High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In the United States, acting white is a pejorative term usually applied to African-Americans, which refers to a person`s perceived betrayal of their culture by assuming the social expectations of white society.Success in education in particular (depending on one`s cultural background) can be seen as a form of selling out by being disloyal to one`s culture. The term is controversial, and its precise meaning is hard to define. Nevertheless, the idea that minority students suffer from the negative prejudices of their ethnic peers is currently accepted as generally true in much of the American media—as expressed in articles in The New York Times, Time magazine, and The Wall Street Journal—and in American society.