"Who Counts" as Vulnerable: Black Boys, Masculinity, and Post-Truth Educational Research

• In Event: 79.011 - Gender and Post-Truth Politics in Education: Shifting Masculinities

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes: This theoretical paper employs a (re)imagining Black boyhood framework (Author, 2016) to explicate how the censorship of terms—e.g., vulnerable and diversity—in federal grant proposals constitute a post-truth act that limits access to fiscal resources that fund large-scale educational research. The intent being to counter the marginalization of Black boys, and Black children overall, in preschool and elementary school settings.

From a sociocultural perspective, Black boyhood has been essentially unimagined and unimaginable in the United States (Author, 2016; Davis, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Scant integration of Black children’s worldviews and experiences into developmental frameworks related to who is considered a child, or what is childhood, has played a prominent role in Black boyhood’s unimaginability. And it is also rooted in racist and post-truth politics where Black children’s lives are culturally deemed sub-human, or less instructive evidence to support understandings of normative child development.

Tied to norms of Black masculinity (i.e., hyperaggression, anti-intellectualism, and hypersexuality; Cose, 2002; Majors, 2001), disparaging social and academic outcomes of adolescent and young adult Black males (e.g., high rates of homicide, suicide, and incarceration, and low rates of high school and college completion; Brown, 2011; Harper, 2014) have greatly informed crisis rhetoric in public discourse and scholarship that have also obscured the ability of U.S. society to view young Black boys as children, and human beings themselves.

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework: A growing number of scholars are calling for large-scale educational research that contributes to a (re)imagining of Black boyhood (Author, 2016; Warren, et al., 2018), a framework whereby school professionals, public policy officials, and community leaders are championing school and classroom-level, as well as policy-based interventions that facilitate the creation of environments for Black boys to experience robust childhoods.

Related to post-truth politics in the President Trump Administration, a foreseeable obstacle to national-level research in education that seeks to (re)imagine Black boyhood is the recent ban of specific words in federal documents, and research grant proposals that are submitted for substantial funding. This post-truth linguistic mandate is partly intended to alter the U.S. public’s perception of what is considered “scientific evidence” worth investing in, and what populations or communities are deemed truly “disadvantaged, which makes it increasingly difficult to justify research that centers younger Black boys’ perspectives of who they are, their intellectual curiosities, and what they hope for in their lives.
Scientific or scholarly significance: Without substantive research that contributes to a (re)imagining of Black boyhood, Black boys lack the freedom to imagine themselves apart from rigid norms of Black masculinity, which largely shape their school and life outcomes. And therefore racist and dehumanizing research continues to inform public and scholarly perceptions and understanding of Black boys as “primates” or less human (Goff, et al., 2008). Alternatively, preschools and elementary schools must become places where Black boys can be silly and frivolous as other children, without these acts being considered a threat to learning, and the physical safety of others.

Author

• Joseph D. Nelson, Swarthmore College