Bad to the Bone: Effects of Narratives of Hypermasculinity on Black Male Achievement

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Abstract

This paper aims to trace the factors that have led to Black men’s negative shift in perception of legitimate pathways to gaining success outcomes, namely educational institutions. As the education literature shows, Black men are disproportionately punished within school and face suspension and expulsion at markedly higher rates than their White peers. However, this is only one rationale for their burgeoning disdain for advancing their education. As the urban studies and race literature shows, these men’s neighborhoods house an inordinate amount social disorder, including crime, violence, and poverty, that have crippling effects on their ability to gain access to essential resources and opportunities for status mobility. In turn, deviant pathways (e.g. gun violence and gang violence) have become legitimate options for these men to pursue as they struggle to gain access to the mainstream.
To substantiate these claims, I include a subsample of in-depth interview and ethnographic data from my undergraduate honors thesis to locate where the shift in Black men’s perception of educational attainment stems from and how it, in tandem with deplorable neighborhood conditions and racist treatment from law enforcement and school authority figures, has created the perfect storm where engaging in violence becomes a tool for survival. In fact, these men are engaging in illicit behaviors out of necessity as opposed to an innate desire to incite harm and violence as hypermasculinity presupposes.
I found that these men have become pigeonholed by reward-granting structures that harbor racialized conceptions of Blackness that are aligned with toxic masculinity that dates back to the slavery era. The persistence of racial inequality across structures and the deplorable state of these men’s communities serve as the impetus for their inability to view normative pathways as beneficial to their life course.

Author

• Aliyah Abu-Hazeem