“Shut up you fake white boy!” said the “real” black kid. The comment came out of nowhere. One minute a group of white and black adolescents were hanging out and laughing. The next minute I got a rhetorical bullet in the chest. I couldn’t help but notice that the white kids seemed to be laughing the hardest about this comment. I wondered why but didn’t ask. Accusations of acting white can be costly as discussed in a must-read study by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard.
In my experience, the phenomenon of people claiming that “nerdy” kids of color are acting white is discussed in a few ways. Those who have been on the receiving end of the charge deny it with passion. Others theorize that the prevalence of the phenomenon is either exaggerated or has little real impact on kids of color. Another school of thought is that the accusation is accurate and its targets suffer from self-hatred. What I’ve heard less of is the possibility that not only are those accused of acting white actually doing so, but that there is nothing wrong with their doing so.
I am going to take those who deny they are acting white at their word. What I will say is that I am one of the people who does act white, knows that he is doing so and is actually quite good at it. I recently joked at a faculty brown bag on race that I’ve earned an honorary doctorate in white people through a lifetime of study. You could call it a kind of anthropology by necessity. In order to successfully navigate white dominated spaces, I have had to learn to understand white people, white psychology and white society. Not only that, but I’ve had to learn how to perform a certain kind of blackness, a whitened-blackness if you will, depending upon the context. It took me a long time to recognize this ability as an asset rather than an indication of racial betrayal or mark of ethnic inferiority relative to other black folks. Acting white does not have to represent some form of pathology, but can actually be an expression of what is generally referred to as “cultural” competence. I agree that acquiring such competence can degenerate into a quest for white acceptance to achieve some degree of white privilege and power. However, it can also be a path to opportunities to challenge and change the racial hierarchy from the inside out. This is the kind of acting white that I engage in. I believe it is a necessary and valuable contribution to black liberation, however paradoxical it may appear.
I intellectually and politically respect those who reject what I’m proposing here. Black people have been debating how best to resist white domination for a long time. We have never had complete agreement or even consensus on this question. My goal is to challenge the notion that there is only one right answer.
One of the problems with the pathologizing of acting white, is that it is based on essentialist notions of a “real” blackness in opposition to a “fake” whiteness. In other words, some of us are “acting” while others are “keeping it real”. The reality is that all racial identity is acting, it represents a performance rather than some kind of self-evident, immutable reality. As Markus and Moya put it, race is something that we do, not something that we are. Thus everyone is “acting white” or “acting black”. What gets some folks upset is the perception that others are somehow not “acting” according to the standards of self-appointed racial authenticity police. This happens on both sides of the color-line, with some whites accused of “acting black” or not being “white enough”.
Another problem is that accusations of acting white or acting black assume there are these distinct, pure, cultures of whiteness and blackness that people are somehow trying to imitate. Such a view denies the long history of cross-cultural assimilation, acculturation, and appropriation between Europeans and Africans in the New World. How could people who have interacted for centuries not deeply influence each others’ cultural formations? Where does so-called white culture end and black culture begin? You could say that all whites are sometimes “acting black” and all blacks are sometimes “acting white”. If so, what is the basis for passing judgment on any of us?
I think that it is time to have a broader and deeper conversation about “acting white”. We don’t have to agree but we can at least consider different possibilities for thinking about what it means. I’ve come to realize that those who have accused me of acting white were right all along, though not in the way they imagined. Today I can say it loud, I act white and I’m proud.
