My Life in Black and White

Is this fact merely a curiosity or does it have something larger to say about names and culture? Every generation seems to produce a few marquee academics who advance the thinking on black culture. Roland G. Fryer Jr., the young black economist who analyzed the БЂњacting whiteБЂ«phenomenon and the black-white test score gap, may be among the next. His ascension has been unlikely. An indifferent high-school student from an unstable family, he went to the University of Texas at Arlington on an athletic scholarship. Two things happened to him during college: he quickly realized he would never make the NFL or the NBA; and, taking his studies seriously for the first time in his life, he found he liked them. After graduate work at Penn State and the University of Chicago, he was hired as a Harvard professor at age twenty-five. His reputation for candid thinking on race was already well established. FryerБЂ™s mission is the study of black underachievement. БЂњOne could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well,БЂ«he says ...»