Mid-Riffs contributor Stuart Buck has a book coming out in May.  The book titled “Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation” investigates the origins of the pejorative ”acting white” slur. You can pre-order the book here at Amazon, and you can find Stuart’s author pages here and here .

Monday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution had a good op-ed about the book. Stuart’s thesis is summed up in the following excerpt from that piece.

“The analogy I would draw is treatment for cancer,” said Buck, speaking by phone from Arkansas. “Segregation is like a cancer that we had to get rid of, but the treatment that saved our lives had unintended side effects.”

While black students often attended segregated schools that lacked the resources of white facilities, Buck says the schools served as the connective tissue in a community that historically valued education.

“In segregated schools, black children had consistently seen other blacks succeeding in the academic world,’’ he says. “The authority figures and role models — teachers and principals — were all black. And the best students in the schools were black as well.”

While black parents welcomed integration, they had hoped for a merger of black and white schools. Instead, they witnessed the destruction of black schools and the erasure of the culture, community and closeness that the schools had created. Their children marched off to white schools where they experienced hostility and were tracked into lower-level classes. In his research, Buck found many examples of new facilities that had housed black schools being abandoned because white parents weren’t willing to send their kids to black schools.

“They did not want to send white schoolchildren into black schools, to be taught by black teachers and disciplined by black principals,” he says.

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Once reassigned to desegregated schools, black students “were sitting in a classroom with mostly other black students in what they believed to be the ‘dumb’ class, watching as the white students headed to the ‘smart’ class down the hall,” writes Buck.

Dispirited, black students began to associate achievement with white students and ostracize peers who joined the white kids in the “smart” classes.

Stuart also did a radio interview on Monday. You can listen here. The book should be a good read. I encourage you all to check it out.