Black Queer Male Students and Educational Desire in Community Programs

• In Event: Black Boys Dream of Love and Justice

Abstract

Black queer male students (BQMS) i.e Black male students who identify as two spirit, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual and additional sexual orientations and gender identities, continue to be “pushed out” of North American schools through harassment, bullying, hyper-surveillance, and anti-Black racism perpetrated by their peers and school personnel alike (Truong et al., 2020; Chmielewski et al., 2016; McCready, 2010). In response to the systemic failure of formal primary and secondary education systems, many BQMS express their educational desires, i.e. complex hopes and learning aspirations, by turning to individuals and organizations beyond school like AIDS service organizations, queer youth programs, and social media (McCready, 2015; Brockenbrough, 2016). More specifically, the nonformal education (learning in programs and organizations beyond school) and informal education (learning, often unconscious, in everyday life that occurs outside a structured curriculum) in these settings help Black queer youth explore and affirm their social identities and learn how it feels be supported as a Black person who is queer (i.e. a sexual and gender minority) (McCready, 2019).

This paper, excerpted from a chapter from a book-length manuscript on educational desires of BQMS beyond school, draws from qualitative data from four focus groups and ten one-on-one interviews conducted in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The author served as the principal or co-investigator of multiple studies that explored how BQMS use the community cultural wealth of community programs to feed their educational desires. Community programs can serve as important spaces for social support and education that BQMS are unlikely to encounter in school. I use mini-case studies (the Black Queer Youth drop-in group, Many Men, Many Voices (3MV) HIV/STD prevention program, and Black Queer Youth Collective) to explore how community programs can serve as structured processes for culturally responsive education that provide opportunities for BQMS to understand what it means to exist fully – as central and treasured rather than marginal, as many feel in the school environment.

Author

• Lance Trevor McCready, University of Toronto - OISE