History of Usage
The phrase was coined by Signithia Fordham and first popularized in her 1986 study, Black Students' School Success: Coping with the "Burden of 'Acting White.'" The question of whether or not acting white attitudes really exist has been debated back and forth in academic literature. The term rose to further media prominence when Bill Cosby used it in a famous May 2004 speech. Black people who are accused of acting white are sometimes referred to as Black Anglo-Saxons, a term coined by comedian Paul Mooney. The 2008 election of Barack Obama as President of the United States created a public discussion that the acting white attitude may be waning.
Read more about this topic: Acting White
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or usage:
“[Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.”
—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)