Black Boys’ Agency and Racialized Inequalities in a White High School

• In Event: Where Do We Place Our Children? Students of Color in Predominately White High School Settings

Abstract

This study examines the everyday experiences and consequent social and academic vulnerability of black boys in Hillside, one predominantly-white suburban high school. We specifically examine how the black boys’ experienced school in light of how schooling agents and other race peers made meaning of blackness and black bodies. This meaning-making was evidenced via teachers’ beliefs about black achievement and the micro-interactions black boys had with teachers, security personnel, and white peers. We analyze how these beliefs and interactions racialized black boys and influenced how the boys’ accommodated to or resisted school norms and expectations.

The study relies on individual interviews of 44 black students in two graduating classes and includes case study observations of 8 of these students. While interviews covered family background, peer relations, academic orientation, and Hillside’s racial and academic climate; the case studies involved shadowing of participants as they participated in the school day and included interviews with these students’ teachers (n=24). For this analysis we primarily draw upon the data collected from the 17 males in the study who ranged in achievement; and use the data from the remaining participants and our own observation of the spatial and racial organization of the school to otherwise flesh out Hillside’s academic and racial climate.

Our findings indicate that black students were keenly aware of the stigmatization and inequitable treatment they experienced in Hillside. They explained that blacks -- particularly black males -- suffered under heightened surveillance and inequitable disciplinary practices; and were subject to low expectations and perceptions of pathology on the part of teachers and white peers. Both our own observations of the school site and our interviews with teachers confirmed students’ perspectives.
As per this environment, both low-achieving and academically competitive black males found themselves compromised. Low-achieving males responded in ways that produced conflict with school officials and reified negative stereotypes, and circumscribed their chances for academic success. And while the academically competitive black boys did not find themselves in school trouble, like the low-achieving males they evidenced adaptations that compromised their academic performance. That is, both low-achieving and academically successful black males reported that as per their interactions with teachers’ and their understanding of how teachers conceived of them, they were disinclined to seek assistance from or engage with teachers in ways that would reap them (greater) academic benefits.
Our findings indicate that there is a dialectical exchange between the racialization of black boys and black boys’ reactions to this racialization and that black boys’ educational experiences and outcomes emerge from a complex dynamic. To date, this complexity has been marginalized relative to an emphasis on the presumably apriori and risky oppositional, hypermasculine, and psychological orientations Black boys take to school. These findings meet the increasing call for a more a more complex picture by illuminating empirically the outcomes of the exchange between the meaning that is made of black boys everyday in school and black boys’ agentic responses to micro-level school injustices.

Authors

• Carla D. O'Connor, University of Michigan

• Seneca Rachel Nelson Rosenberg, University of Michigan

• Shanta R. Robinson, University of Michigan

• Robert Jagers, University of Michigan

• Monica Alejandra Candal, University of Michigan