African Americ The Fear Of Success - 1077 Words

African American The fear of success in blacks can also be looked at through many angles. Socially blacks tend to hinder each other by viewing success as â€Å"Acting white.† In the article Scholars Debate Theory that Blacks Equate Academic Success with Acting White , Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson argues how success often equates to acting white in the black community. Ferguson argues, â€Å"Blacks value education and good grades just as much as whites, what it comes down to is time spent leisurely reading or doing extra work that is considered white† (page). John Uzo Ogbu another professor that argues in the article Black Students School Success: Coping with the Burden of Acting White, argues that this acclaim that blacks do n’t read leisurely isn’t true. â€Å"This isn’t true, and that kid’s answer questions to what they think the adult wants to hear, and the only way to make that assumption is to actually observe the kids†. I think that there is some tr ue in both of their statements, but neither is all the way right. Blacks kids do not associate education as acting white, but see being educated and being able to speak properly as being white. In ‘You Talk White:’ Being Black and Articulate’, Keith Powell states in, â€Å"Being smart, black, young and American had become a liability. People seemed to think I was some kind of walking oxymoron. I was often asked to be more â€Å"urban and it never seemed like the right time or place to launch into a diatribe about how I was born in West