Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High.

Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, by Signithia Fordham. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 411 pp. 22. 95, paper. Reviewed by Jean Harris, Olympic College. At a time when the standardized test scores and educational attainment levels of African American students have been shown to lag stubbornly behind those of European Americans despite a spate of remedies directed at teachers, educators, and curriculum, a study that sheds light on how African American adolescents define and evaluate the cost of academic success should be of immediate interest to educators and policymakers. Moreover, anthropological research by an African American scholar who has herself traversed the oft-mined terrain of educational institutions should be must reading for ethnographers, psychologists, and general readers who want to understand Black student achievement, underachievement, and what Cose (1993) has dubbed the rage of the Black middle class. Such are the elements of Blacked Out, a study of success in the Black community that uses a high school as its field research site. In Blacked Out, Fordham expands upon her earlier argument, first posited in the 1980s, that Black students' academic and out-of-school behaviors must be understood in light of an ethos that, on one hand, values Black identity and, on the other, defines achieving academic success as acting (Fordham, 1988; Fordham the First Emancipation (1866-1959), or the period after the Civil War when slavery was legally abolished, yet people of African descent were forbidden to and assume citizenship on a par with European Americans; the Second Emancipation, the 26-year transition period corresponding roughly to the years 1960-1986, during which time Black Americans were obligated to act White in order to compete with European Americans; and the neosegregation or contemporary period, which Fordham observes others have called the era of the new racism, with its emerging and not yet clearly defined parameters. For example, acknowledging that fictive kinship has been an organizing principle among Black families since the time of official enslavement, Fordham argues that the egalitarian ethos of cooperation and sharing fostered by this principle stands in opposition to the individualistic ethos of the schools. …