I didn't see the implication that Witt did about the unavailability of apartments today; instead, it's that there's no dorms, so the school is non-residential and thus a commuter school serving the surrounding white population.
THE PROBLEM WITH BLACK GIRLS IS THEY ARE INSUFFICIENTLY WILLOWY. THOSE WITH WILLOWY ATTRIBUTES FAIR BETTER. THEY SHOULD WORK ON THAT
Willowy Attributes, Strong Female Character for Hire. New in paperback! In the latest in the Willowy Attributes series from fan-favorite author Tweeter McConventiongoer, Will confronts Symbol O'Sexism. Again!
The boys/girls thing was certainly true of the black kids at Fancypants Academy. On the other hand, in later life the girls seem mostly to have become moderately successful in. Lone with expectations, whereas a really shockingly high number of the black boys who seemed totally socially at ease, successful, smart, confident, etc had really spectacular flameouts once the incredible pressure of being the shining exemplar of blackness and bootstrapyness in white rich person land got to be too much. Of my black guy friends or friendquaintances, all of whom seemed totally popular and in control for most of high school, lets see: one had a sort of promising hip hop career and then got 30 years for smuggling coke, one got super heavy into drugs and dropped out for 8 years, then recovered and is now an engineer, one left college after being busted for coke dealing and doing time and now has a bunch of kids and has drifted through various jobs, one had a bizarre hippy period where he was doing acid every day and wearing that gigantic 90s raver top hat and dropped out of college, one got busted for some kind of check-forging scheme after college and was in prison, and one avoided these mishaps and is a successful professional management consultant, though he's also now an owner of a few black strip clubs in the rust belt.
Huh. I do get the impression that the black female stereotype that they get socially penalized for has something to do with assertive/aggressiveness and competence, and that's clearly the sort of thing that, while it may hurt you socially in high school, is going to be practically helpful in later life.
Also on 4, come to think, isn't that the Malcolm X story? Socially and academically successful in an all white school, and then things get difficult in late teen/early adulthood?
People who were born in Nebraska and leave often have troubles in earth adulthood.
I think it's nearly impossible, socially, for black girls to be perceived as fragile and delicate. And that no one gives a shit about fragile and delicate after high school. Or I guess what LB and Flippanter said, but I added summative value.
Hawaiian Punch is really invested in the idea that people only like her because her hair is long and beautiful. I have no idea how to untangle (HA FUNNY) that one.
Unfortunately, she's probably basically right.
That's convenient. Working on a kid's personality is pain in the ass. If everybody already likes them, you don't need to bother.
And, horrifyingly but conveniently if your kid is appealing looking, it does tend to create a pleasanter personality. If everyone who sees the kid smiles and coos at them because of the cute hair (Sally had that), they get all cheerfully confident if they're even slightly that way inclined.
She's actually really ornery and starting to strain those around her, I think. They call her "strong-willed" in the classroom which is obviously code for PITA.
1: It's here:
Despite all the love that she feels for Bluefield State, Go-Go didn't send her own children there. Her daughter, a Ph.D., went to college at Stanford on a full-ride. Go-Go asks, "Why would I send my daughter all the way across the country to a place where she wouldn't have anywhere to live?"
It doesn't say what year she sent her daughter to school, but elsewhere in the comments section (no time to find it right now) there is more discussion (lack of) local apartments.
Compliment her on her astutenessfashionability
5 & 8 are a little unclear
Is 5 saying that "assertive/aggressiveness and competence" are merely stereotypes, and they are rewarded for the stereotype later, or saying that black women on average are more assertive and competent. Or perhaps that the expectations interact with the performance and outcomes.
Same with 8. Are there fewer "fragile and delicate" black girls, or simply a perception that there are fewer? There is a weaker opportunity to "perform" fragile and delicate?
The numbers, the outcomes seem to indicate that black women are doing ok, relative to black men, relative to starting positions. Relative to white girls?
I might contend, with trepidation, that rather than a stereotype or perception, that young black women (on average, given equal starting positions) are actually more assertive and competent etc, at least relative to black men, based on graduation rates etc.
In any case, the question is why?
Is the relative success of black women due to a weaker or absent patriarchy in early life (which certain statistics might implicate) or due to more supportive and nurturing fathers in early life? I prefer the former, but I'm open.
And why, given the above, are black women "still three times less likely than black men to marry outside of their race."
16:Yeah, the comments to the first post, which include a lot of people with firsthand experience with BSC, are well worth close reading.
16: sure, but in this particular case, maybe she's just trying to find a polite response to a ridiculous comparison (full-ride at Stanford vs unknown regional school)...
Are there fewer "fragile and delicate" black girls, or simply a perception that there are fewer? There is a weaker opportunity to "perform" fragile and delicate?
Fragile and delicate is less a performance, and more a perception by others. If you could take a single girl, and attach her skin color to a volume knob, you could affect how fragile and delicate she was perceived by others, without changing anything else.
Or perhaps that the expectations interact with the performance and outcomes.
I don't think I was thinking clearly when I wrote 5, but this is probably closest to what I was thinking of -- black women/girls are socially expected to be assertive and competent, which will tend to encourage them to express those traits, and you get a feedback loop.
I guess I should read the comments. Oops.
I wonder how this plays out at Sally's school. It's more Latino than anything else, some white, some African American. I get the impression that the social butterflies/popular pretty girls tend to be Latina -- if there's a white-girl stereotype it's either scruffy nerd or kooky goofball (less negative than either characterization sounds). But I don't have a clear sense of where African American girls fit in socially. Partially because the African American/Latina line is an ambiguous one -- one of Sally's better friends is certainly successfully doing the delicate fairy princess thing, and while she's got significant recent African ancestry, she's Latina rather than black identified.
Partially because the African American/Latina line is an ambiguous one
Interesting. Here, the Latina/white line is much easier to blur than black is with either.
I don't know anything about this, but is the more important factor the short term high long term toxicity of the expectations for boys, rather than anything to do with the expectations for girls?
Based on my zero experience of being a teenager or having a teenage kid in Texas. I should probably shut up.
25: this is a fundamental difference between areas, like NYC, where the "Latino" population is primarily carribean, and Texas and California, where it is primarily Mexican.
-r, plus b. I've been making that same goddamn spelling mistake for years.
25: That's blurry too, although I think it's blurrier than my kids do -- they have a strong sense of Latino/a-ness as trumping other ethnic identity. Sally attended a voluntary academic competition that was mostly private school kids, and was commenting on the intimidating upper-classness of it all, and mentioned that a friend from her school was the only non-white kid there. And I boggled a bit, because the friend's Argentinian, and if he's got any non-European ancestry it's not much: it would never have occurred to me to think of him as non-white.
Further to 5, etc.: The pattern described in this article is pretty much the reverse of what happens in college. Black women are outperforming men by a large amount, at least at the community college level (I have numbers somewhere.)
26: I was wondering -- is the social success in white high schools (to the extent it actually exists) toxic for African American boys, or just insufficient to protect against later structural racism? How would you tell?
I missed the "in Texas" specification on my first reading of 27 and wondered whether that meant that Heebie was produced directly as an adult in a lab somewhere.
I've been trying to think of a way to comment on the inversion of roles for African American men and women in college as a function of assertiveness, either perceived or real, and I'm having a hard time of it.
Really, in each case it is more about gender identity in general. A lot of the problems african american men have in college relate to having their sense of self-sufficiency challenged, not being willing to ask for help, and that sort of thing. This isn't quite the same thing as problems with real or perceived assertiveness. But it is part of the same gender complex.
31: Isn't the article talking about social success? I didn't see anything about black girls doing academically poorly in white high schools.
As far as the second article, it was an interesting and perhaps saddish story.
Bluefield County is now 93% white with a family income of $33k. West Virginia is 93% white.
Ancient history and a current political discourse that is nationalized and probably has little to do with BCS or Bluefield County. I'll let others work with it.
I hadn't placed this story geographically before now. Bluefield (not a county), WV, is where I77 runs down south. I once spent the night in nearby Princeton in a hotel so unspeakably filthy that I didn't take my shoes off in bed. It was torn down and replaced with a Home Depot or something.
Anyway, I cannot see why anybody who wasn't from the area would go there either. It's pretty, except for the buildings, I guess.
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I'm using a colleague's notes for a course, to give him feedback because he'd like to publish them (informally). It's going really badly, but obviously that might be specific to me.
I've told him the strengths and weaknesses of the notes, when used in my teaching style, but I've erred on the side of diplomacy, because he's worked so hard on these notes and he's generally overly earnest.
The students just did conclusively worse on the first test. Like, they screwed up all sorts of basic things that they usually would breeze through. Should I share that with him? Or is that just unnecessary and mean? I am actually annoyed at him because of these notes, so I have to check myself that I'm not deliberately being mean to him.
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37:Yeah sorry, it was Mercer County.
I wanted to check larger geographical units to be sure there wasn't de facto segregation.
History, maybe even important history, but history.
Maybe Appalachia is/was simply more brutally tribal (Anglo-Irish?) and reacted very badly to the 60s.
39: I don't understand -- you're using his notes in lieu of a textbook, as a student reference? Or as a structure for your lectures?
39: I'd tell him concrete things about how the students performed. Otherwise, you're being mean to his future students.
35: Yeah, the pattern is reversed when you move college and change the topic to academic success, which makes my comment seem even more strained. I swear there's an idea here, though.
If you want to be mean to him, imply that somebody with a bigger penis would have written better notes.
Has anyone measured generally an inverse correlation between high school social success and college academic success. It seems like that would be plausible, but who knows.
You aren't doing him a favor by keeping him in the dark about a problem with his work. You just have to find the kindest way to explain things.
you're using his notes in lieu of a textbook, as a student reference?
Right. Like his notes form something of a workbook that replaces a textbook, and we're following them. (Inquiry based learning, for those who care.)
Ok. Then I will tell him.
I mean, it's certainly possible that someone else would do much better than me with these notes, and would do much worse with our textbook. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't being vindictive, because a part of me wants to be vindictive.
45: You think? At least for girls, I'd think there's a high-social-status/high-academic-achievement cluster in high school, and I'd figure those girls don't disproportionately flame out in college. I'm less sure about high social status boys.
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Does this case have the seeds of a neo-Lochner or is it just an extremely plutocratic newspaper owner trying to push the envelope?
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Opinionated Grandma is probably sort of right, as is Hawaiian Punch. I'm having lunch while Selah is with a babysitter and I think this may be the first time in a month I've been out on my own (though it isn't, because my mon watched Selah so I could go to therapy) and I was amazed upon walking into Target alone to return some clothes that don't fit Nia because they're made for a different body type that I am totally white with no asterisks when I'm on my own, and that's a weird feeling after going everywhere with an adorable baby I think people mostly believe was born to me and some black guy, which is a weird feeling after three years of going everywhere with kids (white) people assume I've adopted from Africa or Haiti.
I am still inclined to send the girls to my all-girls Catholic high school when the time comes, where it's no longer quite as bad as the one black girl per grade that was true when I was there but also is nowhere near as diverse as where they are now. But I remember starting college and watching the girls from co-ed schools deferring to boys when a quetion was asked, and I don't want them to be in that role at all and think maybe the gender security bump will offset any racial identity tensions. This shit is hard to anticipate and balance.
But I remember starting college and watching the girls from co-ed schools deferring to boys when a quetion was asked, and I don't want them to be in that role at all and think maybe the gender security bump will offset any racial identity tensions.
Heaven knows I don't know what I'm talking about in any first-hand way. But doesn't that gendered deference, as we were talking about above, come into play much less for African-American girls than white girls? Obviously, you can't figure out how everything's going to operate in any individual case, but I think I'd weight the benefits of a singlesex education less heavily for your girls than I might if they were white.
53: That's one way they're probably growing up culturally white, though, even if Lee and I continue to have equal influence. We'll see, but Nia is a serious follower at this point who could stand to be put in more leadership roles and Mara would benefit from academic options they can't get in our county. Our district is currently ranked worst in the state, though I stand by all the positive things I've said about early education there, so I do want to have a backup plan. On the other hand, having them able to walk around the corner to school would be so great for me as a parent. We'll see. They're in kindergarten and first grade and this is not anything like NYC, so I have a lifetime before there are decisions to be made. (One sort of stupid emotional factor is that Mara's dad went to the boys' school and so in some sense she's a legacy on both sides, though since none of us are Catholics it doesn't matter. And they'll learn more about Christianity in HS religion classes than in Sunday school where I take them to church, though I'm not sure how much that matters.)
I did win the preschool disagreement and Selah will get carried around the corner (different corner than the high school and a block closer) to school every morning before whichever of us drops the big girls at their school, and then they'll get bussed to after-school program at her location so they can see each other and again can all be picked up without any seat belts being involved. I'm in heaven about this, especially because Selah has taken to turning around when I want to buckle her and jumping up and down while looking at herself in the rear-view mirror, which is adorable but not how I want to spend every morning or afternoon.
Fryer did a study which measured popularity in high school versus grades in high school.
For whites, popularity is strongly positively correlated with good grades.
For blacks, the curve is essentially flat.
For hispanics, popularity is strongly negatively correlated with good grades except for very low grades.
http://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/acting-white/
The media then reported that Fryers study explained the penalty that black people faced for acting white because something something something.