Black Boys and the End of Opportunity and Respectability  

• In Event: Impossible Sanctuary, Necessary Refuge: Institutional Limits and the Possibilities of Community in Serving Marginalized Students

Abstract

Building on the work of Dumas (2016) and Harris (1992), this paper explores the ways in which respectability politics and opportunity rhetoric combine to shift focus and discussion from student rights, to contingent student possibility. Rather than liberating and inspiring students, these mutually-reinforcing logics are deployed by a variety of actors to limit and contain student and schooling possibilities within acceptable, neoliberal, competitive parameters. I argue that opportunity rhetoric and respectability politics elide larger structural problems in all aspects of American life, but particularly life in schools. Both frequently presuppose that solutions to endemic racism in American schools are largely technical or behavioral, rather than political. Frequently, the solution is to better train teachers to be more responsive, better prepared, or more efficient within the existing parameters of dominant notions of valid schooling, or to demand students better comply with the dictates of adults who supposedly have their best interests at heart. Political engagement in the form of envisioning and building educational structures and arrangements that transcend or reject opportunity as an end, is in turn exceedingly rare or exceedingly marginal. Furthermore, opportunity rhetoric and respectability politics deflect from a broader discussion of social, political, and economic rights, allowing persistently negative and destructive outcomes to be redirected to the behaviors and choices of the individuals afforded greater opportunities, or justified using the logic of market capitalism. 

These ideologies are deployed on all students, but their acuity is most intense when deployed on Black boys. Through the examination of three instances of the deployment of respectability politics and opportunity discourse in relation to young Black men and boys (Barack Obama’s 2013 Morehouse College commencement; the 2014 launch of the My Brother’s Keeper program; and Chetty et al.’s 2018 study on intergenerational inequality and opportunity denial), the paper will explore how well-intended attempts to help Black men and boys better navigate the persistently racist structure of daily American life, shift discourse away from the language of guarantees and human rights, to a language of contingent and tenuous access. 

Ultimately, I argue that schools committed to social justice and transformation must abandon the language of respectability and opportunity so that broader educational possibilities can be imagined and possibly made manifest. If education truly is a right, then what might it look like to imagine a world where it is guaranteed and not contingent on student behavior or compliance? What might educational environments look like in which the elimination of antiblack practices are used as a springboard for broader liberation of all students? As the discourses of opportunity and respectability continue largely unabated, it is imperative that they are more aggressively problematized. 

Author

• Kyle Beckham, Stanford University