Acting white

[3] Don Lemon has also claimed that African-American communities are harmed by referring to use of standard English or finishing school as "acting white".

[5] In 2008, before Barack Obama's election as President of the United States, longtime activist Ralph Nader characterized the then-senator as "talking white.

[9] Obama strongly criticized the idea that achievement was limited to "acting white" in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

He said that "children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

[10] Mike Freeman, writing for Bleacher Report, speculated that this conflict was a possible reason for the trading of player Percy Harvin from the Seahawks to the New York Jets.

Most definitions include a reference to situations where some minority adolescents ridicule their peers for engaging in behaviors perceived to be characteristic of whites.

In this scenario, they equate "white behavior" with high grades in school, a result researchers can quantify, but the term is not limited to this.

[12] A fundamental drawback of much of the research so far is that the people studied have been asked to rate their own popularity in the eyes of others, which naturally brings those scores into question.

"[8] In 1986, Signithia Fordham co-authored with Nigerian sociologist John Ogbu a study that concluded that high-performing African-American students in a Washington, D.C. high school borrowed from hegemonic white culture as part of a strategy for achievement, while struggling to maintain a black identity.

In 1997 the scholars Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig published a report finding that blacks do not face any stronger social pressures than whites to succeed in school, nor do they have greater feelings of alienation towards education in general.

They compared attitudes identified as acting white to the normal adolescent pains experienced in John Hughes' movies.

[14] Margaret Beale Spencer and Vinay Harpalani (2008)[15] argue that usage of the term acting white by black teenagers does not reflect their cultural values; rather, it is a manifestation of their racial identity development, experienced in conjunction with normal adolescent hassles and peer pressure.

[18]Kenji Yoshino, a New York University School of Law professor, in his Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (2006), criticizes social pressures to conform to mainstream white culture.