Black Boys Make Dreams of Love Come True

• In Event: Black Youth Ingenuity as Disruption Towards Bright and Just Futures

Abstract

Black boys in U.S. schools continue to be cast in rhetoric of deficit (Goff et al., 2014) or heroism (Ginwright, 2002), left to feel as though they do not matter in the eyes of public education beyond sports stardom and abysmal test scores (Carey, 2024). Public education has little evidence that it loves Black boys, nor are Black boys shown through loving frameworks. Cogently, critical love literature provides adequate definitions of love (hooks, 2001) with constructs of empowerment against racialized and gendered dehumanization (Brooks, 2017). Accordingly, this paper examines Black boyhood love in response to Black boyhood as “(un)imagined and (un)imaginable” (Dumas & Nelson, 2016). This critical ethnography (Madison, 2020) asked: 1) How does schooling function to afford and constrain Black boyhood critical love-praxis across and within various school spaces?; and 2) How do Black boys conceptualize and operationalize critical love praxis in urban schooling spaces?


Theories on emotion and education have made an ‘affective turn’ in the last 30 years (Ahmed, 2014; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007). In understanding emotion, culture, and the social processing of emotions, Sarah Ahmed’s work is a vital resource for the perceived ‘turn toward affect’ witnessed across disciplines. There remains room to understand the mediating role emotions have in the social functioning of education institutions (Beane, 1990). Applying the sociality of emotions to the sociocultural understanding of learning offers an analytic that provides tools to complicate what we know about Black boy emotional worlds.


This study used observations and interviews in a public middle school in Bay Area, California. I usedsemi-structured interviews (Seidman, 2019) and collected field notes spanning formal and informal learning (Baldridge, 2014) across school spaces. I leveraged multiple coding and analysis frameworks to account for the interaction across various levels and spaces (e.g. classroom, reflections, societal structures, interactions, hallways, etc.), accounting for micro and macro interactional patterns. I leveraged reflexive thematic coding (Braun & Clarke, 2006), phenomenological inquiry, and artifact analysis (Wong, 2013).


Black boys in this study wielded practices that indexed themselves as progenitors of both social-wellbeing and pedagogues among, with, and for each other in often subtle ways deemed innocuous by the schooling endeavor. Such experiences simultaneously function as sites of learning activity (Nasir & Hand, 2006) between bodies (Ahmed, 2014), indexed through their repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). Simultaneously, Black boys co-construct sites of critical-love and learning whereby their prosocial development is safeguarded..


Scholarship that explores the dynamic nature of affect and culture-in-praxis among Black boys in schools remains underdeveloped. Through a rich account of Black boyhood in schools as generative learning ecologies of critical-love, these insights contribute to the growing scholarship on critical-love in U.S. schools (Brooks, 2017; Daniels, 2012; Darder, 2022) and the generative practices of Black boyhood. Deeply understanding what constitutes critical-love repertoires is important to maximizing this resource across informal and formal learning sites (Rogoff, et al., 2016) which provides opportunities to advance a future in which education can meet the needs of its most vulnerable population.

Author

• Aukeem A. Ballard, University of California - Berkeley