Acting White – Solutions to the Puzzle

A few days ago, I wrote about a paper by Ron Fryer and Paul Torelli (click here for the post). To sum it up, they found that white student GPA correlates positively with popularity, black student popularity peaks with a GPA of about 3.5 and Hispanic popularity peaks at about 2 to 2.5 GPA. My question to the readers: why the marked difference between Blacks and Latinos?

I was deluged with emails. So let me start by thanking all the Marginal Revolution readers for sending their thoughts! Even if I haven’t gotten around to responding to every email, please know that I read them all and learned quite a bit.

In general, there were two sorts of emails – personal recollections and attempts to explain the phenomena. Among the former, many support that for the idea that there is an acting white penalty. At the very least, the "acting white" accusation is very real for many people. One person wrote that although s/he earned a modest 2.1 GPA in their final year in high school, s/he was till accused of acting white by peers. A teacher in a mainly Hispanic high school told me that success for many children of immigrants is defined in rather modest terms, and that striving for college and advanced education was out of the norm.

Now, let’s turn to some proposed explanations. One popular answer was that each ethnic group has different GPA distributions and that people become unpopular as they deviate from the group average. It is certainly true that GPA varies from group to group, but the mean white GPA is not 4.0 – the height of popularity for white students. It is also true that in data that Fryer and Torelli use black and Hispanic GPA are about the same at 2.5 (check out page 51). So the “deviate from the mean” explanation only fits Hispanics, but not the other groups examined.

Another batch of emails suggested that a shared Spanish language, close social networks and tight families might mean that Hispanics are better at monitoring each other than Blacks. If a Hispanic student wants to do well in school, they have to master English. It’s pretty easy to know if someone speaks English with any degree of fluency. OTOH, Black students already know English. I can imagine that an ambitious Black student could do pretty well in school and not attract attention. They “fly under the radar,” in the words of one MR reader. However, once you get a super high GPA, you get lots of public recognition in school (honor roll, advanced courses, etc.) and it’s harder to evade the “acting white” tag.

A couple of readers felt that the statistical finding for Hispanics was misleading. They suggested that it was important to discern between fluent English speakers and mainly Spanish speakers. Assimilated Hispanics, they thought, might resemble White students and what Fryer and Torelli report only pertains the least assimilated, where there would of course be unusually strong in-group pressures for conformity. There might be some credence to this; Fryer and Torelli don’t include English fluency as control variables.

So thank you to all who emailed! As you can see, I enjoyed the email enormously and I think we have some tips on solving this puzzle.