He was one of the people who gave us "Ebonics" in the 1990s. But don't hold that against him. John U. Ogbu also helped bring attention to the self-destructive tendency that drives some black students to reject standard English and academic excellence as "acting white," as if ignorance were supposed to be a black thing. The distinguished University of California at Berkeley anthropologist most recently made news when a group of black middle-class parents hired him to examine why their teenagers were not succeeding academically as well as their white counterparts. After careful study, Ogbu concluded that the black parents...