Subordinate minorities, therefore, justify their lack of serious competition in school by saying that it is useless trying to work as hard as whites in school when school success would not qualify them to succeed in society because they are blacks or Mexican-Americans. Consequently, many of them do not try to learn how to succeed in school. (p. 13)

The high proportion of school failure among blacks and Mexican-Americans is the result of this type of adaptation ... In competing with whites ... [they] lose just the same whether they have education or not... The development of this attitude is probaly unconscious. But the belief ... has come to serve both as an explanation for actual past and current experiences of discrimination and as a justification for not trying hard to succeed in the "white world" ... (pp. 14-15)

note the implicit reference ot Geertz on "models of/for behavior (1966)