I was thinking about this thread today while I was at dinner, and this is something that I haven't seen in the discussion about inner city students, so I'm going to go ahead and say it.
Let me preface what I'm about to say with a little bit of background about my high school experience, because what I'm about to say may be offensive to some. I am of mainly Spanish, Irish, and German descent (1/4 of each, with the last 1/4 being made up of an amalgamation of English, French, Cherokee, and God knows what else). I was in the International Baccalaureate program in high school, lettered in Football, Track, and Orchestra, and was a member of The Gentlemen's Club, which was a club at school whose fundamental values were scholastic excellence and professionalism, and had exactly 3 non-black members (I was the first), and of our Step Team (only white member to date), which was initially sponsored by the Zeta Chi chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. The demographics of my school were such that Black students were 34% of the population, Whites were 29%, Hispanics were 27%, and the rest was made up of students of different ethnic backgrounds, Asian, Indian, Arab, etc. I think it's pretty safe to say that I had a very diverse group of people I would hang out with and I'd like to think that I learned a fair bit about a lot of the different groups at my school. I refused to let myself fall into the trap that many advanced students do, and trap themselves within their program's bubble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white
This is one of the things that, in my opinion, has lead to more failure than anything else. I saw this first hand on the football team, and with my black friends in IB, but it was most obvious with The Gentlemen's club/Step Team. We wore suits and ties on Club days, and on days we would pick throughout the year, usually coinciding with important events at the school, like days when middle school students would be taking tours, when the local elementary school would come and make their annual walk to our school, exam days, first days of school/semesters/9 weeks, etc. When we would walk around in our suits, we'd hear things, sometimes through other people, sometimes directly, to the effect of "There go them white ni**as." I heard it personally when I was trying to reach out to one of the guys on the football team who was struggling with his academics to join, and one of the other guys on the team said "Don't listen to him, that's for them ni**as that wanna be white". Incidentally, the kid I was recruiting wound up graduating with honors and getting a scholarship to Bethune-Cookman, and the wanna be gangster is serving jail-time for something, probably dealing drugs. This is a very real problem in schools with large minority populations, or at least with mine.
I've read op-eds and other things refuting it, and you're free to do so as you will, but from my own experience with it, I think that it's something is very real, and a very real threat to minority students.
YMMV, IMO, et al.
