Acting Black and Acting White in Racist America

Acting Black and Acting White in Racist America

Several years ago, four New York City police officers were acquitted after their trial for the murder of an African immigrant. Bill Bradley is quoted in Newsweek (March 6, 2000): "I think that it shows that when racial profiling seeps so deeply into somebody's mind, a wallet in the hand of a white man looks like a wallet, but a wallet in the hand of a black man looks like a gun."

My nephew, David, who is African American, is beginning to expereince teasing about doing well in school and "acting white." He will end up, as have his mother and our other two African American siblings, learning to act black in certain situations and white in others.

People live in quite similar and yet vastly different Umwelten. In this reflexive paper I intend to explore for myself some ideas about the Umwelten of inner city, lower SES African American families (I taught in inner city Washington, D.C.) and white American suburban middle class families. Different Umwelten can lead to vastly different ways of thinking about what it means to be successful in life and, thus, how parents raise and what they desire for their children.

The conversation my sister and I were having did not end with thoughts about David and his hardships in school. We discussed reasons children would tease other children for valuing schooling, and what the teasing says about parents' and culture's educational beliefs. My sister decided that she could not imagine any parents who would not want their child to get an education and, if they had the opportunity, to go to college. (Implied in this sentence is, of course, the assumption that every person has the opportunity to go get that "education.")

I was aghast. Aren't we both liberal people brought up together in the same liberal household? Yet my sister seems to have some limiting views that I do not share (at least not consciously). First, "education" means graduating from high school and the opportunity to go on to college. Second, every parent would want and value this education for their children. Third, this would mean that the opportunity for this education was available to all children and their parents know it.

Here I saw a glimpse through a slice of the rhizome that is my sister's mind, where her interpretants for the signs of "opportunity" and "education" are different from mine, and where they lead to different connections than these interpretants do for me.