Ogbu, John (1939–2003)

John Uzo Ogbu (1939–2003), professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, was born and raised in Nigeria. He brought an etic, or outsider's, view to his anthropological studies of minority education in U.S. schools in their sociopolitical contexts. He is best known for his studies of differential educational achievement among minorities in the United States.

Ogbu was born May 9, 1939, in the village of Umudomi, to a family of farmers. Initially, he planned to become a Protestant minister. After attending Hope Waddell Training Institute and Methodist Teacher Training College, he taught for 2 years in a missionary high school in Nigeria. He emigrated to the United States to study at the theological seminary at Princeton University. After a short time in he United States, he decided to study anthropology and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley. There, Ogbu earned a BA in anthropology in 1965, a master's degree in 1969, and his PhD in anthropology in 1971. Beginning in 1970, he taught in Berkeley's Anthropology Department, was awarded tenure in 1976, and was promoted to full professor in 1980. In 1997, he was appointed Chancellor's Professor at this institution.

One of Ogbu's major contributions was conceiving a distinction between minority groups. He developed a classification scheme he termed voluntary and involuntary minorities in the United States. Voluntary minorities are immigrants who choose to emigrate from their countries to the United States for the chance of a better life, economically or politically. According to Ogbu, involuntary minorities are groups that historically have been incorporated into U.S. society against their will by having been conquered. Some examples of involuntary minorities include Native Americans who lost their lands and livelihood when forcibly moved to reservations, Mexican Americans who already lived in the territory of the United States at the conclusion of the Mexican American War in 1848, Puerto Ricans whose country was colonized as a result [Page 634]of the Spanish-American War, and the descendants of Africans who were forced into slavery and brought to the United States in chains.

Ogbu believed that the history of discrimination against involuntary minorities has implications for the present sociopolitical context of their education and the ways in which they are regarded by members of the dominant society. An example of teachers' discriminatory attitudes toward parents of different socioeconomic levels was documented by Ogbu in an ethnographic study in California. In interviews, teachers said they felt accountable to the higher-socio-economic-status (SES) “taxpayers,” most of whom were White, but not accountable to the lower-SES Black and Mexican American parents, whom they regarded as “welfare clients” and to whom they were giving a service.

Although critics of Ogbu's scheme have pointed out that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary minorities may be overly simplistic and cannot explain all minorities over time or in other nations, his theory has become part of the framework for understanding race and ethnic differences in education as well as the difficulties minority students face in learning English. He learned from interviews that recent voluntary immigrants from Mexico, Central America, or parts of Asia believed in the “American dream.” They left situations of poverty, hard labor, and sometimes war and worked hard to achieve an education because they believed it would lead to opportunity and economic success. By contrast, the involuntary minorities—lower-SES African Americans and Mexican Americans—usually had older relatives who had suffered discrimination; although they were educated and worked hard, they were not in positions earning incomes commensurate with their education. No longer believing that education and hard work would bring success, these students dropped out of school.

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