The (Good) Trouble With Black Boys: Toward a Black Transformative Agency

• In Event: Using Justice-Oriented Conceptual Frameworks in Research With Boys and Men of Color

Abstract

Youth Organizing as a tool for social change has helped to not only change material conditions, but it has also equipped youth with the critical tools needed to engage in long-term social movement building. As a result, youth activists and organizers have been able to increase investments in the highest-needs communities, gain access to college, and even defund and abolish school police. This paper focuses on youth activism and the political engagement of Black young men and boys. More specifically, I look at the experience of Black young men and boys in community-based programs that engage in racial justice-based activism and community organizing. The objective of this paper is to help reflect and articulate the radical political consciousness and practices cultivated among Black young men and boys through community activism. I describe this praxis as Black Transformative Agency.

This paper draws from interviews with 22 Black male youth activists, 19 youth workers who engage Black male youth, and five years of field notes as a community organizer working with four community-based organizations in Los Angeles. The study aims to elevate the political imaginaries that Black young men and boys adopt based on their political activism and how they were educated in community-based organizations. I ask, in the political moment of COVID-19 and the global fight to address anti-Black racism, how have Black boys and young men engaged in the fight for their own lives? From the perspectives of these activists, what is agency? And how do they use their agency to transform their conditions?

Building upon critical frameworks in education and across the social sciences, I chronicle how Black boys and young men engage in what I describe as Black Transformative Agency (BTA). I define BTA as an axis of processes that Black boys and young men adopt to both politicize their peers and fight against anti-Black racism in their communities. BTA is an expansive concept that honors the heterogeneity of Black young men and boys. It acknowledges that the way Black young men and boys imagine their agency will be impacted by how they were politicized and what forms of activism they engage in. This, in turn, is deeply influenced by their understandings of gender, geography, class, and comparative race relations. This study provides insights and implications for social movement scholars, education scholars, and other social scientists who are interested in the ways that young people conceptualize social change

Author

• David C. Turner III, University of California, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author