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Many years back, a California professor was tasked with unraveling the mystery behind the poor academic performance of upper middle-class black students who were earning a troubling average GPA of 1.9, in contrast to the 3.45 average GPA of their white counterparts. Professor John Ogbu eagerly embraced this challenge and uncovered what he believed was the solution to the issue. Sadly, nobody wanted to har the truth he uncovered, and he swiftly found himself branded as the “Clarence Thomas” of academia and was cast aside.

Professor Ogbu discovered that the discrepancy between the two GPA’s likely boiled down to “culture.”

East Bay Express:

A group of parents hungry for solutions convinced the school district to join with them and formally invite the black anthropologist to visit Shaker Heights. Their discussions prompted Ogbu to propose a research project to figure out just what was happening. The district agreed to finance the study, and parents offered him unlimited access to their children and their homes.

The professor and his research assistant moved to Shaker Heights for nine months in mid-1997. They reviewed data and test scores. The team observed 110 different classes, from kindergarten all the way through high school. They conducted exhaustive interviews with school personnel, black parents, and students. Their project yielded an unexpected conclusion: It wasn’t socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students’ poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

Achieving success was deemed to be “too white.” In addition, lazy parenting played a big roll in the students downfall.

Ogbu concluded that the average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as “acting white.” Although he noted that other factors also play a role, and doesn’t deny that there may be antiblack sentiment in the district, he concluded that discrimination alone could not explain the gap.

“The black parents feel it is their role to move to Shaker Heights, pay the higher taxes so their kids could graduate from Shaker, and that’s where their role stops,” Ogbu says during an interview at his home in the Oakland hills. “They believe the school system should take care of the rest. They didn’t supervise their children that much. They didn’t make sure their children did their homework. That’s not how other ethnic groups think.”

School officials and parents alike didn’t want to hear the truth. Clearly, they were looking for a “racism” excuse.

It took the soft-spoken 63-year-old Nigerian immigrant several years to complete his book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, which he wrote with assistance from his research aide Astrid Davis. Before publication, he gave parents and school officials one year to respond to his research, but no parents ever did. Then Ogbu met with district officials and parents to discuss the book, which was finally published in January.

The gatherings were cordial, but it was clear that his conclusions made some people quite uncomfortable. African-American parents worried that Ogbu’s work would further reinforce the stereotype that blacks are intellectually inadequate and lazy. School district officials, meanwhile, were concerned that it would look as if they were blaming black parents and students for their own academic failures.

But then things turned downright ugly.

But in the weeks following the meetings, it became apparent that the person with the greatest cause for worry may have been Ogbu himself. Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an “academic Clarence Thomas.” The National Urban League condemned him and his work in a press release that scoffed, “The League holds that it is useless to waste time and energy with those who blame the victims of racism.” The criticism eventually made it all the way to The New York Times, where an article published prior to the publication of Ogbu’s book quoted or referred to four separate academics who quarreled with his premise. It quoted a Shaker Heights school official who took issue with the professor’s conclusions, and cited work by the Minority Student Achievement Network that suggested black students care as much about school as white and Asian students. In fact, the reporter failed to locate a single person in Shaker Heights or anywhere else with anything good to say about the book.

Professor Ogbu continues to face criticism from fellow scholars who assert that he lacks a true understanding of the dynamics within the black community and fails to recognize the numerous achievements they have made. Nevertheless, there are those who agree with Professor Ogbu’s conclusions. In fact, many experts contend that the black community has been allowed to falter due to an ingrained victimhood mentality they proudly wear like a badge of honor. This mindset acts as a shield, rendering any discussion about black responsibility or accountability as racist. Consequently, the crucial issue of “black responsibility and accountability” remains unaddressed, perpetuating a destructive cycle of failure.

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