Building Laborer-Leaders: Racial Capitalism as Curriculum for Collegiate Black Men

• In Event: Racial Capitalism Perspectives on Educational Inequality

Abstract

Objectives
A closer examination of leadership and career education for collegiate Black men reveals insights to how political meaning is overlayed upon and produced within various educational projects. Scholars within this field have made the case for such studies in recent literature, highlighting the centrality of leadership learning to the development and wellness of collegiate Black men (Beatty & Ford, 2023). However, scholars often understate the role of political economy in the shaping of agendas for collegiate Black men’s leadership and career education. This paper interrogates the discourses and actions of staff within a non-profit’s summer leadership learning program for “high-achieving” students through a lens of racial capitalism.

Theoretical Frameworks
This paper advances racial capitalism to theorize how human value is communicated and distributed (Melamed, 2015). To better conceptualize how these processes might take place within the context of career and leadership education, I turn to critical studies on mentorship to understand the varied ways that students make sense of and navigate various conundrums (Dahlberg & Byars-Winston, 2019). Put together, this framework enlivens political and economic critiques that often are not folded in many empirical studies that seek to understand the sense-making of collegiate Black men and those who support them.

Methods and Data
This study utilized a critical ethnographic methodology that required the researcher to pay attention to topics of power, injustice, and equity. I also interrogated gaps between theory and practice (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022). Through this methodology, I utilized participant observation and semi-structured interviewing as two strategies to collect data from both program staff and current students within the program at the time of the research. I analyzed this data using a flexible coding approach (Deterding & Waters, 2018).

Findings
Findings reveal various dynamics that arise as students receive messages about capitalism and making change. I evidence how program staff and guests used a pedagogy of exposure to relay messages about students’ responsibilities to uplift the race through their roles as earners and leaders. I demonstrate how Black capitalism was discussed as inevitable, thus worthwhile to mastering as a strategy. Additionally, I examine how this connected to politics of incorporation and irony made possible by even the prospect of advancing one’s value within a racialized capitalist economy. I also show how students problematized the implicit and explicit notions about ethics and career choices that The Organization’s staff and speakers promoted.

Significance
This study emphasizes the sense-making of current and former students, as well as program staff and guests. Sense-making is important to understand, especially for the Black managerial middle class, whose logics and discourses shape, influence, and evaluate notions of ideal racial uplift. To this end, this study allows us to focus on the perspectives of emerging or present middle-class students, not because they are necessarily the most fit to lead. Instead, this study centers these “high-achieving” students to interrogate their sense-making as the grapple with the logics or ideologies of racial uplift, as well as fully access the lifestyles of the American middle class.

Author

• Jacques P. Lesure, Brown University