More on the "Acting White" study

In response to my posting below about Fryer and Torelli's study showing that Hispanics lose more same-race friends the higher their GPA than do blacks, a college professor writes:

Your post on educational attitudes among Hispanics and blacks is consistent with my impressions in in the classroom. Apathy towards learning seems widespread among Hispanics. Curious whites are much more common (though not common enough), and among whites and even blacks you have the type of person who is not particularly smart, but who is motivated to play the intellectual. But rarely do I see Hispanics who like to get into a discussion about things--to explore ideas for curiosity's sake, or to project the image of a smart person. As a group, they are a pretty inert bunch. When I see this among black students, it seems like they are simply not getting it; when I see it among Hispanics, they just don't care. I haven't seen them say that someone is trying to be better than them if they act smart, but I have heard this is what you will be told if you excel in school.

The gap between whites and Hispanics in average IQ is only about 65% as large as the gap between whites and blacks, as is the gap between whites and American-born Hispanics on the NAEP achievement test, but Hispanics do worse than blacks on certain measures of quantity of schooling, when their higher average IQs suggest they should be getting more schooling.

Come to think of it, Asians don't seem particularly curious--just very driven and competitive. Similarly, women are also less curious than men. They are better students but are less interested.

That's the same thing you see when looking at who wins the science Nobel Prizes: white guys ask the big, hard questions. Too bad we're the "cancer of history," as Ms. Sontag so felicitously put it.

A reader writes:

The major surprises from the paper were a) that the social cost for blacks in "acting white" [i.e., getting good grades] is much larger in integrated schools, and b) that the social cost for high grades is greatest for... guess who? Private school students of any race.

As for the private schools, a reader urges caution in interpreting the data:

According to the figure on page 47 of the report, the popularity curve for Hispanics and blacks at private schools is pretty flat. Popularity peaks for whites at about a 1.75 GPA and declines significantly to a 4.0 GPA. The curves are very wiggly so I don't think they have a lot of data for private school students.

Another reader responds:

Isn't one obvious reason why blacks and Hispanics with better grades have fewer friends of the same race (or "race" for Hispanics) simply the fact that the ones with better grades are likely to have more white classmates and white friends? Likewise, perhaps low-achieving whites have more black and Hispanic friends. I assume that having more friends of one kind means fewer of another!

Another reader writes:

It would have been interesting to see, for black and Hispanic high achievers, how many white friends each had. In other words, how much all this is basically about students making friends in their academic-achievement class, rather than in their race-ethnic class. I suspect black high achievers have more white friends now than do Hispanic ones, but perhaps I am wrong. And that might not fit all the other ancient axes the Post has to grind.

One also suspects that, in the old days of either pure segregation in the South or ability-tracking in the North, that high-achieving blacks were much more popular and admired by their fellow blacks than they perhaps are today. Blacks could then feel pride in and identify a bit with the most talented of their fellow blacks, while still feeling they shared many of the same experiences. Now, I think the same exceptional levels of achievement among poor-performing minorities are taken as a signal of separation from the main group, which is probably what is happening.

I now see that Fryer and Torelli mention in passing in their confusingly written paper that: "substitution towards other race friendships does not fully explain the stark difference in the popularity – achievement gradient."

In other words, in an integrated school, a smart black kid in the A.P. classes would acquire more white friends, but not as many as he'd lose black friends. This doesn't necessarily mean that black students intentionally penalize black high achievers. They just have less contact with them and less in common with them. So, once again we come back to the brute fact that on average whites are smarter than blacks, and that most other effects hypothesized about the white-black education gap are marginalia.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer