Double Consciousness

Most white Americans know about the scorn many ghetto youths feel for “acting white” —for studying, for doing well in school, for playing by white rules and meeting the white man’s standards. Most assume it is a passing phase, curable, they assume, by better teachers and brighter prospects. The twenty essays by black intellectuals collected in Lure and Loathing will disabuse white readers of that hopeful assumption. Distinguished academics, top-flight poets, the gra...