Race-acting: The varied and complex affirmative meaning of “acting Black” for African-American adolescents

Abstract

In the field of psychology, deficit theoretical frameworks for studying African-American students dominate mainstream psychological theorizing and research. This is particularly the case within research explaining the academic achievement gap between African-American and White students. The aims of the present study are to adopt a culturally responsive theoretical framework to study one of the most widely used explanations for the African-American achievement gap, “the ‘acting White’ hypothesis,” as well as to further interrogate the more globally generalizable concept of “race-acting” and what specifically it means to “act Black.” The data were generated from an open-ended survey question as part of a larger longitudinal mixed-method study. One hundred and fifteen African-American middle school students participated. Researchers used a thematic content analysis to systematically analyze the data and concluded, based on their multiple interpretations, that the meaning of race-acting is varied and complex. Academic Intelligence was discovered as a prominent and affirmative theme for what it means to these adolescents to “act Black” and, with the exception of two themes (i.e., Ghetto and Superiority), what it means to these adolescents to “act Black” and to “act White” was the same. One implication of the study is that the concept of “race-acting” has utility for guiding future theoretical and methodological development about racialized belief systems of all groups living in racialized societies and culturally specific identity processes for African-Americans.