What the Black Middle Class Can Tell Us: Stories From Inside the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: Black Males in the Education Pipeline: Asset-Based Pedagogy for the 21st Century

Abstract

Public and scholarly discourses around the under-education of African American males and their travels through the school-to-prison pipeline rarely conjure images of the youth from the Black middle class. Research along these lines tends to focus exclusively on the educational experiences of the poor and neglect the social and academic worlds of more advantaged Black boys, a gap that contemporary ethnographic studies on the everyday lives of middle class Blacks do not completely fill. This paper begins to bridge these scholarly conversations by rendering the stories of one privileged Black family whose experiences of distress and failure in schools can be explained, in part, by socioeconomic and historical factors.
Relying upon a unique combination of techniques borrowed from auto-ethnography, oral history, and case study research, I have chronicled the retrospective storytelling of a single Black middle class family—my own—whose youngest member dropped out of high school before earning a diploma. My mother’s insights are particularly useful for the purposes of this symposium, as her stories of involvement in my teenaged brother’s education and school-leaving illuminate some of the nuances and complexities of the school-to-prison pipeline. Her words allow me to offer empirically based recommendations for addressing some of the problems facing African American males—even those with advantages—and the people who love them deeply. Motherwork, a Black feminist conception of mothering, frames my mothers’ narratives about navigating power structures to ensure my brother’s survival, nurture his racial identity, and empower him in hostile learning environments.
My research revealed that school discipline policies, labeling practices, and teachers’ beliefs about the nature of Black masculinity worked together to facilitate my brother’s movement from schools, to an alternative placement, the streets, and jails. My mother recalled that my brother was a boy of five or six when he learned in schools that he was “different”; at ten he was “bad”; at fifteen he was “disabled.” She believed that “dropout” must have seemed to him like a natural progression. The study also uncovered my mother’s unwitting complicity in my brother’s school-leaving process. Specifically, my mother tapped into her cultural toolbox—her access to a private medical physician, her college education, and her teaching background—to distinguish a disability in my brother’s learning capacities and garner educational accommodations to mitigate its impact, a decision that with hindsight she sees as a turning point in my brother’s school-leaving process. After several years of school leaders’ insistence that my brother’s academic and behavioral troubles stemmed from a learning disability, my mother began to see leveraging her middle class identity to formalize a disability category as the best way in which to meet her son’s educational needs.
These findings have broad significance for four areas of research and practice: 1) the nature of the school-to-prison pipeline; 2) the under-education of African-American males; 3) the privileges and perils of the Black middle class; and 4) the methods and ethics of “intimate research.”

Author

• Crystal T. Laura, Chicago State University