You’ve probably heard it before: too many black students don’t do well in school because they think being smart means “acting white.”

It’s a popular thing to say, but it’s not true. At best, it’s a very creative interpretation of inadequate research and anecdotal evidence. At worst, it’s a messy attempt to transform the near-universal stigma attached to adolescent nerdiness into an indictment of black culture, while often ignoring the systemic inequality that contributes to the country’s racial achievement gap.

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It’s no surprise that the “acting white” narrative resonates with a lot of people. After all, it echoes legitimate frustrations with a society that too often presents a narrow, stereotypical image of what it means to be black. It validates the experiences of African-American adults who remember being treated like they were different, or being smart but not popular in school. And for those who are sincerely interested in improving educational equality, it promises a quick fix. (“If they would just stop thinking being smart was ‘acting white,’ they could achieve anything!”)

The “acting white” theory also validates a particular social conservative worldview by placing the blame for disparate academic outcomes squarely on the backward ideas of black children and black cultural pathology, instead of harder-to-tackles factors like on socioeconomic inequality, implicit racial bias on the part of teachers, segregated and under-resourced schools, and the school discipline disparities that create what’s been called the school-to-prison pipeline.

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So very high-achieving kids of all races experience social isolation at times. This is why there are plenty of high-achieving black kids to provide anecdotes about being socially shunned (and there are probably plenty of white kids who could do the same, but there isn’t the same appetite for collecting these stories to explain the white experience). And there are also plenty of black kids — many of whom are also smart —who have been accused of “acting white.” But there doesn’t appear to be much of a basis to connect the two experiences.

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The “acting white” theory is tempting to believe because it does contains pieces of truth: Yes, there’s a racial academic achievement gap. Yes, there are plenty of African-American adults eager to tell stories about how they were shunned because they dared to be different. And yes, some super high-achieving black kids — like kids of all races — suffer social stigma. These individual facts are each painful, and they each resonate with people in a way that makes it easy to blur what’s missing from the “acting white” equation: an actual, causal connection between the accusations of acting white, social stigma, and lower academic outcomes. There isn’t one.

It’s particularly troubling that this myth persists, because stories about the sources of educational inequality can shape public attitudes and policy. A continued willingness to believe that solutions lie in simply repairing backward attitudes about getting good grades will continue to distract from the real problems: poverty, segregation, discipline disparities, teacher biases and other structural factors. Unfortunately, none of these issues is as easy to fix as simply changing the beliefs of black students.

More: ‘Acting White’: The Most Insidious Myth About Black Kids and Achievement - Vox

The Ferguson Police Department in Missouri is one of about two dozen law enforcement agencies under investigation by the Justice Department.

Police departments in Cleveland, Albuquerque and Newark, N.J., were the subject of scathing federal investigations last year. The government has increased its scrutiny of law enforcement agencies since the controversial police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

The number of departments under investigation by the Justice Department has increased under the Obama administration and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.

More: Ferguson Police One of Many Law Enforcement Agencies Facing Federal Reforms

Sources in the financial industry tell KrebsOnSecurity they have traced a pattern of fraud on customer credit and debit cards suggesting that hackers have tapped into cash registers at Natural Grocers locations across the country. The grocery chain says it is investigating “a potential data security incident involving an unauthorized intrusion targeting limited customer payment card data.”

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity about a possible security breach, Lakewood, Colo. based Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage Inc. said it has hired a third-party data forensics firm, and that law enforcement is investigating the matter.

Natural Grocers emphasized that it “has received no reports of any fraudulent use of payment cards from any customer, credit card brand or financial institution.”

More: Natural Grocers Investigating Card Breach — Krebs on Security

FOR YEARS THE government has kept mum about its use of a powerful phone surveillance technology known as a stingray.

The Justice Department and local law enforcement agencies insist that the only reason for their secrecy is to prevent suspects from learning how the devices work and devising methods to thwart them.

But a court filing recently uncovered by the ACLU suggests another reason for the secrecy: the fact that stingrays can disrupt cellular service for any phone in their vicinity—not just targeted phones—as well as any other mobile devices that use the same cellular network for connectivity as the targeted phone.

More: Feds Admit Stingrays Can Disrupt Cell Service of Bystanders

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Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found.

The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty. Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and basic help their doctors recommend.

Now, 2 1/2 years after he lost his arm, Whedbee is still fighting with North Dakota’s insurance agency for the prosthesis that his doctor says would give him a semblance of his former life.

The changes, often passed under the banner of “reform,” have been pushed by big businesses and insurance companies on the false premise that costs are out of control.

In fact, employers are paying the lowest rates for workers’ comp insurance since the 1970s. And in 2013, insurers had their most profitable year in over a decade, bringing in a hefty 18 percent return.

More: Injured Workers Suffer as ‘Reforms’ Limit Workers’ Compensation Benefits : NPR

The FBI says a person believed responsible for shootings along highways in the Baltimore-Washington area, including shots that damaged a National Security Agency building, is in custody.

In a statement, FBI spokeswoman Amy Thoreson says investigators believe the person in custody is responsible for shootings over the last two weeks along Maryland highways, including one near the Fort Meade Army installation which is home to the NSA. She says no other information was available early Wednesday.

More: FBI: Person in Custody in Maryland Shootings; 1 Damaged NSA

The Alabama Supreme Court ordered a halt Tuesday to same-sex marriages in the state despite a U.S. Supreme Court order allowing them to proceed. The ruling capped a wild month of confusion and resistance in Alabama following a January decision by a U.S. district court invalidating Alabama’s ban on gay marriage.

The Alabama justices were defiant. “As it has done for approximately two centuries,” the court said, “Alabama law allows for ‘marriage’ between only one man and one woman.” Alabama judges have a duty “not to issue any marriage license contrary to this law. Nothing in the United States Constitution alters or overrides this duty.”

The resistance in Alabama, where states’ rights has always been sacred writ and state supreme court justices are elected rather than appointed, has been compared by many to that state’s resistance to school desegregation orders in the 1963, when Gov. George Wallace (D) stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent the court-ordered enrollment of black students.

More: In Defiant Ruling, Alabama Supreme Court Stops Same-Sex Marriage in State

The U.S. Justice Department report on Tuesday that found Ferguson, Mo., police use racially discriminatory tactics stoked a new round of outrage among the community leaders most active in the ongoing protests there.

Elected officials, protest organizers and community leaders renewed calls for Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson to resign, with some saying that that the department should be disbanded. They also said the DOJ probe should have gone further by investigating other municipal police forces.

Above all, they said, the report serves as vindication. Their protest chants following the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown declared that Ferguson police were racially discriminatory. Now, they noted, DOJ has said they were right.

More: DOJ Report Renews Outrage in Ferguson

and of course she does, the email thing is really just another attempt to loop back to Benghazi. We should expect many more.

“Elections should be contests of ideas,” Clinton said. “Women who have entered the arena well-equipped … can make their case, can be elected.” In another veiled reference to her plans, which are likely to include launching a campaign in April, she said: “Along life’s way you get a chance to make millions of decisions. Some of them are big, like do you run for office.”

While Clinton wasn’t shy about hinting at what might be next, she didn’t talk about a recent flurry of unflattering stories swirling around her, including the Clinton Foundation’s history of accepting contributions from foreign governments, and her use of a personal e-mail account while at the State Department.

Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock did, however, allude to the scrutiny Clinton has received in her introduction of the Democratic frontrunner. “Nobody in American political history has faced more unfair attacks, more desperate opposition than Hillary,” she said. But Clinton has “shown us how to shake off the setbacks, ignore the haters and keep focused on moving our country forward.”In an interview earlier in the night, Schriock said her focus Tuesday night was to “celebrate” the former secretary of state, who’s been “such a champion for women and children around the country.”

More: At Emily’s List Gala, Hillary Clinton Steers Clear of E-Mail Controversy - Bloomberg Politics

More: Israel Holds an Election in 3 Weeks. Here’s What You Need to Know.

In slightly under three weeks, Israel will be holding its 20th parliamentary election, which was declared after a long period of internal power struggles within the ruling coalition. Eventually, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to dissolve the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) after less than two years out of a four-year term. The initial public response to the election was outrage, with the common opinion being that the election is a waste of public funds caused by ego-driven quarrels rather than legitimate policy disagreements. However, that sentiment seems to have withered down as the election became more competitive and surprising.

Political parties in Israel can be categorized into five groups: Right, center, left, ultra-orthodox (“Haredi”) and Arabs. The right consists of Likud, the Jewish Home, and Yisrael Beiteinu. In the center we can find two parties: Yesh Atid and Kulanu. The left parties are the Zionist Camp (a union of Labor and Ha’tnua) and Meretz. In a historic move, the Arab parties decided to unite in the coming election and to run together as one united party. The Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties also considered the idea of unity briefly but eventually decided to stay as separate parties: United Torah Judaism party (UTJ) for the Ashkenazi Haredis, Shas party for the Sephardic Haredis and Yachad for the hard-right wing Haredis.

The current government was formed by a coalition of center-right parties, in contrast to the right-Haredi coalition who ruled before. However, the coming election might put an end to the Netanyahu regime, which has been in power since 2009. The alternative to Netanyahu is the political couple Issac Hertzog and Tzipi Livni. Together, they lead the Zionist Camp alliance and aim to bring the Labor party back to power for the first time since 2001. Do they have a chance? The polls suggests a complicated answer.

Here are the numbers from the most recent polls (there are 120 members of Knesset):

(Babushka ranks the parties in brackets, not the WP)

Likud 24 [Right]
Zionist Camp 23 [Center-Left]
Jewish Home 13 [Hard Right]
United Arab Party 13 [Left]
Yesh Atid 8 [Center-Right]
Shas 8 [Religious Grifters]
Kulanu 8 [Center Right]
UTJ 8 [Religious Grifters]
Yisrael Beiteinu 6 [Hard Right]
Meretz 5 [Hard Left]
Yachad 4 [Religious Convicted Felons]

The first thing that pops up is just how close the leading parties are, with just one seat separating them. However, what bothers the Zionist Camp is not so much the number of votes it will receive but rather the number of votes that will be cast in favor of the political center.

More at Washington Post.