Maclean’s Interview: Roland Fryer

Q: By high school, how big is the achievement gap?

A: Huge. Graduation rates are wildly different; in urban areas, around 50 per cent of our kids are graduating, and when you look just at black males, the percentages are even less. And in the SATs, essentially the entrance exam to our elite universities, there’s barely any overlapping distribution of scores. It’s a little over one standard deviation difference between blacks and whites.

Q: In a study that looked at more than 90,000 kids, you found that black kids who get good grades are less likely to be popular than their same-race peers who get middling grades. Why is there social punishment for what you call “acting white”?

A: Scientifically, I don’t know the answer, but my hunch is that it stems back to the fact that in the ’50s, all the successful blacks—the lawyers, doctors, dentists—lived in the same neighbourhood [as less successful blacks did] because unfortunately, there weren’t that many other opportunities. With civil rights and the Fair Housing Act, you start to see successful blacks move out of the neighbourhood, so education became a predictor of whether or not you were going to be around. I think there’s just been this “Are you with us or against us?” kind of mentality, and I don’t think we’ve fully gotten beyond that. If you go to all-black schools in places like Harlem, for example, you don’t find this “acting white” effect [where high-achieving students are less popular]. Where there’s integration, that’s where we find “acting white” to be most salient.

Q: So do black kids do better overall in all-black schools? Or is it just that you don’t see this “acting white” effect, so kids with good grades are popular?

A: Exactly, you don’t see this effect. Very important distinction, because people have taken my work and argued for segregation, and that was not my intention! Unfortunately, the typical all-black school is also a more impoverished school, so we don’t know, all else equal, if having same-race kids together is a good idea. It would be a wonderful thing to test.

Q: Did you ever experience social repercussions for doing well academically?

A: Of course. I was a football player, and the coaches used to come through and ask all the players, “Hey, how you doing on your grades?” In Texas, as well as many other states now, if you didn’t pass your courses, you couldn’t play. I remember the coach coming around one time in high school and saying, “I know your grades are okay” and he went on to ask someone else. I told him, “Hey, don’t single me out!” I tried to be an athlete and kind of a class clown, to try to take away from the academics. I can also remember accusing people of acting white not only because of education but the clothes they wore, the music they listened to—I mean, if you listened to country music, you were definitely acting white in our high school—which I’m not proud of but it’s true.