STUDIOUS BLACKS UNDER ATTACK "… black students who study hard are accused of 'acting white' and are ostracised by their peers. Teachers have known this for years, at least anecdotally. [A Harvard economics professor] found a way to measure it. He looked at a large sample of public-school children who were asked to name their friends. To correct for kids exaggerating their own popularity, he counted a friendship as real only if both parties named each other. He found that for white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular they were. But blacks with good grades had fewer black friends than their mediocre peers. In other words, studiousness is stigmatised among black schoolchildren. It would be hard to imagine a more crippling cultural norm."