Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Social Scientists have attempted to explain the racial gap in academic achievement in a variety of ways. Some theorists posit that the racial gap in academic achievement is due to a cultural deficiency in the black community. One of the most widely known and well respected of the Cultural Deficit theorists is a Nigerian anthropologist named John Ogbu. whose comparative ethnographic study of black and Chinese youth in Oakland California lead him to two conclusions. First, that Asians are successful despite their cultural differences between themselves and whites because they possess a cultural lens that allows them to view these differences as obstacles to be overcome.. Second, that blacks continue to trail behind whites in the academic arena because they posses a culture that is ‘oppositional’ or that rejects mainstream values and institutions. In this paper I will argue that the different ways that ‘blackness’ and ‘Asianess’ have been constructed in American society has created two very different racial meanings for each group. I further assert that these different meanings create two very different sets of expectations, interactions and reactions from the majority white school officials. Thus, black students and Asian students are not responding to similar cultural obstacles, as Ogbu suggests, but in fact are facing very different obstacles that warrant very different responses.