Studies on the acting white hypothesis--the premise that black students purposefully do poorly in school and on standardized tests because of racialized peer pressure--to explain the black-white achievement gap have not been able to negate the fact that a "burden of acting white" exists for some black students, even though it is not prevalent among the group. This article rethinks the conventional understanding of "acting white," as the basis for the black-white achievement gap, within a world-system analysis that reconceptualizes the very premise of the construct in order to get at a better understanding of its social psychological manifestation. I conclude from this theoretical reexamination that the construct has very little to do with antischool norms, but everything to do with a mismatch of linguistic structures and functions. (Contains 1 figure and 6 notes.)