Oppositional Culture and Educational Opportunity Christopher Lewis Balliol College, Oxford Abstract The most common lay

explanation for the racial gap in educational achievement in the U.S. is the oppositional culture hypothesis, which holds that Black students tend to undervalue education and stigmatize their high-achieving peers, accusing them of acting White. Many believe that, insofar as this hypothesis is true, Black underachievement is unproblematic from the perspective of justice, because Black students are simply not taking the fair opportunities presented to them. This paper offers a systematic critique of the normative aspects of this view and some conceptual clarifications regarding the nature of opportunity. Keywords Racial achievement gap, oppositional culture, educational opportunity, justice On average, Black and Latino students in the U.S lag far behind their White and Asian counterparts on every notable metric of educational achievement. The public political discourse in the U.S about how government, individuals, and communities ought to respond to the achievement gap is deeply influenced by a range of empirical explanations of why the gap exists. These empirical explanations are commonly thought to bear on whether members of different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups have been and would be accorded fair educational opportunities under current and proposed alternative educational and social policy schemes.i This, in turn, is intuitively taken to bear on the question of whether the society at large should undertake potentially costly interventions in order to close the gap.ii The idea that underlies this intuition is that the society as a whole should be concerned with equalizing educational outcomes between sub-populations of the society only insofar as equal outcomes are a proxy for fair educational opportunity. This kind of view has been widely held across U.S society for some time. Most people care about distributions of outcomes in general, including in the realm of education, primarily as a proxy for fair opportunity. They do not have any intrinsic concern for equal outcomes.iii There is widespread agreement that we can infer whether students from different ethnic and racial groups have fair educational opportunities from the educational outcomes of their respective groups combined with an empirical analysis of what generates those outcomes. The belief that Black students (especially African-Americans) have an oppositional culture looms large in the public imagination and is particularly prevalent among teachers (Bol and Barry, 2005; Downey and Pribesh, 2004; Ferguson, 2003; McKown and Weinstein, 2008). According to the oppositional culture hypothesis, Black students practice and identify with harmful social norms that inhibit academic achievement, and this is what explains their underachievement relative to White and Asian students. Many people believe that, insofar as the oppositional culture hypothesis holds true, the achievement gap is the product of fair educational opportunity, which renders it unproblematic from the perspective of social justice (Kluegel and Smith, 1982). Call this belief the oppositional culture justification.

In this paper, I aim to debunk the oppositional culture justification by assuming that the oppositional culture hypothesis holds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and carefully examining the normative implications of that assumption. I argue that the process by which educational inequalities could be generated by Black students oppositional culture cannot meet any reasonable standard of fair educational opportunity. If fair educational opportunity is something the society at large owes citizens as citizens, the broader society not just the Black community has an obligation to promote more equal educational outcomes between Black and White students, even if the oppositional culture hypothesis holds true. I hope this correction will contribute to a more thoughtful normative perspective on educational policy, while also yielding some insight into the abstract ideal of educational opportunity. My argument proceeds in three parts. In Part 1, I develop the distinction between explanatory breadth and explanatory depth to illustrate how conservative political commentators misappropriate empirical studies of the achievement gap in supporting the oppositional culture hypothesis. I then elaborate on the normative undertones of the misappropriation of those empirical studies, drawing on Brian Barrys conception of opportunity as a systematized expression of a popular and relatively long-held way of thinking in U.S public opinion. In Part 2, I distinguish two distinct components of the oppositional culture hypothesis: the acting White phenomenon, a harmful social norm where Black students stigmatize and exclude high-achieving peers; and oppositional identity, Black students social dis-identification with school success. I assume in Part 2 that the acting White phenomenon explains the achievement gap. I provide a formal model that illustrates the structure of the oppositional acting White norm as a coordination problem, suggesting the convention as a practical solution to this problem and illustrating the main normative question at stake: who should be held responsible for bringing the solution about? I show that if the acting White phenomenon explains the underachievement of Black students relative to Whites, Black students do not have fair educational opportunities. Thus, I argue, this burden should fall on the society as a whole. In section 3, I assume that oppositional identity explains the achievement gap. I argue that Black students oppositional identities must be grounded in beliefs about the value of education, in order for the hypothesis to provide support for the oppositional culture justification. Then, I show why the oppositional culture hypothesis needs to explain the origin of those beliefs. Finally, I examine two of the most prominent accounts of oppositional identity that do so, and show that neither of them can support the oppositional culture justification. Two preliminary caveats: first, it is important to keep in mind that the argument is a normative examination of an empirical hypothesis that is probably not well supported though whether it is or not is neither here nor there for our purposes. I assume for the sake of discussion contrary to our best social science that the oppositional culture hypothesis explains the achievement gap. This enables me to reach an important result: conservatives and neo-liberals are, from a moral perspective, unlikely to be able to justify the status quo in education policy regardless of how (or whether) the explanatory debates about the racial achievement gap are resolved. Second, throughout the paper I use the term Black students as a kind of placekeeper, though it is problematic. There are two reasons for this.

On the one hand, I want to bracket some concerns about age, moral development, and responsibility. Some popular manifestations of the oppositional culture hypothesis focus on adolescents, who are not fully responsible agents, but not properly omitted from the calculus of responsibility in the same way that infants are. Other versions of the hypothesis deal with Black students in higher education who are, presumably, fully responsible agents. In the paper, I assume that Black students are of an age such that they can be held at least partly responsible for their actions and choices. Arguments to the contrary will weigh in favor of my conclusions, in any case. On the other hand, I also want to bracket an important but contested ethnic dimension of the oppositional culture hypothesis. Some versions of the hypothesis focus only on African-American descendents of U.S slaves, excluding African and Caribbean immigrants, while others include a broader group of involuntary minorities, including second-generation Latinos. Because these ethnic and age dimensions are more than I can take on within the scope of this paper, I use the term, Black students in a way that is intentionally ambiguous regarding age ranges and ethnicities, so that I can provide an effective normative response to arguments that vary along these dimensions. Part 1: The Oppositional Culture Hypothesis 1.1 Explanatory breadth and depth The principle I aim to criticize in this paper is that, insofar as the oppositional culture hypothesis can explain the achievement gap, the gap is unproblematic from the perspective of justice. This principle takes the form of a conditional proposition with a scalar element. The scalar element of the principle, insofar as, implies that there is some sense in which the oppositional culture hypothesis could explain the achievement gap to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, there are two such senses, which I will call the breadth and depth of the explanation. Oppositional culture could explain some of the achievement gap, but not all of it. How much it can explain determines its explanatory breadth, which is dependent on three distinct variables: 1. 2. The extent to which oppositional culture is either widespread or specific to certain structural locations such as racially integrated school districts with rigid curricular tracking. The extent to which oppositional culture is disproportionately present among Black students, relative to White and Asian students; and The extent to which the oppositional culture actually affects levels of academic achievement.

3.

The explanatory depth of the hypothesis, on the other hand, depends on whether it explains the achievement gap at a relatively superficial level, or at the level of deeper underlying causes. When searching for the causes of the achievement gap, we are looking for (among other things) whether and to what extent the gap and its causes are evidence of a lack of fair educational opportunity, and this normative agenda drives the value of explanatory depth.iv

Imagine a student call her Karlenys who cannot get an adequate education because she is excluded from the standard academic curricular track at her high school. On the face of it, it seems as if Karlenys doesnt have a fair opportunity. But now imagine that the reason she isnt allowed to take the standard curriculum is because she willfully disrupts and destroys the other students learning environment and refuses to do any of the work required. Now it seems like Karlenys actually does have a fair opportunity, albeit one that she has not taken. As we progress backward through the causal sequence, the explanation gets deeper, and we get increasingly more useful information about whether Karlenys has a fair educational opportunity. The value of explanatory depth for social and educational policymaking is limited as well as motivated by normative constraints, however. We ought to be looking for the deepest normatively relevant cause of the achievement gap, not simply the deepest possible causal explanation. 1.2 Two empirical studies of oppositional culture Conservatives often cite the ethnographic work of Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu as grounds for laissez-faire educational policy proposals. Fordham and Ogbu observed African American high school students in several schools in Washington, D.C, and argued that the fear of acting White or being perceived as doing so was a major determinant of those students levels of achievement (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986). When conservatives cite them, they often write as if this is as deep as Fordham and Ogbus explanatory framework goes. But according to Ogbu, Black students in large part define academic achievement as inappropriate for them (acting White) because they accurately perceive systematic racial discrimination on the labor market and in the structure of social mobility and educational opportunity. This cultural inversion, as Ogbu calls it, results in disproportionate levels of truancy, delinquency, dropping out, dismissive attitudes, and lack of effort among Black students (Ogbu, 1978). Ogbu originally called his framework the cultural-ecological theory. But conservatives often misappropriate the theory by leaving the ecological component out. In Ogbus cultural-ecological framework, the cultural component alone has explanatory breadth, but not much explanatory depth. The explanation gets its depth, on his account, by taking ecological factors, such as labor market discrimination, into consideration. Some conservatives also cite a more recent study conducted by Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli as evidence for the oppositional culture hypothesis. Fryer and Torelli use data that measure within-school friendship networks in order to provide an objective metric of popularity. Students in the study listed other students of the same race whom they considered friends, and the results were compiled so that for each student the index measures the number of same-race friends within her school, weighted by the social status of each friend (Fryer and Torelli, 2010: 381). Fryer and Torelli examine whether high-achieving students, indexed by racial group, have fewer and less popular friends than their lower achieving peers. They find that, in some contexts, higherachieving Black students tend to have fewer (and less popular) same-race friends than lower-achieving peers. White students, on the other hand, are on average more popular the better they do in school.

John McWhorter, a popular political commentator and author of two popular nonacademic books addressing the acting White controversy, provides a good example of how these kinds of studies are misinterpreted in public discourse: Fryers results ringingly show that among Black teens, one is less likely to be popular the better one does in school to much more of an extent than among students of other races, he says (McWhorter 2005: 275). But, in fact, Fryer and Torelli only find this effect in public schools where Black students make up less than 20 percent of the student body, and only among students with a GPA above 3.5. Most black youth do not attend predominantly White public schools, and Angel Harris estimates that, according to the Fryer and Torelli study, the acting White phenomenon only occurs among five percent of the Black student population (Harris, 2010). So Fryer and Torellis study does not have the kind of explanatory breadth that McWhorter attributes to it. Harriss estimate is actually generous toward McWhorters interpretation, because it assumes that the drop in popularity experienced by high achieving Black students in these school contexts has something to do with their peers excluding them. That is not necessarily so, however. As Karolyn Tyson points out, High-achieving black students popularity is not simply a consequence of their grades and achievements. Fryer and Torellis findings, due to the disparate impact of curricular tracking in racially integrated school settings, more likely reflect these students extended isolation from fellow blacks due to their enrollment in predominantly white advanced classes and their inability to penetrate white friendship networks beyond a superficial level (Tyson, 2011: 77). 1.3 The oppositional culture justification Unlike Fryer and Torelli, McWhorter argues that oppositional culture disproportionately exists among African-American students in all or nearly all structural and school contexts. On his account, the problem is culture-wide rather than class-related, and its impact is pivotal, rather than marginal, or a mere epiphenomenon of other causes routinely appealed to in addresses of the issue (McWhorter, 2000: 136). This view is often thought to yield backward-looking information about whether unequal educational outcomes in the present are the product of injustice or unfair opportunity though McWhorters own normative position is not completely worked out in this respect. The way the oppositional culture hypothesis has been taken up in the public discourse for the most part fits in with the normative appropriation of the culture of poverty trope since the Coleman Report and the ethnographies of Oscar Lewis in the 1950s: it takes on a distinctly blaming or responsibility-attributing element (Lewis, 1959; Coleman, 1966; Mead, 1985). As James Kluegel noted in 1982, The white public shows near unanimous agreement that blacks should have equal opportunity. In the more recent period, however, it has become clear that such attitudes are necessary but not sufficient to motivate action towards ensuring equality. One must also believe that opportunity for blacks is structurally limited that there is in fact inequality of opportunity. (Kluegel, 1982: 518) Kluegels conceptual framing of the problem is an example of the kind of thinking I aim to de-bunk in this paper. The idea is that if a groups culture rather than unfair discrimination, or the social structure explains their relative disadvantage, then

members of the group have fair opportunities to remedy their own disadvantage, opportunities which they simply are not taking. This idea has received ample support from liberal political philosophers in recent years. Brian Barry, for example, argues that an individuals cultural identity can only affect whether she takes the opportunities presented to her, not whether she actually has an opportunity, or how good that opportunity is (Barry, 2001). He even goes as far as to invoke the meaning of the word, opportunity, which, according to him, originally related to Portunus, who was the god who looks after harbours. Barry tells us,

When the wind and the tide were propitious, sailors had the opportunity to leave or enter the harbour. They did not have to do so if they did not want to, of course, but that did not mean that the opportunity then somehow disappeared. The existence of the opportunity was an objective state of affairs. That is not to say that opportunity could not be individualized: whether a certain conjunction of wind and tide created an opportunity for a particular ship might depend on its build and rigging. But it did not depend on the cultural disposition of the crew to take advantage of it. They might, perhaps, have chosen not to sail because setting out on a voyage was contraindicated by a religious omen, but that simply meant that they had passed up the opportunity. (Barry, 2001: 37) On Barrys account, opportunities are equal when choice sets are equal. Choice sets are defined by all of the factors that influence the likelihood of one choice or another, except an individuals preferences and beliefs. Disabilities (by definition) seem to limit opportunities, but Barry thinks we ought not to conceive of cultural identities as disabilities. Opportunities can only be constrained by physical or financial barriers, he holds. Beliefs and preferences, according to him, bring about a certain pattern of choices from among the set of opportunities that are available to all who are similarly placed physically or financially (Barry, 2001: 36-7). Barry thinks that people own their beliefs and preferences, but not necessarily because they choose them. Rather, people are responsible for the preferences they have if and because they identify with them. While a physical or financial disability is presumably unwelcome, Barry tells us, people identify with their cultural preferences, so those preferences seem to be welcomed. Cultural preferences are not like cravings or addictions desires a person wishes she did not have and this means that their holders are responsible for having them and for whatever choices they make because of them.v Barry thus endorses the same kind of normative framework that is often used in conservative and neo-liberal arguments for laissez-faire social and educational policies in conjunction with various cultural explanations for social inequalities, such as the oppositional culture hypothesis. According to proponents of the hypothesis, Black students identify with their antiintellectual preferences. Black students do not value education, so they choose options from their set of opportunities that involve less of it. On Barrys conception of opportunity, Black students thus have fair educational opportunities but are not taking them. This can be formulated as a problem, surely, since education is a valuable good that Black students are missing out on. But it is not a problem, on this view, that the

broader society has an obligation to rectify by the lights of fair educational opportunity. Part 2: Justice and the Acting White Phenomenon 2.1 Two elements of oppositional culture: Norm and identity There are two elements of the oppositional culture hypothesis that are often conflated. Oppositional culture describes, on the one hand, a harmful social norm manifested in a pattern of teasing and social exclusion: the acting White phenomenon. But the oppositional culture framework is also used to describe a shared set of preferences, beliefs, or normative commitments I call this second element of the hypothesis oppositional identity. The extent to which norms are necessarily tied to normative commitments is a matter of debate in social theory. Rational choice theories of social norms hold that people conform to those norms because of the sanctions that attach to deviant behavior; conformity is the product of the strategic interactions of instrumentally rational, selfinterested individuals (Anderson, 2000: 171). Normative theories, on the other hand, hold that social norms cannot persist without at least some conformers believing in the substantive content of those norms.vi According to these accounts of norms, for the acting White phenomenon to persist, some Black students must have oppositional identities; this is where the motivational and justificatory force of the norm comes from. In a homogeneous or segregated society, however, not every participant in a cultural norm needs to have a substantive attachment to the norms content. The risk of social group ostracism, especially where there are no alternative peer groups to join, is enough to motivate compliance. Thus, the existence and impact of the acting white phenomenon does not require that all or even most Black students have oppositional identities. As such, I give the two elements of the oppositional culture hypothesis separate treatment in mapping their normative implications, as each raises distinct theoretical problems despite the fact that they are often confused or conflated with one another. In this part of the paper, I focus on what I call Acting White theory. Acting White theory holds that the acting White phenomenon, as described above, explains a significant part of Black students underachievement independent of those students normative ideals and commitments. In the third part of the paper, I focus on what I call Oppositional Identity theory. Oppositional Identity theory attempts to explain Black underachievement with reference to how much (or, more accurately, how little) Black students value education. By treating these two elements of the oppositional culture hypothesis as if they were distinct theoretical positions, I hope to be agnostic with respect to the grand social theoretic question outlined above, while providing a normative map of the oppositional culture hypothesis that is consistent with both rational choice and normative theories of norm-compliance. 2.2 A formal model of the acting White phenomenon Acting White theory says that Black students choose not to try hard in school because they are afraid of being stigmatized or excluded by their Black peers. On this view, Black underachievement can be interpreted as a kind of coordination problem: if

the overwhelming majority of Black students chose to strive in school, then none of them would have to worry about being stigmatized, for there wouldnt be enough lollygaggers (students who refuse to try hard) to enforce a norm of lollygagging. This type of coordination problem can be modeled formally in game-theoretic terms, as I shall do here:

C1: Lollygag R1: Lollygag R2: Strive 1, 1

C2: Strive 1, 0

0, 1

2, 2

Black students in this simplified model have two choices: strive or lollygag. The payoffs to each choice depend on the choices that other students are making. So each student ought to decide between the two choices in part based on what she expects the others to do. In the model, R represents the row-choosers, while C represents the columnchoosers, two hypothetical sets of Black students, who, combined, make up the majority of the Black student population. R1, R2, C1 and C2 represent the decisions available to R and C, while the numbers in the center of the matrix represent the ordinal payoff functions of each combination of choices for R and C, respectively. Some combinations of the choices of R and C are Nash equilibria: given Rs choice, C has made the best decision, and, given Cs choice, R has also made the best decision. In the model there are two Nash equilibria, one of which is superior. R1C1 represents the state of affairs where both R and C choose to lollygag. It is irrational for any one of them to unilaterally deviate from this strategy (as in R1C2 and R2C1), as she will undoubtedly be stigmatized and excluded. R2C2, the dominant equilibrium, represents the state of affairs where both R and C strive for high achievement, and where the acting White phenomenon is thus rendered inert. The equilibria are ranked, one superior to the other, because the acting White phenomenon is seen as a harmful social norm. People think that the acting White phenomenon interferes with part of what makes up a good life, either because education is intrinsically good, or because it is instrumentally related to many other goods or options one might take in a life-course. The achievement gap is not thought of in the public culture as simply a harmless result of different racial and ethnic groups choosing divergent and equally valid conceptions of the good life that involve relatively more or less academic achievement. The achievement gap is a problem even if it isnt clear who is on the hook for rectifying it. According to Acting White theory, R1C1 represents the present-day state of affairs. It is easy to see why Black students, on this view, might be trapped in the inferior equilibrium: one student by herself cannot change the oppositional norm, and the

rational choice for each individual is to abide by it. For if C lollygags, then R would be better off lollygagging as well (given the predictable social costs of striving), and vice versa. Collective coordination is required for Black students to move to the superior equilibrium. In his 2004 address to the Democratic National Convention, President Obama (then a Senator from Illinois) said we must [e]radicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. This plea is indeterminate about who we are: the society at large, or the just the Black community in particular, and about what specific efforts we might make to do so. This makes Obamas statement easy for almost anyone to agree with. But how do we counteract the acting white phenomenon, assuming it is as prevalent as some people would like us to think? And whose responsibility is it to take action on this front? 2.3 Conventional solutions to coordination games Some conservatives might think that the society at large discharges some or all of its moral obligations with respect to the achievement gap simply by exhorting Black students to reject the idea that reading a book, or otherwise behaving in an academically oriented way, is acting White, as President Obama has done in the past. If Black students cannot collectively reject that idea, then they have effectively chosen to live with the consequence the achievement gap, and all of the further inequalities it generates. But, leaving aside issues of opportunity and justice for a moment, we should note that motivating collective action requires more than empty exhortations. So even if such exhortations actually do discharge the broader societys moral obligations with respect to the achievement gap, we cant actually expect them to have any real effect on it. In this section, I follow Schelling, Lewis, and Mackie in suggesting one practical kind of solution to coordination problems, which has been adopted in other contexts by the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF): the convention (Schelling, 1960; Lewis, 1969; Mackie, 1996). Convention here denotes a collective mode of behavior that people (a) generally conform to, and (b) generally expect others to conform to, as well as (c) generally prefer to conform to, so long as others do as well (Lewis, 1969: 58). In a seminal paper on footbinding and infibulation (female genital mutilation), Gerry Mackie shows how conventions can be and have been used to provide collective action-based solutions to the kind of harmful social norms that can be modeled as coordination problems, like the acting White phenomenon (Mackie, 1996). Footbinding, one example of such a harmful social norm, existed for over 1,000 years in China but abruptly stopped within one generation when a conventional solution was presented. Mackie argues that footbinding is structurally similar to infibulation, and thus that infibulation could also be stopped within a generation by establishing anti-infibulation conventions. Mackie identifies three features of the work of antifootbinding reformers that allowed them to almost completely eradicate the millennium-old practice within a single generation, and to move from the inferior equilibrium to the superior one: First, they carried out a modern education campaign, which explained that the rest of the world did not bind women's feet that China was losing face in the world and was subject to international ridicule. Second, their education campaign explained the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound feet. Third, they formed natural-foot societies, whose members pledged not to bind their daughters' feet, nor to let their sons

marry women with bound feet (Mackie, 2000: 1011). Elaine Witty and Rod Paige (the U.S Secretary of Education during the George W. Bush administration), who believe the acting White phenomenon to be an important cause of the achievement gap, suggest a conventional solution to the phenomenon inspired by the story of Judy Mathews, a single, upper-middle class, African-American mother whose daughter was struggling with her peers oppositional norms: Judy and her daughter were active in their local Jack and Jill club. There were a considerable number of students in her high school who, along with their parents, were active Jack and Jillers. Jack and Jill clubs of America is an organization that was founded in Philadelphia in 1938 by a group of prominent black families. The organization conducts monthly meetings with their children to expose them to various educational, social, and civic activities. Many of these kids are in majority white environments throughout the week and these monthly meetings provide opportunities for them to interact with other black children from similar social and economic backgrounds. When the high school kids accused Judys daughter and other Jack and Jillers of acting white, they would simply say no, were acting like Jack and Jillers, or Jack and Jillers dont do this, or dont do that. The Jack and Jill support system worked so well that some African American parents who were not members of the organization began to inquire about membership. Moreover, the Jack and Jill support system had an impact on non-Jack and Jill students also, as some of them began to fell embarrassed about their poor behavior (Paige and Witty, 2010: 70). The Jack and Jill club in Paige and Wittys example represents one kind of conventional solution to being stuck in the inferior equilibrium of a harmful social norm. But this can hardly be the solution to the problem. Jack and Jill clubs are extremely exclusive (Baynes, 1998). It takes social, cultural, and financial capital to join, and as such, membership is not a viable route for many or most Black families. In the past, some Jack and Jill clubs are even claimed to have used the paper bag test membership was denied to anyone whose skin tone was darker than a paper lunch bag though these claims are disputed (Kerr, 2006). If there is to be a plausible conventional solution to the acting White phenomenon, it must share the crucial features that allowed antifootbinding reform efforts to succeed. Such a solution must involve an education campaign illustrating the harmfulness of the norm and broadly accessible Black social organizations with enough cultural clout to create and enforce their own pro-intellectual norms. 2.4 Acting White and educational opportunity Moving back into the realm of moral and political theory, an important normative question lurks: where should the resources and energy necessary for forming a conventional association aimed at counteracting the acting White phenomenon come from? Conventional solutions, by their very nature, must be administered by the in group which, in this case, is Black students. But does the obligation to bring these solutions about lie with the in-group only, or with the broader society as well? The answer to this question, I think, depends on how we see the relationship

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between the acting White phenomenon and Black students educational opportunities. Allowing unequal educational outcomes that are the product of fair educational opportunity is permissible. Burdening the society at large with a redistribution of educational resources to a group who simply are not taking the fair educational opportunities they already have is impermissible. There is some dispute about how we should measure the fairness of an educational opportunity. Should students have equal or adequate opportunities? Equal opportunity is a purely comparative measure: two or more students may have equal opportunities, but it is incoherent to say one student has an equal opportunity if we cannot compare her opportunity to somebody elses. Adequate opportunity, on the other hand, is sometimes conceived of as an absolute measure, and sometimes conceptualized as having comparative elements (Satz, 2007). I cannot articulate a view about which standard of fair educational opportunity we ought to use here, so I want to develop a simple conceptual tool that can bridge the gap between the two views. The notion of the quality of an educational opportunity should help us in this respect: fair educational opportunity obtains, on my account, when the quality of the opportunity meets the normatively relevant threshold, whether that threshold is comparative, absolute, or a mixture of the two. An intuitive test for whether an individual has a fair opportunity to reach a given educational goal should measure the following two factors:

1. 2.

The costs she would incur in overcoming the set of obstacles she faces in achieving the goal. The extent to which she can be held responsible for those costs.

Insofar as the acting White phenomenon explains the achievement gap, Black students incur much greater costs in reaching high levels of achievement than White students do. Their educational outcomes are absolutely not just comparatively low, which suggests that they lack fair educational opportunities on either a sufficientarian or an egalitarian standard, unless they can be held responsible for those costs (Harris, 2010).vii The following example is meant to show that they cannot appropriately be held responsible. Take two hypothetically similar students, Greg and Jamal. Greg and Jamal have roughly the same levels of innate talent, the same kinds of educational aspirations, and each has a solid work ethic. They get equal amounts of intrinsic enjoyment (or displeasure, as the case may be) from doing homework. Greg is White, and Jamal is Black. Because Jamal knows he will be stigmatized for studying hard, he studies less than Greg, opting to spend several hours each day watching rap videos with friends while Greg is reading. Not surprisingly, his educational outcomes arent nearly as good as Gregs. But this is not because he is motivationally deficient compared to Greg. If Greg were Black and Jamal were White, then their outcomes would be reversed, since they are similar in all the relevant respects (in terms of talent, aspirations, work ethic, and the activities they enjoy). Reacting to the acting White phenomenon in the way a student like Jamal does cannot be interpreted as a manifestation of different attitudes, utility parameters, or character traits from a student like Greg, who does much better in school. It follows that Jamal is not, at least on the face of it, responsible for his relatively lower achievement,
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for the appropriateness of our reactive attitudes to an action depends on the virtues and vices the quality of will those actions manifest (variations of this view on responsibility are found in Hume, 1902; Strawson, 1982; Wallace, 1994, and Scanlon, 2008). Jamal and Greg have the same kinds and quantities of the relevant virtues and vices the same quality of will, as it were. Jamals educational opportunity is inferior, however, and this is what explains his underachievement relative to Greg. The acting White phenomenon assuming it is as efficacious as some would hold makes it very difficult for Black students to reach high levels of achievement, compared to White and Asian students. According to the oppositional culture hypothesis, academic achievement, for Black students, can only be pursued concurrent with a high social cost: lost of friendship, popularity, and peer-group inclusion things that weigh heavily in almost any child or adolescents evaluation of her decisions. Black students cannot be held responsible for the acting White phenomenon if they do not believe in the norms substantive content. Thus, assuming that the acting White phenomenon is widespread and efficacious, the broader society still has at least a pro tanto obligation to improve the educational opportunities of Black students who adhere to, but do not believe in, the norm.viii But what about those Black students who do believe in the substantive content of oppositional cultural norms? In the remainder of the paper, I will argue that the society at large has an obligation to improve the educational opportunities of these students as well. Part 3: Oppositional Identity 3.1 Value and belief Some philosophers of social science, including Elizabeth Anderson, have argued that the only way social norms can endure over time is if at least some of the participants in those norms have a substantive attachment to the norms contents (Anderson, 2000; Gintis, 2000). Where the acting White phenomenon is the norm in question, an oppositional identity constitutes such an attachment. There is some disagreement about how prominent a role oppositional identity should play in the oppositional culture hypothesis. McWhorter captures this disagreement when he contrasts his view with Fryers: where according to McWhorter, Fryer ...sees the acting White psychology as the result of a subconscious cost-benefit analysis rather than oppositional identity, McWhorter himself thinks oppositional identity is the direct reason for the cost-benefit analysis in question (McWhorter, 2005: 275). I assume here that not all Black students can simply be trapped in the harmful social norm. On this view, the reason that at least some Black students do not do as well as their White and Asian peers in school is that they do not value education as much. We can make a rough and somewhat problematic but useful distinction between two ways in which Black students might de-value education, or be anti-intellectual, in McWhorters words. On the one hand, Black students might believe that, for some reason, they should not or cannot do well in school. On the other hand Black students might have, relative to their White and Asian peers, less favorable affect toward school and the kinds of activities conducive to school success, or perhaps more favorable affective associations with non-academic activities. Here I will argue that we must interpret the oppositional culture hypothesis as a theory about belief, rather than affect, if it is to provide any prima facie support for the laissez-faire normative implications that

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conservatives and neo-liberals want to derive from it. Negative affective associations with academic activities can certainly induce anti-intellectual preferences. For example, when a student is less than enthralled by studying English literature, disgusted by contemplating earth science, ashamed of being the last in her class to finish a math worksheet, or intimidated by the voice of her teacher, this will affect how much time, effort, and energy she puts into academic pursuits. But even if Black students have anti-intellectual preferences that stem from their dislike of school, they still presumably have other preferences (for example, the preference for a high income) that would be more fully satisfied if their levels of academic achievement were closer to those of Whites. Preferences, as Donald Bruckner tells us, can hold instrumental value in the sense that holding and acting on certain preferences can be advantageous or disadvantageous to other, more important preferences (Bruckner, 2007: 196). A dislike of academics is disadvantageous in even more general terms than those Bruckner describes, because a student who hates school is likely to make choices that leave them worse-off with respect to resources, capabilities, functionings, future opportunities and welfare (however welfare is conceived).ix Not all disadvantages are problematic from the perspective of justice, however. If Black students have good opportunities to cultivate scholarly identities and to develop a love of academics, but they are ignoring those opportunities, then the resultant disadvantage might not be morally worrisome. But children develop affective associations with school long before they can make meaningful and informed choices about what kinds of attitudes and passions they are going to cultivate; some children might even be born with an innate love for academics. A more plausible reason why the disadvantageous nature of anti-intellectual affect might be unproblematic from the perspective of justice is that affective attitudes often form a part of their holders identity. It is, after all, oppositional identity we are talking about here. According to Barry, whose views on identity and responsibility I discussed in section 1.3, when a person identifies with her preferences, she is responsible for the outcomes of the choices she makes as a result of those preferences. If Black students dont like school, and they identify with that dislike, then, by Barrys lights, the consequences of the choices they make in that regard are theirs alone to bear. But what does it mean to identify with a preference? Most contemporary philosophical analyses of identification follow Harry Frankfurt in appealing to the hierarchical mesh of a persons desires (Frankfurt, 1971; Frankfurt 1987; Bratman, 2003). On these hierarchical models of identification, to identify with a desire or preference ordering is to desire that one has that desire or preference though there are different ways of spelling this out. When a person identifies with one of her preferences, she normally also believes that the object of the relevant desire is valuable. Gary Watson even aptly characterizes departures from this pattern as manifesting perversity. How could any well-functioning person want to dislike school, for example, yet at the same time believe that academic achievement is extremely valuable for them? Watson provides a strong argument for the

13

idea that the fundamental basis for identification is belief, not the hierarchical mesh of desire (Watson, 1975). But saying that Black students dislike academics, and that they identify with that dislike, seems to reduce to saying that they dont believe achievement is valuable, regardless of ones position on the Watson-Frankfurt debate. People almost always believe that the objects of the desires they identify with are valuable, and perhaps identifying with a desire simply is to believe that the object of that desire is valuable. In any case, empirical research on the oppositional culture hypothesis cannot be expected to focus directly on Black students motivational hierarchy. How could social scientists be expected to gather data about such a thing except by inquiring into Black students beliefs? Philosophers working in the Frankfurtian tradition would have a tough time convincing sociologists to write survey questions about higher-order desires, rather than beliefs. Imagine distributing a survey to Black students asking a question like, do you wholeheartedly want to not want to do well in school? The respondents would have a hard time understanding those questions well enough to give accurate or meaningful responses, if they even took the questions seriously at all. Oppositional identity, thus, needs to be analyzed in terms of beliefs about what is and isnt valuable, if it is to provide any empirically substantiated normative support for the oppositional culture justification. 3.2 Two reasons to push for explanatory depth If the Oppositional Culture hypothesis stops here, and is combined with the popular normative outlook described in section 1.3, it appears to provide a defensible moral basis for status-quo educational policy. But we have reasons to push for a deeper explanation for the achievement gap than the simple idea that Black students dont value education. Why dont they value education, we might want to ask. Here I want to articulate two reasons we have to push for an answer to this question. First, we have one relatively uncontroversial ethical reason to push in this direction, I think: we should not base policy proposals on relatively shallow empirical explanations if available information about the deeper root causes of the first-order explanans (in this case, Black students oppositional identities) would completely alter the normative significance of the explanation. If a social scientific hypothesis is to constitute a compelling basis for making normative claims such as prescribing this or that educational policy arrangement, it ought to be consistent with deeper causal explanations that do not undermine those normative claims. So we have a reason to see if that is so in the case at hand. Second, there is a more controversial methodological reason to push Oppositional Culture theorists for an answer to why Black students supposedly de-value education: namely, because social scientific explanations that can provide plausible accounts of the deeper root causes of the first-order explanans (which in this case is Black students oppositional identities) are both likelier and lovelier than those that cannot: they are more likely to be true, and have the potential to provide a greater degree of understanding (Lipton, 1991). Sometimes we dont need to look into the deeper explanation, but if the only deeper explanation available is just because, then the first-order explanation becomes less credible. Scientific anti-realists will no doubt want to resist this second methodological

14

point, but I see no principled way to resist the first, relatively uncontroversial, normative point.x What counts as a deep enough explanation is relative to the scientific enterprise, and insofar as social stratification research is and ought to be motivated by normative concerns about justice, we have compelling reason to push for the deepest normatively relevant cause.xi The oppositional culture hypothesis should thus be able to explain why Black students do not value education. Distinct variations of the oppositional culture hypothesis abound, but not all of them both (a) appeal to Black students beliefs about the value of achievement and (b) also provide a theory about where those beliefs come from. I have argued here and in the previous section that, in order to support the laissez-faire normative implications that some conservatives and neo-liberals would like to derive from it, the Oppositional Culture hypothesis should do both of those things. In the remainder of the paper I will examine the two most popular and distinct accounts that do so, and I will show that on these accounts the process by which Black students form their beliefs about the value of academic achievement undermines any hope of deriving the normative implications needed for the oppositional culture justification. 3.3 Sour grapes and cultural inversions According to John Ogbus cultural-ecological theory, Black students form their beliefs about the value of education in part as an adaptation to their accurate perceptions of the existing opportunity structure. The job ceiling, for example, tends to give rise to disillusionment about the real value of schooling, especially among older children, and thereby discourages them from working hard in school, he and Fordham tell us (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986). According to Ogbu, The disproportionately high rate of low school performance is a kind of adaptation to their limited social and economic opportunities in adult life. That is, the low school performance is an adaptive response to the requirements of cultural imperatives within their ecological structure (Ogbu, 2008: 595). Ogbu calls this a cultural inversion (Ogbu, 1978).xii I interpret the cultural inversion as a kind of sour grapes problem (Elster, 1983). According to Ogbu, Black students beliefs about the opportunity structure drive their oppositional identities in an indirect manner: first just as the fox sees a bunch of grapes that are out of his reach Black students perceive that because of job market discrimination and inferior educational resources, they do not stand to gain as much from their efforts in school as they would if they were White, and that they have less to lose out on by doing poorly in academics. Second just as the fox subsequently begins to believe that the out of reach grapes are sour Black students subsequently adjust their beliefs about the value of educational achievement to their beliefs about the opportunity structure in effect deciding that they never wanted to be high achievers in the first place, because high achievement is pointless. Fordham and Ogbu tell us, Under these circumstances, attitudes and behaviors of black students, though different from those of white students, are not deviant or pathological but should be considered as a mode of adaptation necessitated by the ecological structure or effective environment of the black community (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986: 179). On this view, Black students underachievement is not a consequence of their oppositional identities in any meaningful sense, for those identities are epiphenomenal to the original opportunity set. Ogbus account holds that Black students would not have oppositional identities if the opportunity structure were fair in the first place so those

15

identities are not counterfactually robust enough to support the oppositional culture justification. The deepest normatively relevant cause of the achievement gap, according to the cultural-ecological model, is the unfairly biased opportunity structure. Even if we think that people ought to be held responsible for the choices they make in light of their cultural identities, the fact that Black students develop an oppositional identity as an adaptive response to an unfair opportunity set cannot render the opportunity set fair.

3.4 Therapeutic alienation

Some conservatives reject or, more commonly, ignore the ecological component of Ogbus picture of oppositional identity. For these conservatives, the idea that the initial opportunity set is unfair on account of, say, disparities in school funding, or racial discrimination in the labor market, is empirically unfounded. Black students may undergo a cultural inversion in light of their beliefs that the opportunity structure is unfair, but those beliefs must be false, they would hold. If the opportunity structure is more favorable to Black students than they believe, their cultural inversion in light of those false beliefs is likely disadvantageous.

On one interpretation of this view, Black students have fair educational opportunities, but they are not aware of them. This interpretation appears incoherent if one holds that a person must be aware of an opportunity to have that opportunity. I will take a slightly weaker position than that here: Black students cannot possibly be said to have fair educational opportunities if they are non-culpably ignorant of the existence of those opportunities. Epistemic access to an opportunity is a precondition of the existence of that opportunity, in other words, even if knowledge or awareness of the opportunity is not.

The broader society cannot hold Black students responsible for underachieving if they do not have access to good information about the payoffs to educational achievement. And how could an entire stratum of students be culpably ignorant of the payoffs to achievement? To support that idea, one would need to provide a macro-level explanation for why Black students culpably form the false beliefs in question, while avoiding a circular appeal to Black students oppositional identities. McWhorter presents a theory that comes close to achieving this normative status, even if it is empirically lacking. He tells us,

Freed from overt segregation and discrimination after the sixties, black Americans were faced for the first time in their history with true choices, with opportunities to succeed or, crucially, perhaps, to fail But as Hoffer noted, being an individual can be challenging. The challenge was especially intimidating for a people who had so little opportunity to prepare themselves for the task.

16

Naturally, then, for many the response was a new hypersensitivity to the obstacles, a new fetishization of The Man, not right in front of you but there, all around you, like oxygen or God, holding you back, cutting you down (McWhorter, 2005: 165-6).

McWhorter calls this process therapeutic alienation, and says that it is an example of a meme, passed on through accidental or nonconscious cultural transmission. Memes, as analyzed by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and others, he tells us, are thought patterns that become entrenched in society via self-replication from mind to mind, along the lines of genes in organisms (McWhorter, 2005: 172). Crucially, on McWhorters account, the idea that black America is bedeviled by the operations of The Man is not based on evidence, but is instead motivated by its therapeutic value. To someone under the effects of the meme, he says, the conflict with reality is a background cognitive dissonance, well worth the sense of place and legitimacy that the meme lends (McWhorter, 2005: 179).

McWhorter holds that Black students falsely believe the opportunity structure to be unjust, or more unjust than it really is, and they do so because those beliefs are therapeutic, rather than because they are warranted by the available evidence.xiii He need not be a full-fledged voluntarist about belief to espouse this account, for he does not hold that Black students simply decide to believe whatever they want about the opportunity structure. Rather, on his account, Black students are motivated to discount, ignore, or avoid exposure to contrary evidence, bringing the therapeutically alienated beliefs about by a route, in the words of Bernard Williams (Williams, 1973). McWhorter describes a therapeutically alienated black artist as someone who wants to feel indignant and that desire guides the way she forms her beliefs about the opportunity structure.

If we assume McWhorters theory of therapeutic alienation is true, does it lend some support the oppositional culture justification? If Black students adjust their preferences so that they become oppositional to school in light of their beliefs about the opportunity structure, but they choose to ignore evidence that tells against those beliefs, should they be held responsible for their underachievement? As I suggested above, I think this question turns on the issue of whether Black students have epistemic access to the evidence about the opportunity set they purportedly ignore, and whether they are culpably ignorant. There is certainly a kind of willfulness in Blacks ignorance about the opportunity set, according to McWhorters model of therapeutic alienation. But I shall argue that willful ignorance does not entail culpable ignorance, and that McWhorters therapeutic alienation model actually serves to bear this out.

For McWhorter, The therapeutic alienation meme thrives not out of external reality but because of internal reality. It gives vent to the insecurity that bedevils all of us especially attractive to members of a race left terminally self-doubting because of centuries of contempt and dismissal, and especially available in a post-sixties

17

mainstream culture intent on censuring itself for possible racism (McWhorter, 2005: 175). Therapeutic alienation, thus, is a response to psychological distress and selfdoubt. But where does that distress come from? Why would so many people want to feel indignant? McWhorter gives us a clue in his ad hominem attack on the prominent Black sociologist of education, Beverly Tatum: What really drives her is personal, he tells us. When one feels inferior to whites deep down, one is uncomfortable presenting oneself as a self-directed individual (McWhorter, 2005: 185). Therapeutic alienation persists, McWhorter tells us, because black self-hatred persists (McWhorter, 2005: 194).

Now, whether or not it accurately describes a social phenomenon in Black America, McWhorters theory of therapeutic alienation certainly depicts a kind of beliefformation process we can recognize in other contexts. We form our beliefs in part, but not solely, based on evidence. Being in denial is natural and expected in some kinds of cases. The wife of a soldier whose platoon was hit by a bomb, for example, should not be expected to believe that her husband is dead, even if the only information she has is that the bomb killed 23 of the 24 soldiers in the platoon. It is unreasonable to expect her to take that information as evidence that there is only a 1 in 24 chance that her husband is alive, or to blame her for maintaining the belief that her husband is alive even in light of those odds. The psychological cost of holding the former belief would be too high to her; it would seem strange for her to coldly calculate the odds as if she were some disinterested party. She may willfully ignore or discount those odds, but this does not at all entail that she is culpable for doing so.

Having a fair educational opportunity entails having epistemic access to the costs and benefits associated with taking that opportunity. But, as the above example shows, epistemic access to a particular piece of evidence or information involves more than just the bare physical availability of that piece of evidence. Epistemic access is a kind of opportunity in and of itself, and we should treat it as such: the notion should take into account the costs and benefits of paying attention to or examining different sources of evidence as well as the extent to which the agent in question can be held responsible for those costs and benefits (as noted in section 2.4).

McWhorter holds that therapeutic alienation is a pervasive phenomenon in the Black community. But why should so many people need to hold therapeutic beliefs, especially beliefs motivated by self-hatred? For McWhorter, these beliefs are attractive to Blacks as a race left terminally self-doubting because of centuries of contempt and dismissal. He tells us that Black people have inherited Anti-intellectualism from centuries of disenfranchisement, followed by their abrupt inclusion in American life before they had time to shed their oppressors debased view of them (McWhorter, 2000: 151).

It is important to note that, on McWhorters account, Black people have internalized their (White) oppressors beliefs about them. The internalization of the black image in the white mind is one of the most intensively theorized topics in the history of

18

Black social and political thought. W.E.B Du Bois famously dubbed it double consciousness. In McWhorters framework, double consciousness seems to block Black students epistemic access to information about the payoffs to education and the opportunity structure not in the sense that such evidence is rendered physically unavailable, but rather in the sense that it is rendered emotionally unavailable. And insofar as Black students lack epistemic access to their educational opportunities, they lack those opportunities altogether.

3.5 Double consciousness and the achievement gap We should see double consciousness as an educational deficit. Educational deficit here is meant to connote a lack of educational achievement, rather than a deficit in educational resources. In the last couple of decades, the scope of what counts as educational achievement has been increasingly quantified in narrowly testable terms. As such, the racial achievement gap is usually discussed as a gap in standardized test scores. Moral development, understanding of civics, and personal growth have seemingly been lost in the frenzy of high-stakes testing, as they are not quantifiable in this way. But these are some of the most important aims of education. Double consciousness should be thought of as an educational deficit in several of these respects. Self-doubt and self-hatred indicate a lack of moral development, they impede personal relationships, and they impinge on civic capacities. Insofar as those feelings of double-consciousness are grounded in racist pseudo-science, and in incomplete or propaganda-driven accounts of racial history, they are also indicative of deficits in critical, logical and philosophical thinking as well as what is now the more standard definition of an educational deficit: a lack of scientific and historical knowledge. We cannot justify inequalities along one educational metric, such as the inequalities between Black and White students in mathematical proficiency, by appealing to inequalities along some other important educational metric including measures of moral and civic achievement especially where the relevant parties cannot be appropriately held responsible for their position with respect to the latter metric. It would do little good to argue, for example, that the Black-White achievement gap in science is unproblematic from a justice perspective because it is caused by Black students underperformance in mathematics. And it would border on logical inconsistency to make such an argument if we knew that Black students only underperform in mathematics because they have inferior educational opportunities in the first place. Thus, if Black students by and large are indeed afflicted with oppositional identities though the evidence for this is not convincing we cannot see that as an excuse to let the achievement gap be. Conclusion In this paper, I hope to have shown the most prominent explanation for the racial gap in educational achievement the Oppositional Culture hypothesis not to have the normative implications it is commonly thought to have. The oppositional culture hypothesis cannot support laissez faire or status quo educational policy prescriptions.

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In the first part of the paper, I developed some rough conceptual tools for analyzing the ways in which conservative political commentators often misappropriate empirical studies of the oppositional culture hypothesis, and I presented the kind of normative thinking that goes along with that misappropriation of social scientific research, which is reflected in White public opinion and systematically expressed in Brian Barrys liberal political philosophy. I called the conjunction of this sort of normative framework with the conservative misappropriation of the empirical literature the oppositional culture justification. I separated two conceptually distinct components of the oppositional culture hypothesis: the acting White phenomenon and oppositional identity. In the second part of the paper, I assumed for arguments sake that the acting White phenomenon explains the achievement gap. I modeled the phenomenon in game-theoretic terms as a coordination problem and suggested one kind of solution to that kind of problem. I argued that if the acting White phenomenon explains the achievement gap, Black students do not have fair educational opportunities, and thus that the burden of bringing this solution about should fall on the society as a whole. In the third part of the paper, I took as my starting point the assumption that Black students oppositional identity explains their underachievement. I argued that this assumption provides no support for the oppositional culture justification unless those oppositional identities are grounded in beliefs about the value of education. I argued that the Oppositional Culture hypothesis needs to explain the origin of those beliefs, and then analyzed the two most prominent accounts of oppositional identity that do so, in order to show that neither of them can support the oppositional culture justification. I hope, thus, to have connected a large body of literature in the social sciences and a controversial debate in our public political discourse to theoretical concerns about opportunity and social justice in a way that is useful to both theory and practice by analyzing the normative implications of the Oppositional Culture hypothesis using philosophical methods. References Anderson, E. (2000) Beyond Homo Economicus: New developments in theories of social norms, Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (2): 170-200. Anderson, E. (2007) Fair opportunity in education a democratic equality perspective, Ethics 117 (4): 595-622. Barnes, E. (1995) Inference to the loveliest explanation, Synthese 103 (2): 251-277. Barry, B. (2001) Culture and Equality. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Baynes, L. (1998) Blinded by the light; but now I see, Western New England Law Review 20 (2): 491-504. Bol, L. and Barry, R. (2005) Secondary mathematics teachers perceptions of the achievement gap, High School Journal 88 (4): 32-45. Bratman, M. (2003) A desire of ones own, Journal of Philosophy 100 (5): 221-242.
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Brighouse, H. and Swift, A. (2008) Putting educational equality in its place, Education Finance and Policy 3 (4): 444-466. Brighouse, H. and Swift, A. (2009) Legitimate parental partiality, Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (1): 43-80. Bruckner, D. (2007) Rational responsibility for preferences and moral responsibility for traits, Journal of Philosophical Research 32 (1): 192-207. Coleman, J.S. (1966) Equality of Educational Opportunity. United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Downey, D. and Pribesh, S. (2004) When race matters: Teachers evaluations of students classroom behavior, Sociology of Education 77 (4): 267-282. Elster, J. (1983) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, R. (2003) Teachers perceptions and expectations and the black-white test score gap, Urban Education 38 (4): 460-507. Fordham, S, and Ogbu, J. (1986) Black students school success: Coping with the burden of acting white, The Urban Review 18 (3): 176-206. Frankfurt, H. (1971) Freedom of the will and the concept of a person, The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1): 5-20. Frankfurt, H. (1987) Identification and wholeheartedness, in Schoeman, F., ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, pp. 27-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fryer, R.G. and Torelli, P. (2010) An empirical analysis of acting white, Journal of Public Economics 94 (5-6): 380-396. Gendler, T. (2008) Alief and belief, The Journal of Philosophy 105 (10): 634-663. Gintis, H. (2000) Game Theory Evolving. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Harris, A. (2008) Optimism in the face of despair: Black-white differences in beliefs about school as a means for upward social mobility, Social Science Quarterly 89 (3): 608-630. Harris, A. (2010) Kids Dont Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hume, D. (1927) Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press Kerr, A. (2006) The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Community and Complexion in Black Washington, D.C. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.
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Kitcher, P. (1984) 1953 and all that. A tale of two sciences, Philosophical Review 93 (3): 335-373. Kluegel, J. and Smith, E.R. (1982) Whites beliefs about blacks opportunity, American Sociological Review 47 (4): 518-532. Koski, W. and Reich, R. (2006) When adequate isnt: The retreat from equity in educational law and policy and why it matters, Emory L.J. 56 (3): 545-617. Lehrer, K. (1974) Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press Lewis, D. (1969) Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewis, O. (1959) Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books. Lipton, P. (1991) Inference to the Best Explanation. New York: Routledge. Mackie, G. (1996) Ending footbinding and infibulation: a convention account, American Sociological Review 61 (6): 999-1017. Marshall, G., Swift, A., and Roberts, S. (2002) Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martinez, T.A. (1997) Popular culture as oppositional culture: Rap as resistance, Sociological Perspectives 40 (2): 265-286. McKown, C. and Weinstein, R. (2008) Teacher expectations, classroom context, and the achievement gap, Journal of Social Psychology 46 (3): 235-261. McWhorter, J. (2000) Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. New York: The Free Press. McWhorter, J. (2005) Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. New York: Gotham Books. Mead, Lawrence (1985) Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: The Free Press. Mickelson, R.A. (1990) The attitude-achievement paradox among black adolescents, Sociology of Education 63 (1): 44-61. Moses, R. (1994) Remarks on the struggle for citizenship and math/science literacy, Journal of Mathematical Behavior 13 (1): 107-111. Ogbu, J. (1978) Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press.

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Ogbu, J. (2003) Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Story of Academic Disengagement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ogbu, J. (2008) Minority Status, Oppositional Culture, and Schooling. New York: Routledge. Paige, R. and Witty, E. (2010) The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing it is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time. AMACOM Books. Satz, D. (2007) Equality, adequacy, and education for citizenship, Ethics 117 (4): 623648. Scanlon. T.M. (1986) Equality of resources and equality of welfare: A forced marriage? Ethics 97 (1): 111-118. Scanlon, T.M. (2008) Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Strawson, P.F., (1982) Freedom and resentment, in Watson, G., ed., Free Will, pp. 5980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swift, A. (2000) Class analysis from a normative perspective, The British Journal of Sociology 51 (4): 663-679. Tyson, K., Darrity, W. Jr., and Castellino, D. (2005) It's not ''a black thing'': Understanding the burden of acting white and other dilemmas of high achievement, American Sociological Review 70 (4): 582-605. Tyson, K. (2011) Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White After Brown. Oxford, U.K: Oxford University Press. Xie, Y. and Goyette, K. (2003) Social mobility and the educational choices of Asian Americans, Social Science Research 32 (3): 467-498. Wallace, R.J. (1994) Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watson, G. (1975) Free agency, Journal of Philosophy 72 (8): 205-220. Williams, B. (1973) Deciding to believe, in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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I use the ambiguous term, fair educational opportunity throughout this paper deliberately in order to avoid taking a stance in the debate about whether fair educational opportunities ought to be assessed according to an adequacy or an equality standard.
ii

I do not want to take any stance on the scope of justice: whether it is a property of institutions only, or also of individual behavior. Thus, I mean educational and social policy schemes to be ambiguous between government mandated and enforced policies, and policies carried out freely by individuals without state coercion.
iii

For example, in a 1991 International Social Justice Project survey, 87% of adults prompted agreed with the statement, Its fair if people have more money and wealth, but only if there are equal opportunities. (Marshall, Swift, and Roberts, 2002: 246.) While some of the 13% of the survey respondents who disagreed with this statement may not care at all about fair opportunity of any sort, it is at least plausible that some of them have an idea of what constitutes fair opportunity that does not involve interpersonal equality. In the context of education, adequacy standards of fair educational opportunity have quite a bit of sway. So it is plausible that a percentage of adults even greater than 87% might agree with the statement, Its fair if some people have better educational outcomes than others, but only if there are fair educational opportunities.
iv

See Adam Swifts wonderfully instructive account of the normative significance of social stratification research in light of what such research can tell us about the kinds of opportunities class positions yield for those who occupy them (Swift, 2000).
v

For defenses of this endorsement criterion for responsibility, see Frankfurt, 1971; Frankfurt, 1987; Bratman, 2003.
vi

Elizabeth Anderson argues that such beliefs are an essential part of explaining social norm compliance (Anderson, 2000). Normative theories of social norms will, in some cases, have to accommodate the possibility that the people who believe in the substantive content of a social norm may be caught in an epistemic trap, where the perceived cost of testing the belief is too high to be worth trying. (I draw the notion of belief traps from Mackie, 2000.)
vii

For example, in 2009, less than one third of Black twelfth-graders achieved basic proficiency in math, and less than 20 percent achieved basic proficiency in science, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. According to the same data set, 70 percent of White students achieved basic proficiency in math, and two-thirds achieved basic proficiency in science. Basic proficiency is a minimalistic measure of educational adequacy. Black students without basic proficiency in Algebra have only slim chances of achieving a college education or gaining lucrative employment (Moses, 1994, cited in Satz, 2007).
viii

The obligation is only pro tanto because society may have interests that conflict with providing fair educational opportunity to all students or children for example, the interest in accommodating what Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift call legitimate parental partiality. (Brighouse and Swift, 2009).
ix x

I owe this point to Kristin Voigt.

Eric Barnes (1995), for example, objects to the general strategy of tying explanatory loveliness to explanatory likeliness in the way that I, following Peter Lipton (1991), have done here. I will not attempt to defend Liptons view in this space, and the methodological comment may be taken as a throwaway for those to whom it does not come intuitively, as my argument does not depend on it.
xi

Compare Kitcher (1984) here. I am grateful to Quayshawn Spencer for helping me see what is at stake in this methodological position. The phrase in quotation marks is his (from personal correspondence).
xii

Angel Harris shows, in my view convincingly, that the beliefs about labor-market discrimination and structural injustice do not negatively affect the educational achievement of Black students (Harris, 2008). C.f. also Yu Xie and Kimberly Goyettes argument that Asian Americans often perceive relatively better payoffs to education compared to Whites, but only because they believe (correctly) that anti-Asian American discrimination in fields that require relatively less education is more pervasive than in fields that require relatively more (Xie and Goyette, 2003).
xiii

I may be interpreting McWhorter too strongly here. It isnt clear that his theory of therapeutic alienation is in fact a theory about beliefs. Therapeutically alienated Blacks on his account are certainly taking a certain sort of cognitive attitude toward the opportunity structure that he sees as unguided by empirical data or external reality, but that attitude may be more accurately described as an alief. According to Tamar Gendler, Paradigmatic alief can be characterized as a mental state with associatively-linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated consciously or unconsciously by features of the subjects internal or ambient environment. Alief is a more primitive state than either belief or imagination: it directly activates behavioral response patterns (as opposed to motivating in conjunction with desire or pretended desire) (Gendler, 2008).