I found that this only happens with the applications hardware acceleration is set to true in the manifest file.
I want to keep the hardware acceleration turned on so I wrote this snippet inside my onCreate method to turn it off just the action bar container.
if(Build.VERSION.SDK_INT == Build.VERSION_CODES.KITKAT) {
Resources res = Resources.getSystem();
int id = res.getIdentifier("action_bar_overlay_layout", "id", "android");
ViewGroup overlayLayout = (ViewGroup) this.findViewById(id);
overlayLayout.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);
}
UPDATE
This issue has been fixed in Android L preview API 20. Please note that the above code will cause an exception in Android L and so the version condition needs to be explicit to Kitkat.
if(Build.VERSION.SDK_INT == Build.VERSION_CODES.KITKAT) {