Conflicting images ? Being black and a model high school student

School participants in two desegregated urban high schools, Lincoln and Norwood East, shared virtually the same image of the good or "model" student. But student peer cultures differed significantly between the sites with regards to the acceptability of this and other images for African Americans. Within these contrasting school contexts, six high-achieving black juniors formed and then performed identities as model students, as black persons, and as other selves. They responded in unique ways to what they perceived to be conflicting images of who they ought to be. African American high school students have been portrayed by researchers as experiencing a nearly irreconcilable conflict between being black and being a model student. Believing they can be one or the other but not both, black adolescents are often described as resolving the conflict by choosing to identify with African Americans, to express distinctively African American cultural traits, and to reject dominant "white" schooling as inappropriate or unrealistic for them. Ogbu was among the first to note African American youths' tendency to be "excessively tardy, lackadaisical towards schoolwork, and otherwise prone to behave in ways that will not necessarily lead to school success" (Ogbu 1988:170). He contends that these youths and members of other involuntary minority groups living in the United States internalize "folk theories" of success which downplay school achievement and divert their interests into nonacademic pursuits. The folk theories were constructed in response to perceived job ceilings and other forms of racial discrimination that for generations have limited involuntary minority groups' chances of prospering in the United States (Ogbu 1987, 1978). Fordham (Fordham and Ogbu 1986) also observed African American adolescents purposely failing or falling behind in high school. Students within the context of all-black Capital High viewed studying, getting good grades, speaking standard English, attending operas and ballets, and expressing other mainstream cultural traits as "acting white" and therefore as inappropriate for them. They formed oppositional identities