Negotiating the "Scholastic": Racialized Masculinities in the Age of "No Excuses" Reforms

• In Event: Co-Opting Justice: How Neoliberalism Profits From Race in Educational Reform Projects

Abstract

What do the experiences of poor and working class Black and Latinx students within current educational reform movements reveal about the nature of race, class, and gender relations in the twenty-first century U.S.? This paper details how “No Excuses” educational policies leverage the hard earned struggles and advances of past social movements to relieve neoliberal educational reformers and politicians of the burden of challenging the structural and historical basis of educational inequality. Instead, these approaches expect young men of color to shoulder the weight of achieving equity in a society that—while giving verbal affirmation to their humanity—constantly reminds them that their acceptance is conditional.

I utilize Anibal Quijano’s (2000) coloniality of power framework, which contends that current power hierarchies emerged from the history of colonialism, and persist even after the end of formal colonial administration. Quijano argues that the idea of race, which “expresses” the struggle to justify the enslavement, coercion and religious conversion of natives in the Americas (and soon after chattel slavery) for economic exploitation, put forth the basic premise that there were those who were human and those who were not (Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2007; Williams, 1944). As a result, theories of coloniality enable scholars to understand that forms of domination—such as sexuality, race, class and gender—are historically, materially and epistemically coarticulated on a world-scale around Eurocentric notions of the human after 1492.

This paper uses qualitative research focusing on the lives of poor and working class Black and Latinx boys attending two urban independent middle schools for “gifted and talented students” in a large Northeast city in the U.S. The first school, The Langston Hughes Academy (LHA), is an all boys’ school serving grades 4 – 8. The second school, St. Mary’s Academy (SMA), is co-educational and offers grades 6 – 8. The data comes from a year of participant observation that utilized field notes, documents, artifacts and thirty-three semi-structured face-to-face interviews to discern patterns of meaning and significance in the everyday lives of adolescent Black and Latinx boys.

The data revealed that “No Excuses” educational policies triggered conversations surrounding which kinds of dress, attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge systems were valuable and which were not. Often students identified cultural behaviors and intellectual traditions resembling white middle class culture as more worthy of the label “proper” while those from their communities were seen to be less so. Similar to many other programs that implemented “No Excuses” practices, LHA and SMA targeted a supposedly “oppositional culture” by enforcing a "professional" dress code and forms of "middle class culture" that would reposition students as scholastic subjects—persons demonstrating compliance and an acceptance of white middle class culture—worthy of a quality education. In contrast, this paper finds that the process of becoming a “deserving” student entailed what I call existential dissonance—moments when they experienced a gap between their lived realities of race, class and gender, and the colorblind ideology of twenty-first century U.S. society—that cause feelings of contradiction and confusion in these young men.

Author

• Angel Rubiel Gonzalez, De La Salle Academy