Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the “acting white” charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. … Buck’s book gathers what I suspect is almost every relevant description or treatment of the “acting white” charge. No one could come away from his discussion believing that the issue is fictional or even unimportant. There is no other conceivable black problem for which such a weight of personal reportage and sober analysis over decades would be dismissed as an illusion. Any further such claims must now be judged as based at best on ignorance of the existence of Buck’s book, and at worst on a studious refusal to engage with it.