers beliefs converged more in terms of
their perceptions of the ideal and real effects
of education.
Furthermore, these concrete-attitude
scores correspond significantly to the mean
GPAs provided by the students who were in
middle or high school at the time of the interviews. Table 2 shows that the cultural mainstreamers had GPAs of about 90 (out of a possible 100), while the cultural straddlers had
GPAs of 80, and the noncompliant believers
had GPAs of 73.
In addition, the majority of the participants
aspired to attend college: all 5 cultural mainstreamers, 21 out of 25 cultural straddlers,
and 31 out of 38 noncompliant believers.
Aspirations are not equivalent to expectations, however. Aspirations signify what a student dreams of or envisions, given ideal conditions, whereas expectations take into
account a students realityhis or her actual
material, familial, and/or academic circumstanceswhich may or may not support the
students aspirations. Thus, it is not uncommon for the proportion of students who
expect to attend college to be lower than the
proportion of those who aspire to attend.
Whereas all 5 cultural mainstreamers and
three-quarters of the cultural straddlers (18 of
25) expected to attend college, less than half
the noncompliant believers (17 of 38) did.
So what does all this mean? As in
Mickelsons (1990) study, I found a positive
association between the students concrete
attitudes and their GPAs. In addition, the students scores on the concrete scale support
the finding that racial and ethnic minority
students do not fully subscribe to the myth
that schooling and education are the great
equalizers. Despite their rankings, all three
groups had mixed feelings about the benefits
of education, especially for people from racial
and ethnic minorities. It should come as no
surprise that these students doubted that
educational systems and job markets work for
them. In fact, their responses resonate with
researchers findings that even middle- and
, in
spite of their economic successes, maintain
critical political views of the opportunity
structure in U.S. society because of experiences with racial discrimination and prejudice
(Collins 1989; Feagin 1991; Hochschild
1995). But their critical views do not deter
them from their desire for upward mobility.
Similarly, the mixed concrete views of the
cultural mainstreamers and the cultural straddlers in the study did not deter them from
doing well in school or from intending to go
to college. Although these students acknowledged the necessity of academic achievement
for occupational success, many displayed a
healthy disrespect for the romantic tenets of
achievement ideology. That is, while the
mantra that education and effort lead to success was the acceptable belief, they also
understood that it does not hold equally true
for all social groups. More than two-thirds (69
percent) of the students believed that despite
the value of education, their families faced
many obstacles to job success.
The literature on the attitude-achievement
paradox suggests that black students are
more likely to maintain significant differences
in concrete attitudes and educational practices than are whites. This analysis of lowincome black and Latino students revealed a
more specific pattern linked to racial and ethnic ideology, concrete attitudes, and achievement. In addition, it shows that even highachieving African American and Latino students may maintain somewhat mixed or pessimistic views of the real effects of education.
Yet if the cultural mainstreamers and the cultural straddlers are more inclined to attain
educational success, then the noncompliant
believers become the critical academic cases.
And the question remains, How are racial,
ethnic, and cultural meanings associated with
their attitudes and behaviors? In the next section, I show that although the cultural mainDelivered by Ingenta to :
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314 Carter Table 2. and Concrete Educational Attitudes and GPAs, by Racial Ideological Orientation (1 = very strong pessimism to 5 = very strong optimism) Mean Mean Percentage Percentage Abstract Concrete Aspiring Expected Attitude Overall Attitude Overall Mean to Attend to Attend Group Score Assessment Score Assessment GPAa College College Cultural Mainstreamers (
n = 5) 4.63 Optimistic 3.36 Mixed 90b 100 100
Cultural Straddlers (
n = 25) 4.17 Optimistic 3.10 Mixed 80 84 89
Noncompliant (
n = 38) 4.33 Optimistic 2.76c Mixed 73 82 55d
a GPAs are based only on the number of those in secondary school at the time of the interviews.
b Significant mean differences among all three groups (
p = .00). c Marginally significant mean group differences between the noncompliant believers and the other two groups
p < .10. d Significant mean group differences between the noncompliant believers and the other two groups.
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Straddling Boundaries 315
streamers, the cultural straddlers, and the
noncompliant believers shared some cultural
understandings of the meanings of acting
white, their responses and acceptance of certain cultural practices differed.
The Sociology of (Resistance to)
Acting White
In the analyses, I counted 51 explicit references to the phenomenon of (resistance to)
acting white across 37 interviews. Either these
references arose spontaneously, or the students explained in detail when I probed after
their implicit references to it. Generally, all
three groups agreed on what acting white
meant, but they differed in how they
responded to or embraced these behaviors.
Four main dimensions of acting white
emerged: (1) collective and individual signifiers in language and speech codes; (2) racial
and ethnic in-group/out-group signifiers centered on cultural style via dress, music, interaction, and tastes; (3) the meanings of group
solidarity symbolized by the racial composition of students friendship and social networks at school; and (4) interracial power
dynamics of superiority and subordination.
The most frequent reference to acting
white pertained to language and speech
styles. Peers teased co-ethnic or same-race
peers for how they spoke if they perceived the
latter as emulating whites, rather than speaking black slang, a commonly shared communication style among these urban minority
youths (Labov 1972; Morgan 2002), both
black and Latino. Fourteen-year-old Samurai,
a noncompliant believer, demonstrated for
me just what talking white meant:
Samurai: Yeah. Like I might be talking on the
phone, and he might be like, Oh you see the
new Jordans out. Oh they is butters, they is
phat. A white person aint gonna say that.
Fine. [He mimics what he perceives as white
talk.] Did you see the new Charles Barkleys?
Theyre nice; I really like them. My mother
says that shes gonna buy them for me on
Wednesday. Its like that. Its not the proper
English that they use; its just . . . theyre not
hip to everything. It goes all back to the rap
and the neighborhood that you in. Its like
that. So [theyre] not used to being all around,
Oh thats phat. Like different words come
out like every year that person, every week different words come out.
Prudence: Does acting white and acting black
go beyond language? Is there anything else
that makes a person act black or white other
than how they speak?
Samurai: No.
Prudence: So its not about any other kind of
behavior. What you want to do in life?
Samurai: No, definitely not what you want to
do in life.
Samurai, a noncompliant believer who did
not link whiteness to achievement and aspirations, chose to speak what he dubbed as
black talk. From my interactions with him,
it was clear, however, that he was aware of
the distinctions between how he spoke and
the principles of Standard English, as was evident by the sudden change of subject-verb
agreement in his elaboration of these differences. When either a same-race or co-ethnic
peer avoided using an established local lexicon, which, according to Samurai, could
include a compilation of easily made-up and
variable words and phrases that defied the
grammatical structures of Standard English,
and spoke only in Standard English in a certain style that the students associated with
either whites or white youth culture, they
were acting white. Samurai referred to peers
like 15-year-old Adrienne, a cultural mainstreamer, who revealed that her schoolmates
called her white girl:
Adrienne: Yep, like some boys in school expect
me to speak Ebonics or whatever, so they call
me a white girl. They like, Come here,
white girl, cause of the way I talk. I tell them
Im not a thug. I go to English class; this is the
way I talk. This is my grammar. Im not going
to sit here and make myself look stupid talking
about some What up, yo. Thats not
English! So you do get picked on if you speak
a certain way or you act a certain way. I know
some of the boys say white girl just because
of the way I talk. And I dont see how you can
distinguish between a black person and a
white person talking because of the way they
talk. Theyre just talking. A black person has to
speak stupid in order for you to know that
theyre black?
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316 Carter
Adrienne told me that she had a tough
time among her peers because she rejected
many of their speech codes and other cultural styles. Refusing to uphold some of her
peers prescriptions of blackness, she relegated some of her schoolmates speech to ignorance and stupidity. Adrienne also believed
that the use of Standard English was an indicator of intelligence, unlike Ebonics or black
youth slang, which she spoke about in a
desultory tone. When I invited Adrienne to a
group interview with other neighborhood
girls in the study a few days later, she
declined because she did not get along with
them. Later, the other girls told me that they
believed Adrienne behaved like an outsider,
acting as if she were different and better
than [they]. This instance illuminates the ingroup/out-group dynamics that the students
perpetuated through the construction of stylistic boundaries. It also highlights how students used these ethnospecific cultural
resources to signify a peers authenticity as a
racial group member in good standing
(Carter 2003).
Recognizing the delicate balances of
power, identity, and the signifiers of authentic group membership, some students
switched between speech codes in different
social contexts. Having recently entered the
workforce, Moesha Latimore, a 19-year-old
recent high school graduate, like Adrienne,
thought that speaking Standard English signaled intelligence. But unlike Adrienne, who
was a cultural mainstreamer, Moesha was a
cultural straddler, and she contested any
stereotypical associations of black vernacular
with ignorance:
See I know people, who can act ignorant as
anything, but they are also smart, and they
can also talk in an intelligent way. Its just that
when you talk with your friends, you talk in a
certain way, or when youre at work or wherever youre at, you have to act intelligent.
Were [African Americans] not ignorant;
there are just certain ways that we talk to each
other. It might not seem right, but that doesnt
mean were dumb.
Moesha had accepted the idea that to be
taken seriously academically and professionally, she needed to speak Standard English. At
the same time, she valued the speech codes
that she shared with black friends and family
members, which for her fostered community
and group cohesion. Thus, she chose to draw
on her familiarity with black speech codes to
signify her racial authenticitycurrency that
allowed her comfortably to invoke the collective we in her characterization of the
African American community.
Dress styles and tastes, another site of adolescent coolness (Danesi 1994) and ethnoracial and cultural boundary making, characterize the second most frequent reference to
acting white (mentioned 31 percent of the
time). Having forged a distinction among
their white peers, other racial and ethnic
groups, and themselves, these students
dressed in a variety of clothing fashions or listened to different genres of music, in addition
to creating their own speech codes, to preserve their sense of cultural uniqueness.
Again, I found that if a student crossed the
racial or ethnic peer groups dress boundary,
then he or she, like Rosaria, an 18-year-old
Dominican American cultural mainstreamer,
was teased for acting white:
Rosaria: Like I like to dress preppy, with the
khakis, the crisp shirt, and a scarf around my
neck. The kids in my class are all like: You
dress so preppy. Why are you so preppy?
Prudence: How do they want you to dress?
Rosaria: I guess like they do.
Prudence: Whats that, the hip-hop style?
Rosaria: Yeah, with the baggy pants and stuff.
Prudence: How do they want you to talk?
Rosaria: Thats another thing. Like they say
you talk . . . you talk . . . cause I speak intelligently, they want to say that I talk white. I
speak intelligently. Its not Spanish, its not
black, its not white. No one has claim on who
can talk intelligently. My friend is always saying that to me.
Prudence: Well, who are the kids who tend to
have tastes in clothes and music more like
you?
Rosaria: Thats a hard question that I dont
want to answer. It makes me uncomfortable.
Prudence: Why? Because it makes you . . .
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Straddling Boundaries 317
Rosaria: . . . seem like I really am white.
Because it would fit right in with what my
friend wants to say. I just like these things, and
I dont think that my friend is right.
Rosarias last comments proved to be a
poignant moment as I gathered from her
tone and demeanor that she wanted to
answer the question about which students
tended to have tastes in clothes and music
like hers. Yet, she felt a need to preface her
comments about why the question would
make her feel uncomfortable because she
feared how others and I would perceive
them. A self-conscious Rosaria felt that her
answer might confirm her Dominican and
black friends beliefs about her acting white.
Although she liked to dress preppy and listened to pop singer Michael Bolton, she felt
strongly that she had the liberty as a
Dominican American to maintain these tastes
as much as some of her co-ethnic friends valued hip-hop music and clothing styles.
Students like Rosaria, who held an ascribed
minority identity but who did not conform to
their co-ethnic peers cultural styles, threatened the already-tenuous reins that their
Dominican and black peers held over this
youthful domain of status and identity.
Consequently, Rosaria risked being charged
that she acted white.
Yet Rosaria wanted to avoid being perceived as less ethnic than her peers. Thus, she
challenged the racial and ethnic dress code,
just as Adrienne challenged the coding of the
usage of Standard English. Speaking Standard
English and dressing in a preppy style had to
be devoid of any racial and ethnic proprietorship. That way, if either Adrienne or Rosaria
chose to embrace Standard English, not ethnic youth slang, or even certain styles of
dress, in their minds they would still be black
and Latina (or Spanish), respectively. This
strategy resembles the racelessness
described by Fordhams (1988) interviewees,
who tended to disassociate themselves from
their ethnic group. However, unlike
Fordhams interviewees, Adrienne and Rosaria
identified strongly as African American and
Dominican, respectively, and asserted their
pride in their heritages, as was evident in their
very proud responses to the survey questions about their racial and ethnic heritages.
While cultural mainstreamers like Rosaria
confronted the boundaries of alleged black,
Spanish and white11cultural practices
through their peers evaluations of speech
and dress styles, the noncompliant believers
perceived that they faced the evaluations of
teachers, the cultural gatekeepers of school,
who policed the boundaries of either appropriate or respectable dress. One student who
did not share Rosarias more preppy and standard tastes explicitly discussed his thoughts
about how a teacher perceived him as a drug
dealer because of his hip-hop or black
dress style:
Alberto: Toward the end of the year [the
teacher] asked me . . . [s]o he would characterize me because the watch and the clothing
that I wore once. He was like that he knew
what I did. And I asked him what that was.
And he was like that [he] knew . . . and whatever it is that I do leads nowhere in lifethat
all it does is just catch me a death. He didnt
actually say it, but he just gave hints in what
he was getting at.
Prudence: So he thought that you were a drug
dealer?
Alberto: Yeah.
Prudence: How did you feel about that?
Alberto: Of course, you get insulted.
Prudence: Did you say something back to
him?
Alberto: No. I paid no mind to him. But deep
down inside, you feel insulted him saying that
when you actually work hard and try to succeed. And you try to show something for it
that they stereotype you as thinking, or whatever he got. He got it as just being another
drug dealer . . . and not even thinking that he
worked for it or that he worked hard for it.
Alberto, aged 17, was a noncompliant
believer, yet the product of a Dominican family with two high-achieving sisters, one of
whom was a college graduate and the other,
Alma (whom I introduce later), was enrolled
in a local college and aspired to attend
Syracuse University. Yet, he grappled with the
idea that his teacher perceived him as a participant in illegal activities. Alberto dressed
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318 Carter
hop music and its attendant dress styles: long
gold chains, baggy pants, and a baseball cap
cocked to the side. In comparison, John, a 13-
year-old African American cultural straddler, a
high achiever and a popular school athlete,
said that he felt the pressure to negotiate his
peers expectations about his dress, his friendships, and his schooling. As a cultural straddler, John had found a way to maintain his
popularity by keeping up with the styles of his
black peers, in addition to hanging out with
students at school who were perceived to be
nerdy and not particularly sociable.12
John: You know, being who I am [my schoolmates] expect me to wear name-brand stuff
. . . hang with such and such people like, you
know, they say, like they dont want you to
hang with the low-profile people.
Prudence: Who are the low-profile people?
John: The kids that usually do all their schoolwork, and they dont really go anywhere after
school, you know, they just go home and do
their homework and stay in the house.
In this section, I have described the two
most common references to acting white or
to acting black or Spanish that the participants used. These findings confirm what
other researchers have documented (Bergin
and Cooks 2002; Neal-Barnett 2001), namely, that students explicitly discuss the idea of
(resistance to) acting white in terms of linguistic and dress styles. The findings also
show that the application of this idea transcends a students achievement levelthat is,
whether the student is a high achiever or a
low achiever. In addition, the findings highlight the social significance of the processes of
(resistance to) acting white, how students
create in-group/out-group stylistic boundaries to maintain ethnospecific identities.
Students respect for the value of education is
not at stake, however. Rather, what is at stake
is how students use the symbols and meanings they attach to different racial, ethnic,
and cultural identities as measures of inclusion and exclusion. In the next section,
extrapolating from the students comments, I
discuss how the institutional practice of tracking fueled the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and boundary making as the students
evaluated the racial and ethnic makeup of
their peers social networks at school.
Consequently, students in high tracks who
had primarily white friends were viewed as
acting white.
Peer Ties and the Implications of
Tracking
A third set of findings reveal how the students
used acting white to describe co-ethnics
whose primary social interaction at school
was with whites. Twelve percent of the references to acting white referred to primary
social interactions with whites. Moreover,
strong, primary peer ties with white students
in school are likely to allow more exposure to
cultural attributes described as acting white
and thus suggest reasons why minority high
achievers could be more likely described as
acting white.
In multiracial schools, few African
American and Latino students are placed in
higher ability-grouped classes (Hallinan and
Sorensen 1983; Oakes 1985). If white students occupy the top of the educational
achievement hierarchy in racially integrated
schools, then numerous African American and
Latino students may perceive that section as
the white niche and may even want to
avoid it. As a result, the token few who are
given the opportunity to enroll in these classes may have the reservations that 13-year-old
Jeremy, one of the cultural straddlers, had.
Jeremy dreaded entering the International
Baccalaureate (IB) Program, which included
advanced courses that may be eligible for college credit, because his mostly black friends
would be attending the regular high
school. Although he protested, his mother
insisted that he attend the school with the IB
program the following year.
In their predominantly white, high-track
classrooms, the highest achievers are more
likely to have contact with the styles and
behaviors that were perceived as white (dress
styles, musical tastes, linguistic forms, and
types of social interaction), since students
tend to share and transmit various cultural
attributes through their associations with one
another. Alma, a college sophomore at
Manhattan College, contrasted her and her
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Straddling Boundaries 319
brother Albertos school experiences. Alma
was both a high achiever and a cultural straddler, while Alberto was an average high
school student and a noncompliant believer.
Alma explained: I think that it [the difference] had to do with what classes . . . most of
my classes in high school were honors classes,
and there was a different crowd there than
with those kids who were in more comprehensive classes.
Alma and the other high achievers in the
study were significantly more likely to mention that whites were part of their social network. A much higher proportion of the high
achievers (55 percent) than of the lower
achievers (19 percent) responded that their
classes were comprised of either almost all
or very many white students. The lower
achievers were more than twice as likely as
the high achievers to report that the majority
of the students in their classes were black and
Latino (see Figure 1). Moreover, the high
achievers mentioned more whites as friends
than did the lower achievers, probably
because of the composition of their classrooms and the ties they made within them. A
cultural straddler who had both Dominican
and white friends, Alma admitted that she
had to negotiate between them in terms of
their expectations of her self-presentation:
Alma: I think that my Hispanic friends always
want me to speak Spanish and like be proud.
My white friends, if they find out that Im
Hispanic, they go Oh, youre Hispanic. You
dont act like it. And Im like Oh, how
should we act?
Prudence: What do they say?
Alma: They give me the same stereotypes like
Do you know how to dance? Im like but do
all Dominicans [know how to dance]?
Alma and several of the other high achievers in the study told me that they generally
were either the only or one of a few students
of color in their classes. And although Alma
admitted that she maintained friendships
with non-Hispanic white and Dominican students who were not in her classes, if she had
maintained friendships with mainly white students, she would likely be characterized as
acting white.13 Eighteen-year-old Maxwell, a
noncompliant believer, would agree. While
discussing racial and ethnic relations in
schools with me, Maxwell was apt to sanction
peers who refused to hang with their samerace or co-ethnic peers in school:
Prudence: Now do any black students try to
behave like the white students?
Maxwell: Umhmm [affirmative]. There are
some white boys. They dont want to be
with no black kids. They rather hang with
some Indians or white boys or Puerto Ricans,
kids like that.
Without hesitation, Maxwell explicitly
labeled peers who chose not to interact primarily with other black youths as white
boys, when I questioned him about black
students who emulated whites. Prior research
has shown that epithets, such as whitewashed, have been used to express disapproval of members who appear to have
rejected an affiliation with their respective
racial or ethnic communities (Benjamin 1991;
Landry 1987; Neckerman, Marchena, and
Powell 1998). Showing his allegiance to
same-race friendships, Maxwell was also critical of his black classmates who chose to
socialize primarily with other racial or ethnic
groups, indicating that he thought it was
essential for his black peers to maintain an
association with other black youths.
Smart Status and Looking Down
The last set of findings appear to articulate
further Maxwells beliefs about racial loyalty
and affiliation and reveal how students linked
other aspects of blacks and Latinos comparatively lower status than whites in a racially
polarized society with meanings of acting
white. Approximately 1 in 10 of the students
evocations of the acting-white label dealt
with their beliefs and perceptions of when the
boundaries of ethnic solidarity were being
transgressed, specifically when they felt that
co-ethnics acted in ways that either disrespected or denigrated other members of their
ethnic or racial group. Some students
believed that when co-ethnic or same-race
peers touted their smartness at the expense
of another or put on airs, then those students believed that there were better than
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320 Carter
other students. In these moments, putting on
airs or acting in a superior manner reeked of
the same dynamics of racial dominance that
these students encountered, and, consequently, they were likely to describe students
who behaved this way as acting white. I
found that the noncompliant believers were
the most sensitive to these dynamics. As
Monique, a 13-year-old noncompliant believer, said: People dont really care [if you are
smart]. For Monique, being smart was valued. If students teased smart students in
school, however, according to 16-year-old
Raul Juarez, another noncompliant believer,
they did so because they felt that the smart
students were conceited, that they didnt
want to do nothing for nobody.
Some students also expressed disapproval
when they perceived that peers transgressed
the boundaries of ethnic solidarity, specifically when co-ethnics acted in a way that denigrated other members of the group. They
referred to such actions as white and verbally sanctioned others who behaved this
way. As I delved into her school history,
Vincenzia, a noncompliant believer and 20-
year old single mother, admitted to being a
high school bully and described some conflict
with a schoolmate whom she perceived as
acting white. She explicitly discussed her disapproval:
Prudence: Were there any Hispanic and black
kids who behaved like the white kids in
school?
Vincenzia: It was one Puerto Rican girl.
Prudence: Did you pick on her, too?
Vincenzia: Yeah! Cause if she Puerto Rican,
why she trying to act white?
Figure 1. Students Reports of Classroom Racial/Ethnic Composition
Note: These data are based on perceptual questions that asked students to report on whether certain
racial or ethnic groups comprised either almost all or very many of their classmates. The reader will
note that for the low achievers, the percentages do not sum to 100, which indicates some overlap in their
perceptions of black and Latino students in the classroom. By chance, the percentages total 100 for the
high achievers. The main intent of this figure is to show the contrasting differences in reports (which most
likely correspond to the actual percentages) between the two achievement groups.
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Straddling Boundaries 321
Prudence: What would she do?
Vincenzia: She would act real conceited, the
same way they was acting. She used to look at
you like you was lower than her, and I used to
hate that. She did that shit to me one time.
Thats one of the girls I fought with. [She
laughed.]
Vincenzia expressed her disapproval not
only verbally, but physically by fighting,
although her comments suggested other
interpersonal issues with her schoolmate. If a
co-ethnic lost this respect and loyalty, then
other students were likely to believe that he
or she had simply emulated the behaviors of
those they perceived as being associated with
the subjugation of racial and ethnic minoritieswhites. In those moments, to accuse
another co-ethnic of acting white was meant
as a stinging reminder of how he or she has
embraced the behaviors of those who, in the
opinion of 14-year-old Avery, another noncompliant believer, think they [are] smarter
or better than us [racial minorities].
A cultural straddler, 15-year-old Valerie,
who was one of the highest achievers in the
study and who was enrolled in the gifted program, navigated between the cultural politics
of race and her peers at school differently. On
the one hand, Valerie shared similar ideas
about the meanings of acting white as the
other participants across all three groups. On
the other hand, in responding to the issue of
putting on airs, Valerie attempted to distinguish between behaving naturally and
authentically and merely acting instrumentally to achieve a popular or higher status:
There are a lot of [black] people who have a
lot of white friends who see nothing wrong
with it. If you dont try to act like what you are
not, if this is the way that you naturally are,
then there is no problem with it. But if you are
just acting, then it is no good, In the meantime, Valerie refused to embrace any behaviors that would denigrate her race: Dont do
nothing that would degrade you, and dont
do anything that would make people think
less of your race, even when they already think
less of it. Valerie moved back and forth
between the cultural worlds of her mostly
white classmates in the gifted program and
her mostly black friends, all of whom were
enrolled elsewhere in less rigorous high school
courses, more fluidly. Unlike some of the cultural mainstreamers in the study, however, she
never alluded to any instances of being
described as acting white. She did not dismiss
her co-ethnic peers cultural forms, nor did
she brand them as ignorant, unlike Adrienne,
the cultural mainstreamer introduced earlier.
Like John, Valerie negotiated between her
peers and her work: I hang out with them
[her friends]. I talk to them and conversate
[sic]. If I didnt like [what they were doing] or
I thought that it was a bad idea, I would tell
them, No, Ill see you later. Thats all right.
And they understand.
Within marginalized communities, distancing oneself from the racial group has historically played itself out along class lines.
Middle-class African Americansa group that
has burgeoned since the advent of the civil
rights erahave been chided for distancing
themselves from their lower-income co-ethnics (Benjamin 1991; Landry 1987). Some
writers have suggested that in poor urban
schools and neighborhoods, this social and
economic mobility has come to be defined as
inconsistent with an authentic black identity (Fordham 1988). However, as the analyses
of the findings of this within-class study have
shown, the issue of distancing is not just a
class phenomenon. Groupness for these
students who had inherited a legacy of subordinate social and economic statuses also
engendered strands of fictive kinship (see
Fordham 1988). Peers who dared to desecrate these fictive kinship lines by looking
down on co-ethnic peers who did not
embrace or have the dominant cultural markers of academic success, competence, and
strong aptitude were equated with the racial
group in U.S. society that has historically
appeared to wield power in inequitable ways.
In other words, they were acting white.
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
The dimensions of acting white discussed in
this article have some connection to how this
select group of low-income black and Latino
students approached school and one another.
The findings presented here offer four key
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322 Carter
insights. The first insight is that black and
Latino students who share similar socioeconomic backgrounds vary in their approaches
to the (resistance to) acting white phenomenon. The results suggest that defining the
avoidance of acting white as an antischool
stance and as a central feature of specific
minority cultures masks the diversity of ideological and cultural perspectives within these
groups.
Those who appeared to traverse best the
social boundaries between their ethnic peer
cultures and their school environments were
the cultural straddlersstudents who demonstrated multiple cultural competences and
deployed varied cultural tools and resources
to strike a more effective balance among the
various cultural spheres in which they participated. Rather than succumb to the acculturative/oppositional culture divide, straddlers
navigated between dominant and nondominant communities, choosing to be intercultural (for a review of this concept, see
Sussman 2000) and accepting and seeking
facility with multiple cultural repertoires. Yet
as other researchers have shown, the continuum of culture and identity is not necessarily
linear or bipolar. Phinney and Devich-Navarro
(1997), for example, offered a more complex,
multidimensional understanding of identity,
suggesting that variation exists even among
those who have bicultural identities. That is,
biculturalism is not just a fixed midway point
on the identity spectrum between sole identification with ones ethnic culture or with the
larger society. Some students can move back
and forth among different cultural environments, strategically alternating and turning
cultural codes on and off, while others appear
to be more blended and identify with their
multiple social identities simultaneously.
The second insight is that students who
are labeled as acting white vary in achievement levels, ranging from low achievers to
high achievers. Of the four participants who
declared they had been labeled as acting
white, two were either average- or lowerachieving students, and the other two were
high achievers. Overall, the black and Latino
participants subscribed to the dominant
achievement ideology, which supports the
findings of other studies that black youths
have more optimistic attitudes than do white
students (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey
1998; Portes and Wilson 1976; Solorzano
1992). Contrary to the view that black and
Latino students perceive high achievement as
acting white and thus reject schooling, the
findings suggest that resistance to acting
white is mainly about the assertion of particularistic cultural styles that are not perceived
to be incongruous with achievement and
mobility.
The third insight is that students contention with acting white has broader sociological meanings than the ones that are generally ascribed to it in the literature on the
sociology of education. For those in this
study, resistance to acting white connotes
more than anything else their refusal to
adhere to the cultural default setting in U.S.
society that is seen as normative or naturalwhite American middle-class tastes for
speech and interaction codes, dress and physical appearance, music, and other art forms.
Moreover, the label acting white also signifies group members proclivity to associate
mainly with students from outside their
ascribed racial or ethnic group. Some of these
behaviors included these members exclusive
association with whites. The participants also
challenged co-racial or ethnic members who
behaved in ways that suggested they were
looking down upon another member or
thinking that they were better. That is, acting white signified a refusal to adhere to
social actions that purportedly derogate these
students own racial and ethnic groups.
The final insight is related to the question
of what connection these descriptive meanings have to schooling and inequality. The
data indicate that high-achieving minority
students may be more likely to be exposed to
styles that are deemed white. They suggest
that if a correlation between high achievement and accusations of acting white exists,
it may be mediated by students placements
in school and these placements influences on
the racial and ethnic composition of students
friendship networks (Moody 2002). For
instance, Tyson et al. (2005) found that when
black students are disproportionately underrepresented in high-track classes, peers outside these classes are more likely to accuse
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Straddling Boundaries 323
their co-ethnic peers of acting white, but
when black students are proportionately represented across the tracks in schools, evidence of accusations of acting white to highachieving students is not found. Using the
Adolescent Health data, economists have
shown that the popularity of black students
with GPAs of 3.5 or higher (out of 4.0) in allblack high schools does not decrease among
co-ethnic peers, as it does among the same
achievers in predominantly white schools
(Fryer and Torelli 2005.) These studies have
also confirmed that resistance to acting white
is not really a core ethno-racial feature but,
rather, an indication of something about race
and group dynamics among black, Latino,
and white students in different school contexts. Racially integrated schools may structure peer associations in the classroom
through ability grouping or tracking that
places high-achieving African American and
Latino students mainly in contact with white
students. This type of grouping likely facilitates the idea that some students of color disassociate themselves from others, since they
may maintain peer ties with other racial or
ethnic groups and thus tastes and preferences
that are different from those that are used to
mark in-group membership. In short, peers
may perceive their classmates who are situated in white-dominant settings where different
cultural styles and tastes prevail as acting
white.
Since the results of this study are based on
a small sample of low-income students, more
research is needed before generalizations can
be made. Further research could show how
the results may vary if the study included a
mixed-class sample of black and Latino youths.
Although reports have shown that middleclass minority youths invoke the notion of acting white (Belluck 1999; Kaufman 1996),
these youths may either emphasize different
social factors or have significantly greater
access to resources that would help them
more effectively negotiate their cultural styles.
To facilitate a more fine-tuned understanding
of how race, ethnicity, and class determine
these meaning systems about acting black,
Spanish, white, or even other racial and ethnic
groups, larger studies could also include more
variation by race, ethnicity, and region. Such
studies could highlight the extent to which
these meaning systems both converge and
diverge between classes and across racial/ethnic group classification in diffrent parts of the
country. Some findings from this study suggest that some white youths are described as
acting black or acting Spanish. How do these
white youths negotiate their school, peer, and
home spaces both similarly and differently
from their African American and Latino peers?
Do they categorize themselves as such? (cf.
Perry 2002)
This article aims to encourage researchers
to reconceptualize how resistance to acting
white is argued to be associated with academic and mobility outcomes for black and
Latino youths. The prevalent articulation of
resistance to acting white in various bodies of
social science literature is a value system that
deters the social, economic, and political
progress of many poor African Americans and
Latinos. Such a view implies that to embrace
acting white means to be success oriented,
while to resist acting white signifies a rejection of achievement-oriented behaviors. As is
evident from the findings presented here,
that claim cannot be made unequivocally.
Nonetheless, several of the cultural styles and
preferences that have been described as acting white may underwrite dominant forms of
cultural capital, such as the use of Standard
English and styles of dress. Studies have
shown that the impact of certain cultural tool
kits extends beyond the school and is connected to mobility in the workplace
(Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991; Moss
and Tilly 1996). Thus, success in both school
and the labor market may depend on the
degree to which these youths can primarily
embrace some of the styles that they label as
acting white, especially in relation to language and interactions with whites.
Invariably, it is a matter of individual
choice whether to listen to soft rock, dress in
hip-hop style, speak Standard English, or
maintain certain peer associations. We know
that different students abilities to deploy and
use certain cultural styles can determine how
they become classified when social boundaries exist among groupsthat is, an us
versus them phenomenon. Yet, when privileged and socially powerful groups define
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324 Carter
and circumscribe what is appropriate for success and achievement, the choices that some
students in this study made, especially the
noncompliant believers, will have unintended
consequences. For socially marginalized students, success in and attachment to school
have never been simply a matter of learning
and competently performing technical skills;
rather, and more fundamentally, [they have]
been a matter of learning how to decode the
system (Stanton-Salazar 1997:13). The system encompasses the schools cultural environment, which engenders an allocation of
resources, including prestige, social standing,
and evaluations that are based on the degree
to which students possess dominant cultural
capital (Bourdieu 1977; Farkas et al. 1990;
Lareau 2003; Lewis 2003). Rather than take
an either-or approach, cultural straddlers,
compared to noncompliant believers and cultural mainstreamers, broker the boundaries
among multiple cultural environments,
instead of choosing one set of cultural codes
over another. One implication is that schools
that implement practices that promote interculturalism may yield better academic and
social results among their minority students
than those that do not. The challenge will be
to create school societies in which educators,
parents, and students value and work to
incorporate effective methods for developing
cultural expansion among all the principle
stakeholders.
NOTES
1. Classic works in the field, meanwhile,
have revealed that the oppositional culture
phenomenon is not a specific ethnoracial
one, since white poor and working-class boys
have been found to have attitudes that are
contrary to those of the mainstream and low
academic achievement (Gans 1962; MacLeod
1995; Willis 1981).
2. Throughout the text, I use black and
African American interchangeably. Racial
terms comprise numerous ethnic groups,
however. All the black students in this study,
with the exception of one, are African
American. The youths of Hispanic heritage in
the study varied in their racial identification as
black, white, or no race at all. I use the term
Latino to refer to the group of students whose
parents immigrated to the United States from
countries in Central and Latin America and
the Spanish Caribbean.
3. In the academic literature, the terms
Hispanic and Latino are generally used to refer
to all people in the United States whose
ancestry is predominantly from one or more
Spanish-speaking countries. However, the
Dominican and Puerto Rican American participants in my study referred to their ethnic
groups under the rubric Spanishreferring to
the one obvious commonality they share, language.
4. Ogbus four other categories of blacks
included the assimilationists, the accommodators without assimilation, the ambivalents, and the encapsulated.
5. The other three components of Sellers
et al.s MMRI include racial centrality,
salience, and regard. Racial centrality concerns the extent to which people define
themselves with regard to racethat is, the
degree to which they make their racial identity a principal part of who they are. Salience
refers to the extent to which ones race is a
relevant part of ones self-concept; it is usually concerned with a particular event or situation and the degree to which one is inclined
to define oneself in terms of race in that social
situation. Regard refers to a persons evaluative judgment of his or her race, the extent to
which he or she feels positively about it.
6. See the discussion by Meyerson and
Scully (1995), who introduced the concept of
tempered radicalsindividuals who identify
with and are committed to their organizations and to a cause, community, or ideology
that is fundamentally different from and possibly at odds with the dominant culture of
their organization.
7. Although the original study from which
I selected my participants examined neighborhood differences in the attainment of lowincome families, a comparison of these
youths by neighborhoods is not my intent
here.
8. The estimated reliability coefficient
(Cronbachs alpha) was .71 for the abstract or
normative attitudes scale.
9. I constructed a scale from four items of
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Straddling Boundaries 325
Mickelsons six-item concrete educational
attitude scale that yielded the highest reliability statistic, or Cronbachs alpha, which was a
modest .43. The two items that I excluded
were All I need to do for my future is read,
write, and make change and When my
teachers give us homework, my friends never
think of doing it. While the latter item contributes to the validity of the scale, I do not
mention it here because it taps into another
social dimension of students academic realities that, on the surface, has less to do with
their concrete attitudes about race and education.
10. Pseudonyms are used throughout the
article to protect the youths privacy and
identity.
11. The black and Latino students also differentiated between their ethnospecific cultural styles; for example, Fernanda, a highschool graduate and Puerto Rican cultural
straddler, told me that her friend chided her
for dressing too black and not in Spanish.
12. Generally, I found that almost all the
participants were more likely to describe certain high-achieving students as either lowprofile or nerdy, rather than as acting white,
when they believed that these peers focused
on their academic achievement at the
expense of not having a social life (Kinney
1993). Also, they were primarily ridiculed for
either having low levels of social skills, being
unpopular or not dressing in the faddish
clothing styles.
13. According to the participants, the converse was possible, too. White students could
emulate black and Spanish cultural styles and
practices that were more prevalent in a
minority-dominant high school. During my
interviews and field observations, it was not
uncommon to hear students talk about white
peers who tried to act black or Spanish.
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Stephanie A. J. Rowley, and Tabbye M.
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Prudence L. Carter, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Harvard University. Her
main fields of interest are education, culture and identity, race, class, and gender. She is currently
conducting a comparative international study of ethnicity, culture, and group dynamics in South
African and U.S. schools. She is the author of Keepin It Real: School Success Beyond Black and
White (Oxford University Press, 2005).
This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9801981) and
the Spencer Foundation. Thanks to Sheldon Danziger, Mary Corcoran, and the Ford Foundation
Program on Poverty, the Underclass and Social Policy for office and resource support during this articles conception. For comments and suggestions on various versions of this article, I thank James
Ainsworth-Darnell, Tony Brown, Darrick Hamilton, Lori Hill, Reena Karani, James S. Jackson, Jennifer
Lee, Roslyn Mickelson, Amanda Lewis, and Karolyn Tyson. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle,
Washington, and at the Malcolm Wiener Inequality and Social Policy Seminar, JFK School of
Government, Harvard University. Address correspondence to Prudence L. Carter, Department of
Sociology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, 504 William James Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138;
e-mail: plcarter@wjh.harvard.edu.
328 Carter
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