Black Boy Resistance as Rubric and Health

• In Event: 61.068 - MTCC Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 61.068-2 - From Pipelines to Pathways: Reconceptualizing Schooling for Black Males

Abstract

There is a commonly held perception about why black boys suffer; it is a myth about their inherent state of nothingness, their ability to embody more pain than others, which rarely has anything to do with the realities that black people endure. This paper follows cases that disavow this reality by centering the schooling experiences of black boys in order to critically examine the systematic forms of suffering that occur within schools. Drawing on data from an exploratory case study, the author interrogates schools as a fundamental site for the norming and (re)production of black suffering as a way to call for more disruptive and transformative pedagogical practices to address suffering. The overall goal of the paper is to make space for different and deeper understandings of school violence for readers to intentionally disrupt suffering as a fundamental process of creating a more equitable and safe society for all.

Social science research on black youth often positions them as problems before they are seen as people. These researchers (Best, 2007; Clark, 1965) have come to understand academic failure and communal disenfranchisement as a result of individual pathological behavior, rather that a consequence of structural inequality. Critical Pedagogy (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Howard, 2010; Love, 2013) functions as a third space (Bhabha, 1994) within education that supersedes pathological approaches to youth development and achievement. Critical pedagogical approaches to educating black youth seek to reconceptualize black youth resistance as a transformative and critical responses to schooling. These theories and pedagogical approaches offer an alternative way to assess schooling practices, and alongside public health theories that are concerned with the well-being of children, offer researchers and pedagogues the opportunity to reimagine educational spaces, particularly for black youth. This paper illuminates and examines the use of critical pedagogies that engage public health theories as a way to better understand the beliefs, practices and overall disciplines needed to sustain educational third spaces that help Black youth remain radically self-loving and self-actualizing, autonomous beings.

Author

• Tiffani Johnson