Prison Break: Black-male-centered Educational Spaces, Gender Abolition, and Gender Self-determination

• In Event: Writing, Righting, and Rioting Against Colonial-Carceral Machineries: School Abolition in Real Life, Time, and Context

Abstract

This paper explores how a Black-male-centered educational space may 1) impact how Black males understand, respond, and resist anti-blackness and its soul-damaging consequences, and 2) facilitate critiques and refusals of patriarchal masculinity and movements towards healthier, more expansive, and liberatory performances and enactments of gender and masculinity amongst Black men. I draw on Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) (Dumas & ross, 2016), school abolition (Stovall, 2018), and Black Trans Feminism (Bey, 2022) to examine how a Black-male-centered educational space impacts how Black men respond to anti-blackness and embody and perform gender. The wedding of school abolition, Black Trans Feminism, and BlackCrit also offers possibilities for imagining what it may look like to create subversive, fugitive, school abolitionist spaces that simultaneously exist both within and against the schooling institution under which it may be housed. Through qualitative approach, I deployed focus group interviews and critical document analysis. A total of 20, one-hour-long focus group interviews with a total of 90 participants were conducted to answer the research questions of this study. Focus group interview questions were designed to explore how course participation impacted how Black male participants understood, embodied, and performed their genders.

This study’s findings reveal that participation in the Black-male-centered educational space impacted participants by 1) bolstering their critical consciousness towards anti-blackness and cisheteropatriarchy, 2) encouraging critical reflexivity concerning their relationship to and complicity with cisheteropatriarchal violence, and 3) ultimately empowering them to envision for themselves healthier, expansive, liberatory, self-determined raced-gendered identities. According to the participants, the elements of the course that were most conducive to their learning were 1), the course’s pedagogical grounding in critical pedagogy and Black feminism, 2) the intentional cultivating of loving bonds through community building, 3), culturally relevant material, 4) incorporation of community building, and 5) a “call-in” culture that turned problematic moments into teaching moments, thus facilitating student learning by enabling students to share their (mis)understandings about the course material without fear of ostracization.

Based on these findings, I argue that the focal point of this study functions as what I am calling a gender abolitionist educational space. Gender abolitionist educational spaces may exist within, against, and outside of the confines of traditional schooling and seek to equip participants with the space, language, and tools needed to critically interrogate and disrupt how the carceral logics of cisheteropatriarchy ultimately restrict human autonomy, expression, and self-determination. This work seeks to cultivate a space of “education,” rather than of normative schooling (Shujaa, 1993; Stovall, 2018); that is, the focal point of this study seeks to afford the participants space to interrogate and disrupt how participants imagined and enacted their identities as Black men and further imagine what it would look like to disrupt cisheteropatriarchal violence and enact more expansive performances of gender in their everyday lives. The Black-male-centered space at the core of this study serves to possibly be an important intervention that may positively impact how Black men perform and embody masculinity, thus improving their health and overall quality of life, and ultimately preventing premature death.

Author

• Gene F. McAdoo, University of California - Los Angeles