Educational Anti-Black Misandry: Social Science Constructions of Black Male Students, 1970s-2000s.

• In Event: Brothers in the Academy: Critical Dialogues on Black Maleness, Masculinity, and Manhood in Education

Abstract

On March 31, 2025, the New York Times released an online article titled, “At Black Colleges, a Stubborn Gender Enrollment Gap Keeps Growing” (McGrady, 2025). In the article McGrady discusses HBCU specific and general Black male college attendance trends, the lifetime impacts of declining Black male college attendance, and educational barriers Black men and boys encounter throughout the schooling pipeline. Not only did the article spark debate on social media concerning the causes of the gender gap at Howard University, it also prompted the public to theorize the underlying factors influencing the dismal educational experiences and outcomes of Black men and boys more broadly. The article’s popularity also piqued the interest of media personalities. Author and journalist Jemele Hill posted a screenshot of the article on her Instagram account with a caption that partly read: “Why are so many young Black men rejecting college? And why do so many Black women seem to see college as a viable pathway to upward mobility and Black men don’t?” (Hill, 2025). Author, podcaster, and television host Touré Neblett also posted an Instagram video where he stated, “There’s an array of reasons why this is happening, but the number one reason sociologists point to is the ‘belief gap,’ that a lot of Black men don’t believe they can or should be able to handle college intellectually or financially” (Neblett, 2025). Deficit notions of Black males “rejecting” educational pursuits or having “belief gaps” and subsequently opting out of schooling are not new and have found particular popularity since the 1970s (Brown, 2011, 2021; Bryan, 2022; Howard, 2013).

In an increasingly white supremacist, conservative, and neoliberal political climate–where marginalized populations are blamed for their suffering and structural inequities are minimized or ignored–it is crucial that narratives surrounding Black males and education be interrogated. As argued by Brown (2017) to encourage deeper examinations of the educational standing of Black males, “Understanding the historical and discursive strategies to name and categorize Black males over time could help the public discussion understand the depth and implicit nature of the Black male problems as not simply the by-product of present interactions but are made, re-made and sustained over time” (p. 117). To that end, this manuscript draws on Brown’s (2011) same old stories and Howard and Flennaugh’s (2011) research concerns, cautions, and considerations to explore how scholars within Anthropology, Psychology, Afrocentricity, and Education Studies have reified deficit constructions of Black males while theorizing the causes of their educational underachievement from the 1970s to the 2010s. This selective examination will highlight scholarly arguments and the evidence (or lack thereof) employed to sustain said arguments, and foreground interdisciplinary relationships by tracing intellectual genealogies. This manuscript concludes with recommendations on conducting research on Black male students that do not reify historic and contemporary tropes of Black masculinity. Ultimately, I advance the term educational anti-Black misandry to capture how Black male students are overdetermined as anti-intellectual and implore scholars to reframe how we understand the educational experiences and outcomes of Black males.

Author

• Taharka Anderson, University of Texas at Austin