Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation by Stuart Buck

(Yale Univ., 261 pages, $27.50)

Stuart Buck, a white scholar, is “sure to be tarred as a callous bigot” for writing this book, said Richard Thompson Ford in Slate.com. Because he is arguing that school desegregation destroyed an educational system that served many black students better than what replaced it, his critics will charge that he is advocating a return to a racially segregated society. But Buck isn’t, and he started down this path by merely asking an important question: Having adopted two black sons, he ached to know why many black students who excel in school are ostracized for allegedly “acting white.” This self-harming attitude turned out to be a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, Buck says it was unknown in black communities before the widespread school desegregation orders of the late 1960s.

First, he paints a rosy picture of how well all-black schools served their communities prior to desegregation, said Maureen Downey in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Though shortchanged on public resources, the schools offered an abundance of positive black role models, because the teachers and principals were figures of respect. Buck makes clear that segregation had to go. “The analogy I would draw is treatment for cancer,” he says: Ending segregation was necessary, but it had the unhappy side effect of destroying a distinct pro-education culture. In one Georgia city, the number of black educators working in the public schools declined by 68 percent in just three years.

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The effects were devastating, said John McWhorter in The New Republic. Because white schools were integrated while black schools were simply abandoned, many black students entered hostile classrooms and struggled to adjust. Buck’s “terrific” book documents that this was the very moment when black students actually began embracing academic underachievement as a form of group identity. The news Acting White offers is hard to swallow, but “I cannot imagine we will soon see another book so utterly necessary on what used to be called the Race Question.”