The Fresh Prince Syndrome: Experiences of Urban Black Males in Educational Settings
Matthew R. Morris
Master of Arts Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto (2016)
The Fresh Prince Syndrome: Experiences of Urban Black Males in Educational Settings
Matthew R. Morris
Master of Arts Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto (2016)
Abstract
This thesis examines how urban Black males shape and negotiate their identities and how they situate themselves within schooling experiences. I take a phenomenological approach and use principles of CART to explore and analyze the stories of six individuals who claim an urban Black identity, including myself. This study is distinct in that it examines how identity is fostered inside of schooling environments as well as how it undergoes transformation from high school to university. This study also closely examines identity of urban Black males who find themselves clinging to a hip-hop cultural allegiance and the implications that has on their schooling. These experiences of aesthetic representation, space, and peer relationships combine to extend a narrative regarding urban Black male experience in school while providing insight into how educational institutions can facilitate more productive and engaging learning environments.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. George Dei for his patience and wisdom throughout this entire project. As a man of color, I have learned a great deal from him and credit him with my interest in doing anti-racist work. He initiated a flame within me that will last for a lifetime.
I would also like to thank Dr. Miglena Todorova for her dedication, inspiration, and guidance throughout my journey in completing The Fresh Prince Syndrome. She not only provided academic support but much personal guidance. I greatly appreciate her ability to challenge my thinking and push me during the times when I truly needed it. I am forever indebted to her.
I owe a great deal to the five participants who participated in this study for without them this project would not have been possible. I thank all of you for your time and interest in this project.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Neville and Erna Morris for their help and words of encouragement. I love you.
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In Memory of Erna Morris Without you, none of this would be possible.
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Table of Contents
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………. ii
Acknowledgements …...……………………………………………………………….. iii
Chapter I: Introduction ………………………………………………………………... 1
Chapter Ia: Positionality .……………………………………………………………… 7
Chapter II: Literature Review ...………………………………………………….….. 12
Chapter III: Methodology …...…………………………………………………….…. 28
Chapter IV: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Academic Performance ...…………...……… 45
Chapter V: Space ……………………………………………………………………... 71
Chapter VI: Aesthesis x Space: Impacts on Vernacular & Peer Relationships ….. 83
Chapter VII: Conclusion ……………………………………………………………... 97
References ………………………………………………………………………….… 111
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“The role of hip-hop in my life…it’s big, it’s big…It’s like – hip-hop is the professor of black culture, man”
-T.A, personal communication December 11, 2015
Chapter I. Introduction
The hip-hop albums I have listened to, since Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle to
Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly have taught me more valuable life lessons and offered more insight into my world than any educational resource I was ever handed in public school. Through education, I learned how to read, write and do math. To a certain extent the questions and challenges I was required to complete taught me how to problem-solve.
As I progressed through education, History and Geography textbooks allowed me to understand my situational context. Through these resources, I learned that the world was bigger than my block, bigger than the east side of Toronto, and bigger than North
America. In high school, many classes taught me lessons that were not explicit aims of the curriculum. Art and French class flaunted me with the notion that I could not excel in all things. Or rather, they made me appreciate the talent that seemed to come to others more naturally. But the music that I listened to, both to and from class (and sometimes during class!), taught me about life.
In fact, hip-hop taught me how to live. There were mistakes that I did not dare to make thanks to listening to Biggie’s Ready to Die or watching videos like TLC’s
Waterfalls. English classes taught me how to write ‘properly’ but I would contend that
Morris 1 music taught me how to articulate meaning. However, the hip-hop cultural aesthetics and vernacular that I learned from and appreciated were the furthest from things being valued in the school space. This reality impacted my scholastic endeavors both externally and internally.
With that being said, I give kudos to all those scholars and academics that have and continue to work in Anti-Racism education for paving the way for a young mind like mine. But as I read canonical articles of the trendsetters in this socio-political vein of academe, I cannot help myself from feeling a gap between my reality and their theoretical analysis. Fanon is dead and gone. Yet, his work leaves a lasting impression. The Cornel
Wests and the bell hooks have left an undeniable and indelible imprint on my psyche as a young Black male and intellectual. But they grew up in an era that I had no part of. I only know it through ink on a page and black and white pictures. These black and white articulations of a better tomorrow bridge my reality with their contextual lens because I find myself relating to an environment of yester year. Despite the progressive transformations of the Civil Rights era, Black males are still being gunned down for being in a place where they ought not to fit and because they are merely wearing a hoodie at night. The black and white pages that analyze racism have recycled their message into the physical reality of today. The anti-racist intellectuals of prior generations have undoubtedly made their mark, but what has improved on the ground? I still feel ‘a way’ driving my car down a main road once a police cruiser pulls behind me. Although I have not committed a crime, nor done anything wrong, I still feel anxious.
For all the work these trailblazers have done, I still feel that way. So what has really been done? And in academia, what are we really peddling? Is the practice of theorizing
Morris 2 about the material conditions of oppressed bodies merely “intellectual gymnastics”? As we have grown to become a more litigious state it seems as though, “[t]he current climate of accountability and proclamations that all children can and should learn, we are witnessing a disparity between equality talk and inequality reality” (Hooks and Miskovic,
2011, p. 191). “Discourse” and “reality” seem to be two far opposing sides of a coin we consistently suggested to flip, over and over again. As far as the predicament and prospectus of urban black males are concerned, the coin might as well be the house money. We have cycled the same rhetorical message over and over: Black kids are failing in school and we need to analyze it (Dei, 1997). The deeper theoretical explanations on this topic always resorts to this unfortunate meta-narrative. We know that Black males perform below their peers in basic subject areas (Noguera, 2008). We have known this for 60 years. The Brown v. Board of Education act and much other legislation have tried to remedy the situation. But little has been done to scratch the core epistemological issues that create the reality that still objects to core tenets of Black culture in the school settings. The Fresh Prince Syndrome identifies an assumption made of the Black male subject as,
“The discourse that emphasizes Black students’ underachievement is a component of the racial hegemony that serves to perpetuate the myth of Black inferiority. It conveys a message that assaults the intelligence of Black people and reinforces the perception of White superiority. The danger in this message is that it not only shapes and reinforces the beliefs of White supremacist thinking but it also influences the perceptions African Americans have of themselves. It creates a form of mental bondage, a psychological slavery where people internalize the negative discourse about themselves to the extent that they believe and consent to what they are said to be, which makes their subjugation easier” (Hooks and Miskovic, 2011, p. 194).
Morris 3
The issues I and countless other urban Black males experience(d) when navigating a system that ostensibly sees us as outsiders is more complicated than a few dichotomous tropes and analogies. The matter stems deeper than the ways I talked to my friends, or how I dressed at school and how teachers and the institution of schooling perceived me.
Simultaneously, these realities are precisely where the analysis of Black culture and schooling must begin. It is about the culture urban Black males prescribe to, but also about how that culture becomes delegitimized by more hegemonic definitions of social interaction, especially within the educational setting.
Thus, it can clearly be observed that the academic discourse encapsulating the urban Black male borders on a type of lose-lose situation. This is precisely why academics must be especially diligent when examining the experiences of urban Black males. The dilemma of Black male excellence pertains to a certain type of fluidity of identity and culture that cannot be easily categorized. For sake of a less “intellectual” term, in our modern times I will phrase the aesthetic articulations, vernacular performances, and peer relationships as a collective phenomena that, when combined, resemble what can be termed as “swag”. This “swag” pertains to the notion that aesthetics and vernacular of Black male culture impact how urban Black males articulate their identity. This is not as simple as Black males responding to their positioning on the hierarchical totem pole by emphasizing their stylistic superiority over other groups
(Wright et al., 1998). Beyond that, this “swag”, perhaps more conservatively termed as a combination of identity construction and subjective rationalizations, as far as Black males go, pertains to a historical and perpetual battle that necessitates a dimension of fluid identity.
Morris 4 This phenomenon of identity fluidity exists amongst all cultural groups but pertains most saliently to Black males. No other group must experience, understand and endure this fluidity like young Black males. Historically speaking, the Black male has made it essential to his being to be able to be a “chameleon” for the sole purpose of survival. This identity construction speaks to the adaptability of the Black male in the face of oppressive levers that are designed to keep him subordinate. Becoming adaptable speaks to aesthetics, vernacular, space, and ultimately, power. This study examines precisely how these interrelated networks form and work within the Black male and subsequently push some intelligent urban Black youth out of school while retaining others. As the proceeding chapters explain, school operates as a “cleanser” of sorts, orchestrated through supremacist measures of reproducing difference, a difference that ultimately forces urban Black males to experience realities, actual or imagined, like no other cultural group in North America.
As an urban Black male, I am heavily invested in the experiences of my brothers in school settings. Everyday, Black males walk into schools across Canada and experience a lived reality like no other group. Two sets of curricula serve to create “hegemonic schooling policies, programs, and practices that perpetuate stereotyping that are oppressive to racialized students” (James, 2012, p. 485). The first set, curriculum of science, math, geography, etcetera is taught through explicit mediums of schooling. The second set is implied through more implicit routines; the hidden curriculum regarding
“universal” ways of walking, talking, dressing, and behaving are insidiously interwoven within the school system through modes of teaching, learning and the spatial realities of the public school. All pupils are taught these ways through a K-12 education. For Black
Morris 5 males, these messages are continuously relayed and reproduced. This process fosters socially sanctioned values, norms and patterns of behavior that people are expected to have in order to succeed in society (James, 2012). Because the second set is more or less implied, but arguably more impactful, it is understandable that the many students who do not “live up to [these] standards” become disengaged with the primary set of curriculum and subsequently become disenchanted with school, and education in general. This paper will explore the extent to which the schooling process itself informs, shapes, and creates a dichotomy between urban Black male culture and the institution of school through articulating that “Black masculinities are not expressed in isolation” (Wright et al., 1998, p. 75) but communicated through a culture of collectiveness and validation in the face of oppressive systems.
Urban Black males are the one group of bodies that most frequently do not mesh with the standards of Eurocentric schooling paradigms and as a result, Black males are routinely and inexplicably accosted. Several specific explanations intertwine and complicate the systemic crisis surrounding ‘underachievement’ and ‘push out’ factors surrounding Black male students (Dei, et al., 1997). The factors are indeed complex and multi-layered. The multiple reasons why Black males hold the highest ‘push out’ rate amongst any racially-based demographic (TDSB Census, 2011) make it essential to explore the processes through which young Black males experience their schooling identities, especially when, “their relationships with others become predicated upon assumptions about the nature of Black masculinity” (Wright, et al., 1998). The reason why this peculiar fact has become a reality can be translated from a body like mine. This introduction is extended by means of a conscious political decision because ultimately,
Morris 6 we need to “de-academize theory and connect the community to the academy” (Yosso,
2005, p. 82). With that, I will continue to start with a brief anecdote regarding my transition from high school to university that will hopefully provide some insight into the trajectory of this work.
Ia. Positionality “How much time this nigga spending on the intro” Drake, Tuscan Leather, Nothing Was the Same (2009).
I remember walking into one of my university classes on a September day; it was a small 300 level history course. I had my gold chain out and a fitted hat on. My Jordans were fresh and the belt holding up my pants was somewhere down the middle of my
Tommy boxers. Of course, I strolled in late. I was simply repeating my regiment; the processes of my tried and tested high school routine that I used to assert and project my identity. I found affirmation in it. By repeating these behaviors, I felt that I created a sense of self and also a sense of space within a classroom. But a strange thing happened that day in university. In fact, it had been happening for a little while now, pretty much since I began walking into university classrooms as a freshman.
I would come to class late on a routine basis. Hat on, most of the time blasting my music through my headphones, and passively looking around for attention. “Yah, yah…I’m here…It’s me, get it, the guy who doesn’t care about school…Look at me make my entrance…and please tell me what I’m doing wrong.” I dared them. In fact, I thrived for that type of interaction. These were the subconscious thoughts trickling through my psyche as I twisted that doorknob and smugly walked to an open seat in the class or
Morris 7 lecture hall. But there was a difference I was encountering through this experience in university. That difference was that every time I “performed” my routine, no one cared!
Not the other students; there were no looks of comical relief or supplanted appreciation for my bravado or passive resistance to school. There was no passive scorn or attention from the professor either; from her, I failed to illicit a list of demands upon entering the room. No “take your hat off, you’re late, turn off your music right now.” It felt as though the collective consciousness of the university room was whispering, “keep your damn hat on and wear your pants however you want, whoever your name is. We barely notice and hardly care.” And it was true; no one seemed to be concerned about my presence, or rather performance. There was no difference as to whether I was late or early, dressed in saggy jeans and Jordans or khakis and Sperrys. The point I thought I was promoting was mute to say the least. At least to me it seemed.
In high school, this performance would yield a completely opposite experience. So why did this change from high school to university? And how, or in what ways, was this affecting me? These particular questions began a journey to explore the ways in which urban Black males experience educational spaces. To venture back to an earlier point about the Cornel Wests and the bell hooks, this essay is an attempt to examine a generation of young Black males, like myself, who instead of growing up with explicit forms of racism, developed alongside illustrations painted by Nas mixed with the ever- ominous cloud that promoted myths about living in a post-racial society. This is not a diatribe about separate water fountains or explicitly inhumane occurrences that has indelibly impacted a culture. This is more attuned to the new-age re-racialization of the
Black man. This is an analysis regarding a culture that collectivity thinks that because
Morris 8 Jay-Z made it, so can they; the idea that Michael Jordan is revered so that means everything is okay. Clearly, this is not true.
I was a junior in university when America saw its first black President. I grew up and experienced schooling far amputated from the civil-rights realities that many of my academic idols experienced. Like most peers from my generation, I see very little problem with my Black peers using the word “nigger”. With contextual layers regarding race clearly shifting in this new generation and culture, there must be a difference concerning the perceptions and self-identifications of, and from, the Black body.
The dichotomizing vehicle that has both polarized and celebrated Black culture goes by the name of “Hip-Hop”. What feels like one fell swoop, but has realistically taken the course of over three decades, hip-hop has both been a means for closing the gap between cultures while simultaneously ostracizing the culture that is the symbolic representer and creator of its form. At times, hip-hop’s influence on Black culture seems as insidious in its manifestations both commercially and authentically, as hegemony itself
(Rose, 2008). But, the “master’s tool”, as Audre Lorde (1984) terms it, will never be used to destroy the Master’s house. The one thing that, at this point, is organically created, fashioned, remixed and refined by “an other” is hip-hop. Therefore, we cannot afford to make half-hearted intellectual accounts pertaining to a system that has such potential on positively affecting Black culture in today’s world.
Thus, this work is a meditation on the intimate ways in which hip-hop culture figures in the subjectivity of the urban Black male. In contemporary discourse, the words
“hip-hop” and “academics” seem to be oxymoronic. This is partly because one of them derives from the lowest form of discourse and the other, the most valued form. Urban,
Morris 9 Black, hip-hop identity, encapsulating aesthetics, vernacular, space, and power relations must be seen as an interwoven matrix that affects how one negotiates identity, subjectivity and academic performance. The fluidity of Black male identity precipitates from his necessity to survive (Fanon, 1963). Thus, this multi-layered subjectivity cannot be compartmentalized, but on the contrary, needs to be examined in its essence.
Ultimately, this ideology figures into the mentality of young, urban Black males as they encounter and experience school.
As modern as this analysis asserts itself to be, the accounts of contemporary urban
Black males that are ascertained and analyzed in the following chapters ironically speak to a historical dualism of identity that is uniquely experienced by the urban Black male.
In the essence of W.E.B Dubois (1903), urban Black boys in educational settings endure an experience that is both arresting and liberating at the same time. Through their educational experiences, they resist hegemony by acting passively resistant towards the lack of validation they receive as complex individuals in educational spaces. Specific examples include the frustration that a Black male experiences by not getting the “benefit of the doubt” when it pertains to academics. Incongruously, these bodies also embrace this rebellious culture; a part of being connected to an inherent hip-hop foray that is grounded in being proud of being the “other”, or to put it more abruptly, validated by peers for being the nigga in the classroom. Unfortunately, the duality of these experiences shapes the trajectory of the urban Black male experience with education and his potential trajectory into academic excellence.
The tropes of “urban” and “Black” are vast. So for the sake of this work, by
“urban” I am drawing upon two particular themes. First, I am suturing the term “urban”
Morris 10 to specific male individuals demarcated by space and location and determined by discourses pertaining to “high priority” or “risky” neighborhoods within the Greater
Toronto Area (Strayhorn, 2009). The participants in this study came from communities in
Jane and Finch, Rexdale and Scarborough respectively. Secondly, by using the trope
“urban” I am fixing a particular body that is read and represents himself through the discourse of popular hip-hop culture (Petchauer, 2009). These males are all Canadian born and prescribe to a particular way of “representing” themselves through commodified notions pertaining to hip-hop vernacular and aesthetics. By “Black” I am simply referring to males who read themselves, or are read, as belonging to an African-Canadian fictive kinship group.
This work examines these aspects of identity, space and power that urban Black males experience while in school. The sub-topical themes that relate to hip-hop, aesthetics, and space serve to accentuate the fostered friction between urban Black boys and our current schooling model. With that understanding, I am aware that my closeness to the issue affects my assumptions, opinions, and readings of my research and analysis to a certain degree. So, my second aim of this work is to invite others to test my assertions elsewhere. When we bridge the gap between cultural arms and consider the complicated politics of representation by observing the ways in which Black males refuse to settle into being just “waste”, then the work for intellectuals in our time becomes more urgent, “as the work of not just making life livable but making life anew presents itself as our only option” (Walcott, 2009, p. 89). It is my ultimate aim then, though not realizable in this single paper, to eventually contribute to a theoretical, descriptive, empirical and critical framework in which Black masculinity is demarcated by a “both/and” dichotomy
Morris 11 that considers the complexity of personhood as it simultaneously relates to the ways
Black males resist hegemony but also comply with said structures of oppression in certain contexts. I am trusting that this work is a step in the right direction.
Chapter II. Literature Review
“It’s huge. Before I got involved with the curriculum, prior to that I felt like hip-hop was my biggest teacher, and I didn’t even know it.”
- Braxton T, personal communication, November 20th 2015
The literature review is divided into two specific sub-categories. (1) Hip-hop and
Black identity and, (2) Urban life and educational excellence. When correlated, these two themes extend a narrative of the experiences of particular bodies that do not ostensibly belong to the traditional school setting. Many scholars have abundantly documented
Black male youth and their experiences with the educational system over the last several decades (Anderson, 1988; Bell, 1992; Clay, 2003; Codjoe, 2003; Dei, 2008; Hill, 2009).
Research on Black males and school is often premised on the notion that Black males are
“at-risk, underachievers, and disengaged with learning” (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986;
Cuyjet, 1997; Bonner and Bailey, 2006). Contrarily, studies in recent years have documented that those Black males who participate in hip-hop cultural production give
Black males (1) the agency to control their own image and maintain their individuality and (2) a sense of worth and belonging to something constructive (Petchauer, etal., 2013,
Seidel, 2011; Duncan-Andrade, 2004; Pihel, 1996). Analyzing how hip-hop culture affects the experiences of Black males in school settings opens dialogue around how school pedagogy and educational reform can better suit our most vulnerable students.
Clay posits, “If hip-hop is the Blackest culture to date, it is important to determine the
Morris 12 significance and/or usefulness of hip-hop for the Black community and Black racial identity” (Clay, 2003, p. 1348). Therefore, Black racial identity, or identity for that matter, is a worthwhile concept to explore for the sake of this study. Simply put, identity
“refers to our feelings of belonging to a collective” (Grimson, 2010, p. 63). Grimson
(2010) eloquently notes the philosophical attack that has subsequently divided identity into two polarizing camps: on the one hand intellectuals place too much emphasis on its salience, while others too little when espoused with ambiguity (Grimson, 2010). He claims that “hard concepts of identity preserve a common sense meaning of the term while soft concepts have become intertwined with constructionalist clichés that leave the notion fluttered with adjectives and interlocking, multilayered notions of the term which result in such a conflation that easily serves critics to dismantle the concept in its entirety” (Grimson, 2010, p. 65). As slippery as the notion of identity is, it is indeed problematic if we drift into an understanding that doesn’t take its existence seriously.
Instead, identity should be thought of as a “‘production’ which is never complete, always in formation and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall, 1990, p.
222). Ibrahim (2008) and Stuart Hall (1990), posit that soft concepts of the term highlight misrecognition of identity construction, performance and saliency rather than an inexistence (Ibrahim, 2008; Hall, 1990). Thus, Bakhtin (1990) rightly points out that identities are ongoing productions that produce unstable points of suture that become manifest at the intersection between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other.’
The work of Cornel West (2000) signifies how the relationship between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ is based on unequal historical relations of power. When identity becomes the supplementary analysis to Black experience, bell hooks (1992) provides literature that
Morris 13 demonstrates how bodies are “marked” by history where Blackness is primarily read through an essentialized gaze where skin color, hair, aesthetic features and so on determine who one “is” (hooks, 1992). To this I would add, and emphasize, how cultural representation (read: hip-hop culture) importantly demarcates discourses of race and
Otherness.
Whilst many of these studies facilitate an important conversation surrounding hip-hop and identity construction, most fall short of theorizing how hip-hop positions and affects its most salient producers (young Black males) inside classrooms and schools. My study proposes to fill these gaps by analyzing how hip-hop identities manifest and transform through high school into university.
Because my work is rooted in an understanding of ways of knowing and representing oneself through hip-hop culture, a culture that is mainly an American manifestation of Black cultural identity, the literature that pertains to this study is more appropriately aligned with an American frame of reference. Prominent American scholars, including Chris Emdin (2010) and Marc Lamont Hill (2003), have written exhaustively on the use of hip-hop as a pedagogical practice and how not only lessons, but also embodying a cohesive classroom environment that is based on how “the ways of hip-hop culture” leads to more engaged and critical Black male students (Emdin, 2010;
Lamont Hill, 2003). For example, spatially transforming the classroom to represent the
“rap cypher” (more circular rather than rows of desks and forms of dialogue that progressively overlap to produce a classroom dynamic more engaging than traditional didactic delivery methods) tapers some of the implicit practices that generally privileges white middle-class students and white middle-class culture (Emdin, 2010). While their
Morris 14 studies present an elegant case for the infusion of hip-hop culture into mainstream education, studies of this nature generally omit ways that traditional schooling can still be positively navigated by Black males who ascribe to a particular hip-hop culture.
Even in the American context, it doesn’t take much digging to note that the ways
Black males articulate themselves becomes much more salient through the affinity of hip- hop more so than any connection to one’s diasporic origins. In his study on Caribbean youth in New York City, Waters (1994) reports that, “over time, Caribbean youth tended to think of themselves in more American terms” (p. 811). Waters (1994) suggests that over time, there may be “few distinctions between the Black Americans and the Black
Caribbean immigrants of New York City” (Waters, 1994, p. 809). This same understanding can be related to African-Canadians in a city like Toronto, which has a large immigrant population, where young minority individuals acclimatize and prioritize hip-hop culture into their seminal vernacular and identity performance, particularly when they are first or second-generation citizens.
A study like this requires one to be mindful of, “the lack of clarity and the intellectual danger of using conceptual and analytical categories that are themselves social constructs” (Dei, 1996, p. 356). Literature on hip-hop identity and education emphasize hip-hop as, “an example of cultural politics and enunciative of black cultural politics” (Walcott, 1999, p. 97). However, the gap in the literature remains open to an analysis of the ways that Black males who claim a hip-hop identity still succeed in traditional education programs despite the negative social constructions of such identities.
Morris 15 One cannot theorize about the dichotomy between hip-hop culture amongst urban
Black males and education without examining masculinity, and in particular, urban heterosexual male masculinity. As Walcott (2009) suggests:
…At the outset it might be argued that the history of black masculinity is one in which masks play a fundamental and crucial role in manhood. The role of the mask might be so primary to black manhood that it obscures and covers over how black men have been able to articulate their selfhood both consciously and unconsciously to themselves and to others. The masks black men wear are many and varied and might be understood as congruent with the difficult history of the agency or lack thereof of black masculine self-fashioning that is autonomous and wholly self- interested. As we all know, history is always in question when black masculinity is in discussion. (Walcott, 2009, p. 75)
Taking a Fanonian perspective on Black masculinity, one must assert that, “[a] person’s identity (or authentication of that identity) may not be based simply on personal attributes such as skin color but rather a person’s performance of an intra-ethnic construction of that identity” (Clay, 2003, p. 1350). Although this theoretical angle elicits a notion of realizing the complexity of identity, this does not mean we should negate the saliency of how race frames such a discussion. Analyzing the construction and negotiation of masculinities and identities within peer groups of young Black men, and how hegemonic groups perceive and construct those masculinities within the structure of education opens up the discussion of how these identities exist in a space where normative values pertaining to the “universal student” have been long embedded. When examining identification and identity, one needs to look no further than Stuart Hall. Hall
(1996) states that, “we tend to privilege experience itself, as if black life is lived experience outside of representation. We have only, as it were, to express what we
Morris 16 already know we are” (Hall, 1996, p. 476). The point here is that Black masculine identity is a combination of a lived experience with a representational performance. It becomes a suturing of experience that binds re-presentation to subjective opinions regarding how others perceive the self. Unfortunately, much educational research in the
United States “is still dominated by the paradigm that sees race as an independent variable. As such, it can be controlled for or manipulated in order to monitor the outcome
(i.e. academic achievement)” (Hooks and Miskovic, 2011, p. 195). Literature grounded in a phenomenological approach considerate of the complex ways urban Black males negotiate and alter their identity throughout their scholastic careers is what this study will offer a glimpse into. Simply because the ways in which we represent and imagine ourselves is the only way we come to know who we are (Hall, 1996). Statistical relationships (and qualitative measures) through the truism in academia that promote a one-sided framework of how race is a social construct become devoid of history and context. This study aims at examining the ways the urban Black males come to know and define themselves in educational spaces and the strategies they use to succeed academically while simultaneously maintaining their urban identity (read: “swag”).
Literature encompassing the theme of masculinity found much grounding through the work of Kessler (1982) in his study of social inequality in Australian high schools.
Work by Carrigan, Connell, and Lee (1985) followed that examined, and subsequently critiqued, the discourse surrounding the “male sex role” and proposed a model of multiple masculinities and power relations. When isolated, literature on masculinity examined how the practice of gender-specific identity roles allowed men’s dominance of women to endure (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Akin to identity, “masculinities are
Morris 17 not simply different but also subject to change. Challenges to hegemony are common, and so are adjustments in the face of these challenges” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 835). Other research has pointed out that “structured relations among masculinities exist in all local settings, motivation toward a specific hegemonic version varies by local context, and such local version inevitably differ somewhat from each other” (Connell &
Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 847). This is an important point, especially when considering that The Fresh Prince Syndrome is an analysis not only on males, but Black males who have grown up in urban settings.
George Dei importantly asks how may we challenge discursively imposed social identities? (Dei,1996) The phenomenon of identity construction is extremely pertinent when considering the effects of schooling on Black male bodies and the ways the Black males navigate and cope with their scholastic realities. To this extent, our identities are merely illusions. As Dei posits, “[t]he power of illusion is that there are real consequences” (Dei, 2008, p. 356). When grappling with the notion of identity, Grimson
(2010) notes that it is imperative to understand that “a clear, precise conceptual distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ is an essential precondition for analyzing social processes” (p. 61). Examining the construction of Black masculinity requires an understanding that values expressed by Black boys are not solely dictated by their style, mannerisms, or even the culture they choose to embody. Simply put, the fact that one chooses to identify with a certain culture tells us little about his embodiment of that culture (Grimson, 2010). When examining Black masculinity in the school context,
McGlaughlin et al. (2002) has found that, “Black males are symbolically excluded from the power and status associated with White masculinity, but they are institutionally
Morris 18 excluded through exclusionary measures in the school setting” (p. 74) Thus it is essential in this work to center the urban Black male voice. Several studies pertaining to male
Black youth have utilized narrative analysis to explicate how Black males navigate their identities within the school setting. Marshall and Rossman (2001) define narrative analysis as “the ways in which people use stories to interpret the world” (Marshall and
Rossman, 2001). However, few studies have focused on the ways that Black bodies straddle the line between positive academic achievement and expressive forms of hip-hop identification.
Black masculinity has not only been theorized from the lens of understanding how identity is constructed. There is also an abundance of literature pertaining to the dominant’s wider understanding of Black masculinity (Mac an Ghaill, 1995). Scholars closely niched to whiteness studies have indicated that, from the lens of privileged white educators, Black masculinity becomes essentialized, judged and stereotyped (Codjoe,
2004). Findings suggest that, “race acts to position Black masculinities as illegitimate, rather than merely subordinate” (Wright et al., 1998, p. 84; Dei, 1998). The construction of Black masculinity and its implications on their education rest on the historical indoctrination of Black male stereotypes and the effects that such an indoctrination has on Black male bodies. Wright et al. (1998) has cautioned about the danger of theorizing
Black masculinity with a tone that implies ethnic distortions. He states that, “it is important to move away from theorizing masculinities as a form of ‘machismo’ which is quite clearly racialized, as to do so many only pathologize the very different ways that young Black males respond to their experiences in school” (Wright et al., 1998, p. 77).
This point is carefully taken. But it must be understood that masculinities are inevitably
Morris 19 racialized. We must move towards interrogating these racialized masculinities without silencing them for the sake of intellectual politics. One cannot examine Black males apart from males without theorizing about the semantics of racialized masculinity.
Furthermore, it is also important to acknowledge that, “the way masculinities are responded to, and often lived out in schools, is ‘race’ specific” (Wright et al., 1998, p.
79). This study will attempt to fill a gap that many scholars have either neglected or intellectually pathologized.
There is much literature on aesthetics and schooling, particular Black males’ endeavors into sports and the effects that such has on educational pursuits (Bierman,
1990; Harrison, 1998; Nasir and Cooks, 2009; James, 2012). Carl James’ (2012) study highlights that, “athletics is seen as a way that youth who are ‘at risk’ can surmount the obstacles and challenges they face in their communities and schools and as students engage school and not drop out” (James, 2012, p. 477). Carl James troubles the notion that sports solely serves to be a “positive stereotype”. He frames the dialogue surrounding
Black males and sports in schools as a form of institutionalized racism which leads to self-fulfilling prophecies that contribute to individuals’ blindness in both the schools’ and the students’ use of the stereotype. Thus, the literature indicates that sports and hip-hop overlap to produce a specific stereotype of the urban Black male in scholastic settings; an identity that railroads many Black males from supplementing their “urban identity” with an equal “successful academic” identity. While tactfully critiquing the ways that hegemony burdens the self-perception of Black males, these studies omit methods that
Black males have used to successfully parlay “urban identity” into achievement in the classroom.
Morris 20 Urban life and educational excellence is a topic usually theoretically funneled towards specific literature pertaining to the experiences of urban Black youth in school settings that mesh with the aforementioned sub-themes (Lamont Hill, 2009; Emdin,
2010). Of particular importance in this area, especially in the Canadian context, is George
Dei’s work titled “Race and the Production of Identity in the Schooling Experiences of
African-Canadian Youth” (Dei, 1997). In it, Dei posits, “to claim an identity, rather than passively accept one, is a political act which involves one’s self and others” (Dei &
James, 1998, p. 94). Indeed, urban Black males who cling to a hip-hop identity whilst navigating the schooling environment make a conscious choice to do so. Unfortunately, oftentimes the passive resistance demonstrated by Black males in urban schools gets
(re)positioned by teachers and administration as a students’ deficient or inability to succeed in such settings (Walcott, 2009). Thus, in order to create educational spaces where urban Black male identity is not only accepted as one of the “norms” of positive school climate, but also validated in its own domain, requires a theoretical move that involves troubling the dialogue pertaining to the “victim to victor” ideology (Walcott,
2009). This train of thought is, “central to the narrative of coherency in the assumption that black manhood is an impoverished masculinity in need of repair and or rescue, and the unspoken is that a good douse of patriarchy would do it well” (Walcott, 2009, p. 76).
Lastly, studies on urban life and educational excellence are generally grounded generally in the ideology of cultural capital ideology (Yosso, 2005). Although much of the literature in the vein pertains to notions regarding cleavages of culture without clear intersections about how they are interlocking. By combining these modes of analysis, I drive at a concise and linear narrative that describes the experiences of urban Black males
Morris 21 in university settings. Despite the transparencies in this domain of literature, it must still be noted that, “to the extent that cultural capital theorists are correct, educational attainment is not an individual achievement in any meaningful sense of the word, and schools are not transmitters of opportunities by active agents in social reproduction”
(Kingston, 2001, p. 88).
Since the phenomenon of urban Black males and their experiences in school settings represent a serious social problem that is naturally complex, a multidisciplinary approach that takes into consideration culture, racism, and discourse is more appropriate.
Literature based in this ideology manifestly indicates a lack of scholarship pertaining to work like that of Emery Petchauer (2012) that suggests, “Black males indeed are engaged in learning and teaching practices; however, they are not always engaged in the types of learning or in the spaces that educators recognize or value” (Irby et al., 2013, p. 17). This sentiment is no more tangible then when gazed at through the lens of urban Black males and how they come to experience their schooling.
Unfortunately, many studies pertaining to Black male identity and academic performance imply poisonous jargon that suggest high-achieving Blacks typically employ strategies to minimize their relationship to the black community and the stigma attached to ‘blackness’ by adopting a raceless identity to pursue academic success and upward socioeconomic mobility (Fordham, 1988). This frame of reference, most notoriously championed by Fordham (1988, 1996), posit that successful Black academic achievers adopt strategies of “acting white”. In contrast, much research has refuted these claims through research findings that suggest adopting a strong racial identity and awareness promotes academic success and educational attainment for Blacks (Anderson, 1988;
Morris 22 Codjoe, 2006; Weinberg, 1977). More specifically, Codjoe’s (2001) article provides results of a study that investigated and analyzed the experiences of academically successful Black students in Alberta’s secondary schools. From the narrative these students provided, Codjoe (2001) shows how Black students overcome racism not by abandoning their cultural heritage and race but by aggressively affirming it. This study has significant impacts on the future of Black educational experiences in Canada; most importantly, by demonstrating how educators have greatly underestimated the effects of racism on Black youth in multiethnic societies, like Toronto. In Canada, alternative work by Codjoe (2006) focuses on the traditional tendency to emphasize the poor academic performance of Black students by stereotyping them as “loud, lazy, muscular, criminal, dumb, deviant, deprived” and so on (Codjoe, 2006). In contrast, this work studies those students who have achieved in spite of considerable adversity. The data from this study implies that indeed factors such as pride in one’s heritage and knowledge of one’s culture positively contribute to academic success. As a seminal text for redirecting the discourse surrounding Black academic excellence, it falls short of accounting for the complexity of urban Black male identities and the experiences that encourage, or facilitate, students to adopt stereotypical roles for the sake of peer networks, identity and a ‘comfortable’ high school experience that weighs more heavily on social figurings than academic ones.
To my knowledge, no study has systematically assessed the effectiveness of manipulating Black identity through aesthetic (hip-hip) representation as a strategy for maintaining an academic ethos. In this vein, some have explored particular aspects of
Black culture and its relation to educational performance. For example, Lisa Delpit
(1992) calls into question the vernacular hierarchy maintained by schools by suggesting
Morris 23 that it is not only racist, but classist to demand that urban minority students put aside the language of their homes and community to adopt a discourse that is not only alien but has been instrumental in furthering their oppression (Delpit, 1992). Delpit notwithstanding, the literature that clouds discourse analysis, or practices of code-switching, as related to academic aspirations and identity politics for Black students offer a binary reading of culture that avoids the multi-layered realities and true contextual arrangements of what it is like to navigate school as an urban Black male. This study addresses the direct notion of identity politics as it relates to behavioral adaptation in academic settings. The
“juggling act” that urban Black males must embody in order to remain in legitimate networks with their peers while achieving academic success in a site largely regulated by hegemonic standards is a fundamental analysis of this work.
Studies centered on the relationship between peer relationships and academic success of Black youths typically utilize the discourse of “fictive kinship systems” in an understanding of their literature. Fordham (1986) describes fictive kinship as a family- like connection between a group of people within a society, not related by blood or marriage by who maintain a sense of peoplehood or collective social identity resulting from their similar social and economic status. The term conveys the “idea of
‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ of all Black Americans” (Fordham, 1988, p. 61). While the notion of “fictive kinship” serves as a salient and expedient trope for discussion on the collective identity of particular groups, regarding the issue of urban Black males, literature that contends that “being black does not necessarily grant membership into the fictive kinship system” is troubling (Harris and Marsh, 2010, p. 1244).
For instance, Fordham states:
Morris 24 “One can be black in color, but choose not to seek membership in the fictive kinship system. One can also be denied membership by the group because one’s behavior, attitudes and activities are perceived as being at variance with those thought to be appropriate and group-specific, which are culturally patterned and serve to delineate ‘us’ from ‘them’” (Fordham, 1988, p. 56).
This train of thought, which has been adopted by much literature pertaining to Black peer networks and academic achievement (Ogbu, 2003; Tyson, Darity, and Castellino, 2005;
Weis, 1985), demonstrates analysis that represents a disturbing judgment about the dichotomizing nature that currently exists in Black culture. Literature of this nature does not account for the role that hip-hop culture plays into the process of demarcating social groupings within Black peer network systems. Instead, literature preferential to this mode of explication subsequently proposes to further the negative internalizations that Black males already feel about themselves, especially when in school settings. One can’t help but feel the self-hatred that bleeds through the pages of those who proposed the idea that
Black culture equates to deficient culture. Unfortunately, literature prescribing to this notion is abundant to the field of analysis on race and education.
To allude to the title of this work, as portrayed in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, both Will Smith and Carlton Banks are Black men. Carlton’s identity, however varied from Will’s, does not deny nor restrict Carlton from claiming membership as a Black youth. Carlton is still as Black as Will’s character. But he simply isn’t, for lack of a better term, considered ‘cool.’ The lines between “coolness,” or popularity, and “Blackness” are made mute through literature that prescribes to a notion that the Black community emphasizes group loyalty in situations involving conflict or competition with whites.
Harris and Marsh’s (2010) statement that, “membership in the fictive kinship system is primarily determined by the larger black community’s judgment regarding whether an
Morris 25 individual adequately practices the fundamental elements of ‘black culture’” (p. 1245) is flat-out misguided by its failure to speak to the young Black males’ preoccupation with a hip-hop based cultural system that manifests popularity and belonging through a means that, at times, conflict with the hegemonic spaces of educational institutions. The pessimistic narration slandering Black culture as one that views academic performance as futile and “adopts an identity oppositional to the dominant culture, which includes a cultural frame of reference that does not value academic success” (Harris and Marsh,
2010, p. 1245) is damaging and ignores the systemic factors that more appropriately result in Black academic underachievement. The tendency to analyze identity orientation through a black and white dichotomy must be challenged because this framework avoids fruitful discussion regarding the complexity of Black personhood. Literature emphasizing this dichotomy may interpret individual difference, self-expression, and so forth through an epistemology that seeks to understand these differences through over-used symbols of
Black vs. White archaic tropes of identity. I suggest that the phenomenon of Black urban identity construction is better captured through self-reporting rather than observational interpretation of students’ behavior. This is precisely what my study aims to present.
Furthermore, I have found very little to no research on is how youth who claim a hip-hop identity experience “shifts” in how that identity is demarcated, (re)produced and
(re)negotiated over time as they progress through their scholastic careers. More specifically, no study that I am aware of examines how youth, who feel the need to belong to hip-hop/urban “Black” culture, alter and evolve their outward representations
(read: identification by means of aesthetics, peer groups and vernacular) of that culture as they move through high school and into university. Several studies have indicated how,
Morris 26 in education, Black males are at the bottom or near the bottom of all academic achievement categories and are grossly over- represented among school suspensions, dropouts, and special education tracks (Noguera, 2003; Reed, 1988). But almost no work has examined the ways in which urban Black males, who primarily claim a hip-hop identity, navigate school settings successfully onto university and how (and in what ways) their identity performance changes in the process.
A last point of acknowledgment must be devoted to literature regarding the production of space. Because my study analyzes how the physical space of educational institutions contributes to, impedes, transforms and ultimately shapes one’s identity, literature on the topic is particularly worthwhile. Sherene Razack eloquently rationalizes how closely space is tied into the individual (Razack, 2002). As Razack states, “the subject who maps his space and thereby knows and controls it, is also the imperial man claiming the territories of others for his own; the inventor of terra nullius (Razack, 2002, p. 12). Albeit an historical account that details the origins of mapping space, cartography, and how such a mechanism espouses a new form of subjectivity that enables space to exist, Razack clearly outlines the specific practices of knowledge production used to create racial space, and more specifically, the racial other. Kirby (1996) extends this train of thought by explaining how “the mapping subject, now as then, is a contrast incapable of responding to many of the features of the (geopolitical) environment; that it is an exclusive structure encoded with a particular gender, class and racial positioning” (Kirby,
1996, p. 46).
Still, literature that pertains to the field of spatial understanding maintains more objective and philosophical views on its importance. When one considers the analysis of
Morris 27 space and how it is produced, one comes to note that “the modern field of inquiry known as epistemology has inherited and adopted the notion that the status of space is that of a
‘mental thing’ or ‘mental place’” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 3). Space existing as a non-tangible means is an understanding that is crucial to my analysis, especially considering I examine the ways high schools and universities create distinguishable environments that simultaneously work to create a culture of homogeneity and dominant discourse. In essence, space represents the political use of knowledge, thusly, like energy and time, are an empty abstraction devoid of reality without the energy that is deployed within it
(Todorova, 2006). Radhika Mohanram (1999) is also useful in capturing the account of the Black body through notions of whiteness as a form of social capital that allows for movement. She describes the two bodies in terms of racial and spatial attributes: “[f]irst whiteness has the ability to move; second the ability to move results in the unmarking of the body. In contrast, blackness is signified through a marking and is always static and immobilizing” (Mohanram, 1999; Razack, 2002). This analysis is especially important when one considers the navigational aspects of the urban Black male student in school settings. Essentially, the process through which individuals gain a sense of self is unambiguously connected with space, and as Mohanram (2011) puts it, “racial difference is also spatial difference” (Razack, 2002, p. 167).
Chapter III. Methodology
“My people be Projects or Jail, Never Harvard or Yale” Nas, Book of Rhymes, God’s Son
Morris 28 Methodology speaks to the means by which knowledge can be produced/acquired, and in this section I present and justify my choices of methodology and method for the proposed study. This study works on a three-pronged axis that ties together growing culture, the experiences of educated urban Black men as well as pedagogies that transcend the classroom and educational institution. This study utilizes a phenomenological approach that heavily relies on interviewing and qualitative data analysis. A phenomenological approach is beneficial in such a study because,
“phenomenology thematizes the phenomenon of consciousness, and, in its most comprehensive sense, it refers to the totality of lived experiences that belong to a single person” (Giorgi, 1997, p. 236).
Ethnography is a highly useful methodology for addressing a range of research questions within a range of professions. Essentially, it “is the study of social interactions, behaviors, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organizations, and communities” (Reeves, et al., 2008, p. 512). Its central aim is, “to provide rich, holistic insights into people’s views and actions, as well as the nature (that is, sights, sounds) of the location they inhabit, through the collection of detailed observations and interviews”
(Reeves, et al., 2008, p. 512). Through this framework, the goal is to explore and document particular aspects of a social phenomenon, rather than merely testing hypotheses about it.
What underpins my research is a question that begs for a focus on understanding that seeks to reveal individual lived experiences and use those experiences to describe, analyze and make a profound assertion that is meaningful. The phenomenological approach “is concerned with the phenomena that are given to experiencing individuals,
Morris 29 because nothing is possible if one does not take consciousness into account, but all of the givens must be understood in their given modalities, as phenomena, that is, not as real existents” (Giorgi, 1997, p. 238). Phenomenology can be described as a research approach that seeks to make explicit the implicit structure and meaning of human experience (Atkinson, 1972; Sanders, 1982). The most basic task of phenomenology is to acquire a certain form of knowledge that is concerned with the essential characteristics of consciousness and intentionality (Hopp, 2007). Put most simply, it is an analysis of the way in which things or experiences show themselves (Sanders, 1982). Thus, the “real” experiences of my participants, through analyses, become bracketed and analyzed in their phenomenal status. This study’s aim then, is to put the individual at the center of knowledge and use his articulations to say something about social formations and society.
In this case, the elaborations on the utilization of hip-hop vernacular and aesthetics and its correlation with education become the situating point of the lived experience of my participants.
When studying the effects that racism has on educational excellence, it becomes clear through a phenomenological perspective, that “either one acknowledges its presence and role or else it silently makes its presence felt anyway” (Giorgi, 1997, p. 236). Due to the central themes presented in this study, understanding the phenomenon of urban Black male experiences with school leads precisely to a critical pillar of phenomenology in that this mode of analysis, as it “begins its analysis of intuitions of presences not in their objective sense, but precisely in terms of the full range of ‘givenness,” no matter how partial or marginal, that are present, and in terms of the meaning that the phenomena have for experiencing subjects” (Giorgi, 1997, p. 237). Ultimately, the approach “clarifies the
Morris 30 nature of our everyday experience of objects and the world, and thereby clarifies both (1) the nature of those objects and that world precisely as objects of experience and (2) the nature of ourselves and of other subjects in and of the world” (Drummond, 1990, p. 243).
Using a phenomenological analysis is a means of protecting the sense of ‘an ordinary’ and the scientific assertions that philosophically motivate the falsifications steered towards them (Finegan, 2012).
Qualitative analysis concerning issues of racial identity is typically based on the researchers’ theoretical manipulations of what they consider (or lay-out) as “race consciousness” vs. race ambivalence. Many studies using the qualitative framework attempt to situate race and identity construction with analysis that are demarcated by limiting questions that are somehow supposed to represent one’s affinity to, or deviance from, their race. Instead of focusing on race, many of these studies lose their impact because they lump race-based analysis with aspects of identity that rigidly point to personality, performance, etc. Quantitative studies make it extremely difficult to accurately pinpoint identity, especially when that identity under examination is largely tied to race. By analyzing the vernacular and aesthetics, or communicative properties, of urban Black males, this study aims at illustrating the dimensions along which discourse is involved in dominance, namely through the enactment of dominance in text and talk in specific contexts, and more indirectly through the influence of discourse on the minds of others (Van Dijk, 1993). Examples of text in this study are hip-hop music and popular culture portrayals of urban Black males.
Notions of partiality and marginality precisely tie into the Afrocentric feminist epistemology, championed by Patricia Hill-Collins (2003), which eloquently urges
Morris 31 academics to not only validate, but also weave the centrality of lived experiences in the theoretical frameworks of scholarly writing. The use of phenomenological analyses demonstrates that consciousness is not simply a neutral presenter of objects of givens, but rather, contributes to the very intellectual quality of meaning of such objects by its multiple modes, styles, forms and so forth.
Critical Anti-Racism Theory (CART) is a theoretical framework that can be used to theorize, examine and challenge the ways race and racism explicitly and implicitly impact systems and social structures, such as schooling (Dei, 2013). By acknowledging multiple sites of difference and oppressions, such as race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, language, and religion. CART maintains that oppressions are complex to study and understand (Dei, 2013). This theory asserts that, “we cannot understand race without being anti-racist” (Dei, 2013). Although CART acknowledges that race is a set of social constructions, it also realizes that “it is racism that has made race real” (Dei, 2013, p. 73).
CART is integral to this study because of the historical nature of its origins, claiming that race and racism is a system, deriving from a colonial projection of order. This is no more pressing and explicit than in education, and especially in the schooling of our urban
Black males. CART posits, “oppressions have many things in common – for example, oppressions work within structures, they are intended to establish material advantage and disadvantage, and they make invidious distinctions of self/Other” (Dei, 2013, p. 73). By using this methodological framework, I seek to include analysis that produces counter- stories to balance the hegemonic, often white, representations of the experiences of heterosexual urban Black male bodies. Furthermore, giving saliency and centrality to race
Morris 32 and racial oppression should not be seen as an attempt to hierarchize and/or privilege one form of social oppression over another.
The ability of this framework lies in its continual persistence on voicing the silenced without measuring one form of an oppression against another. To put the complexities of
CART more succinctly, “the danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place” (Moraga,
1983, p. 24). Thus, the centrality of this methodology lies in the analysis of experiential knowledge, as CART “recognizes that the experiential knowledge of people of color as legitimate, appropriate, and critical to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racial subordination” (Yosso, 2005, p.74; Delgado Bernal, 2002). Drawing specifically on the lived experiences of urban Black males fosters a sense of ownership and accuracy in analysis.
In its essence, CART “starts from the premise that race and racism are central, endemic, permanent and a fundamental part of defining and explaining how US society functions” (Yosso, 2005, p. 73; Bell, 1992) while also acknowledging the “inextricable layers of racialized subordination based on gender, class, immigration status, surname, phenotype, accent and sexuality” (Yosso, 2005, p. 73; Crenshaw, 1989).
This methodological framework is necessary also in that it takes up an explicitly political agenda, with its focus on racial discrimination and white supremacy (Marshall and Rossman, 2011). However, it must also be understood that, “[t]he use of the race concept as an analytical and practical tool is only valid if it allows for adequate
Morris 33 discussion and the transformation of relations of power, domination and oppression”
(Dei, 1996, p. 17). Because CART amplifies voices from the margins, this study is another attempt to move from intellectual observations to practical agency. Lastly, one of the fundamental tenets of CART is the utilization of interdisciplinary approaches. By suturing critical discourse theory and cultural capital theory, I will be fulfilling a core epistemological concern of CART.
Critical discourse analysis focuses on the “role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 249). It is an understanding that has evoked a methodology that examines the ways in which people utilize cultural resources to tell stories; “how they organize their versions of events, and how they build identities for themselves and others as they speak” (Wetherell, 2003, p. 11). This conceptual argument is linked to specific and concrete referents. Wetherell (2003) refers to cultural resources as metaphors. This theory has evoked a methodology that pays particular attention to what types of metaphors Black males use and where these metaphors originate(d). Because my study will have a heavy focus on the articulations of my participants, the supplemental use of this analysis represents a conscious epistemological decision to explore the thematic content of urban Black men in ways that we may be unable to legitimate using Eurocentric criteria for consistency with substantiated knowledge and criteria for methodological adequacy (Collins, 2003). It is through the meshing of these frameworks that I will strive to present a thick description of what it means to be an urban Black male experiencing high school and university.
Moreover, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a framework that focuses on the role of discourse in the (re) production and challenge of dominance. Dominance is thus
Morris 34 defined as, “the exercise of social power by elites, institutions or groups, that results in social inequality, including political, cultural, class, ethnic, racial and gender inequality”
(Van Dijk, 1993). CDA takes a sociopolitical stance, spelling out a particular point of view, both within the discipline and within society at large. By accounting for the intricate relationship between the text, talk, social cognition, power, society and culture,
CDA may be utilized as a method to discover and draw urgent attention to the persistent problems of inequality and modes of social oppression. Importantly, “CDA does not primarily aim to contribute to a specific discipline, paradigm, school or discourse theory.
It is primarily interested and motivated by pressing social issues, which it hopes to better understand through discourse analysis” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 280). Through this method, it is essential to examine and evaluate events that are deemed racist from the point of view of the marginalized. That is, if “knowledgeable Blacks consider an occurrence to be racially motivated, this perspective takes precedence despite mitigating claims or white denials” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 253).
Critical discourse methodologies connected with phenomenological analyses, combine to analyze the structures, strategies or other properties of text, talk, verbal interaction or communicative events that play a role in modes of reproducing dominant and subordinate groups. Because my work focuses on urban Black males’ usage of vernacular and aesthetics, particular emphasis will be paid towards the role of social representation and its effects on social actors. Furthermore, a study analyzing the ways that Black males encapsulate and utilize hip-hop aesthetics and vernaculars mediates an understanding between, “micro- and macro-levels of society, between discourse and action, between the individual and the group” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 249). Or in this case,
Morris 35 between the collective individuals that espouse a particular hip-hop culture and the academic institutions that they ostensibly do not find themselves to be a part of.
Underpinning the two aforementioned methods will be a small but relevant methodology that includes what I would term as “re-mixed” components of Cultural
Capital Theory. When sewn with a critical race perspective, cultural capital theory then becomes significant. Because the crux of my analysis is based on aesthetics, vernacular and peer relationships of urban Black students, significance must be paid towards an understanding of both the benefits and detriments that can be induced from cultural capital theory.
Cultural capital is “institutionalized, i.e., widely shared, high status cultural signals
(attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goals, and credentials) used for social and cultural exclusion” (Lamont and Lareau, 1988, p. 156). Thus, using cultural capital theory as a complementary method of analysis in a study that centers around race, and urban Black males in particular, it becomes important to assess directly the academic impact of the dispositions and practices that are thought to embody (or be void of) cultural capital. Because much of cultural capital theory avoids cutting across social cleavages, this theory must be used with discretion.
Much of cultural capital theory examines the affects of cultural capital from a top- down approach, looking at the capital of elite status members of society and trying to forge a correlation between these markers and academic success. The approach for this work takes the theory and flips it; looking at cultural capital from the bottom up, centralling the perspective on those bodies who are read to have very little or no dominant cultural capital. Without reifying elite culture as synonymous with universal
Morris 36 culture, the theory helps to understand how students who are immersed in hip-hop culture manifest and express their culture and to what effects these articulations have on their schooling experiences. When CART is primary in analysis, supplemented with the lens of cultural capital theory, we can account for the connection (or experiences) between cultural advantage, race and academic success.
From this theory, the argument is made that “people of color ‘lack’ the social and cultural capital required for social mobility. As a result, schools most often work from this assumption in structuring ways to help ‘disadvantaged’ students whose race and class background have left them lacking necessary knowledge, social skills, abilities and cultural capital” (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 27). Although this frame of analysis can potentially be used to make damaging assertions, it is a useful framework in allowing one to critique the assumptions of “normative” values and performances. Especially when worked together with CART, which “makes race, and its interlocking relationship with gender, class, and other demographic factors, central to any social analysis,” cultural capital theory allows this study to critically look at the experiences of the participants in this research (James, 2012, p. 468).
Of course, “defined in terms of exclusionary class-related practices and dispositions, cultural capital does not substantially account for the relationship between social privilege and academic success” (Kingston, 2001, p. 88). This is glaringly correct when you look at the plethora of work done in the field of cultural capital pertaining to education (Dimaggio, 1994; Dimaggio and Mohr, 1985; Lamont, 1992; Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997). Most of these works focus on class distinctions without any reflection on how race, and race itself, plays into cultural capital. Of course, students who go to
Morris 37 museums (a traditional exemplar found in cultural capital theory) are likely to be advantaged in other matters, such as educationally sensibly parents and material resources for example. When examined from the point of referents of social class, there are many holes in this theory, largely because it flagrantly omits the pertinent variable of race. But when connected to race, and in particular race relations, the method can be used effectively to illustrate that rewarding an appreciation of particular cultures are linked to school-based practices.
When race-based practices are juxtaposed with school culture, they illustrate exclusionary tactics produced and re-produced by hegemony and power. Seemingly, academic participation in hegemonic tenets (which has now slid into also accounting for the majority of middle-class cultural capital) may reflect the fact that “this participation stimulates students’ curiosity, perseverance, sense of mastery, and imagination”
(Kingston, 2001, p. 97). But playing the trombone is unequivocally more validating that being able to “freestyle” or recite countless hip-hop lyrics verbatim. Thus, the argument made against cultural capital theory, that many parts of culture matter for school success and not as a form of capital, ignores the fact that even particular traits that may be universally equal (traits of mastery and imagination) are not arbitrarily valued. When one moves beyond the surface of cultural capital theory and digs deeper into the core assertions surrounding culture and its capital, the framework alludes to significant factors between one’s culture and academic success. Carefully minding the theoretical land mine of evolving into an argument that proclaims some practices are ‘better’ than others, cultural capital theory can be used to point to some of the reasons why particular cultures have better ‘academic’ skills and thus greater academic success. In this sense, the
Morris 38 framework finds some grounding without conflating necessary distinctions that ought to be made.
Bourdieu is right in claiming that, “schools reflect and are responsive to the cultural orientations of the dominant class” (Kingston, 2001, p.89). What is important to note from this theory is the idea of “communicative competence,” which is essentially a “style of discourse, including nonverbal cues, accent, and pacing of speech” (DiMaggio and
Mohr, 1985, p. 1255). When examining the affects that a prescribed hip-hop vernacular and aesthetics has on urban Black male experiences, this understanding of communicative competence factors in heavily. So if the core of the Bourdieusien argument has failed to find support on an anti-racist praxis, at least particular aspects of the language of his argument can live on in other research by combining his methods with theories that are more attuned to the importance of race.
The methodology I utilize facilitates a data collection through conducting extensive interviews. In phenomenological and social research, interviewing has long been one of the most crucial measures of data collection (Hammersley, 2008). Despite the participant’s direct or definitive knowledge of their subjectification, what people say in interviews can help us understand their dispositions (Hammersley, 2008). More importantly, this research is action oriented, and will be used to promote new knowledges that can make an impact on communities and their relationship with schooling. Theories and methods are more relevant if they are able to contribute to the main aim of the critical approach, namely understanding and improving upon situations mired in social inequality and injustice.
Morris 39 Interviewing involves an analysis of data that involves “explicit interpretation of the meanings and functions of human actions; the product of this analysis primarily takes the form of verbal descriptions and explanations” (Reeves, et al., 2008, p. 512). It is classically situated in observation and face-to-face interaction between researcher and participant. In accordance with ethical issues combined with the political stance that
CART works within, reflexivity remains a central tenet in the analysis of this work. I am to account for the relationship that I share with the world I am investigating by presenting extensive orations by my participants so that readers, in the light of phenomenological analysis, can judge the possible impacts of my influences on the study. In addition, I will use methodological triangulation, which is, “a technique designed to compare and contrast different types of methods to help provide more comprehensive insights into the phenomenon under study” (Reeves, et al., 2008). Specifically, I will utilize theory triangulation that will facilitate an approach of the use of different concepts and theories in understanding to see how each helps concretize a rich understanding of the data presented. Interlocking the concepts of identity, masculinity, and space serve to strengthen the research focus and analyses. My choice in taking a phenomenological approach was largely due to the opportunity this framework gave me in gathering empirical insights into social practice that are normally hidden from not only statistical and quantitative work, but also the public gaze.
This study utilized six self-identified Black male participants who are grounded in a sense of Black community. Participants were recruited through query posts via
Facebook and flyers at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, and York
University. By conducting deep extensive interviews, an assortment of data that
Morris 40 specifically illustrates how Black males cope and react to stereotypes that they experience in school was elaborated and subsequently analyzed using a mixed-coding approach. I maximized variation amongst participants by fostering a sample of eight participants and filtering the participants in a way that reflects other relevant criteria to my study (such as age and class). Individual interviews were tape-recorded for subsequent transcription and analysis. Through interviewing, data was organized along two specific frames of thought.
Firstly, respondents were coded by their affinity with “Black, urban culture”. This consists of eliciting participants who self-identify as urban Black males and/or who self- identify with hip-hop culture. Once these participants were arrived at, I explored their narratives to discover interpretations of what it might mean to be an “urban Black male.”
The second kind of data collected targeted and analyzed the cultural and spatial barriers to Black male identity that present themselves in both the high school and university settings. Thus, my participants either recently graduated university or are currently in a university program.
This style of qualitative research methods, by its combined association with
Critical Anti-Racism Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Cultural Capital Theory, works to create a “deeper and richer picture of what is going on in particular settings”
(Goodwin and Horowitz, 2002, p. 44). Such a narrative analysis, framed through methods of phenomenological approaches, offers counter narratives that serve to balance the hegemonic representation of Blacks. The production of counter narratives is done through testimony – giving witness to social injustices (Marshall and Rossman, 2011). This is precisely the reason behind the prominent accounts of my participants’ in the analysis and discussion of the following findings.
Morris 41 Furthermore, an account, or profile, of each participant is appropriate at this time before I delve into analysis. Their production of a counter narrative that informs the discourse pertaining to urban Black male experience in educational settings is not replete without an acknowledgement of the valiant forthcomings of the individuals who were willing to engage and endure in this process with me. These participants reflect a cross- section of data that cuts through socio-economic, geographical, cultural and generational lines. With their consent, I humbly honor them with a brief synopsis of each individual.
Michael’s Story
Michael was born in Canada. Through his reflections, it is clear that he considers himself as an African, and to be more specific, Ghanaian, first and foremost. Michael grew up in the Rexdale area of Toronto where he lived in a government assisted housing apartment on Kipling Avenue, near Steeles. The youngest child of a father who worked as a delivery driver for a major manufacturer, and a mother who earned steady employment working the late shift on a factory line in the west end of the city. Michael was frequently left to establish his own navigational awareness and gravitated to football and hip-hop. Luckily, he took an interest and excelled in the sport. Upon leaving Henry
Carr Collegiate he earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Toronto where he eventually earned a degree in History. He is currently operating a marketing company he co-created with colleagues from the University of Toronto.
Kevin’s Story
Morris 42
Kevin was also born and raised in the west end of Toronto. Growing up in the
Driftwood section of the Jane and Finch community, Kevin lived in a single parent household with a younger sister. He briefly lived in Ghana from the age of 9 until 12 because of what he describes as, “acting out at school” and his father’s decision to “set him straight”. Due to the tragic loss of his mother at a young age, there is no doubt that early childhood trauma impacted his identity and how he chose to negotiate schooling.
After moving back to Canada, Kevin attended Monsignor Percy Johnson Secondary
School in the Jane and Finch area. After his freshman year at York University, Kevin transferred to the University of Toronto to pursue a degree in Criminology. He is currently a police officer for the Peel Region police force.
Taureen’s Story
Taureen’s life is a story of exemplary discipline and individual focus. Born and raised in Jamaica, Taureen was subject to moving from house to house in the city of
Kingston, Jamaica living with various family members. With no father around and a mother who emigrated to Canada for the sake of a better life, Taureen experienced an unstable childhood which is undoubtedly cause for the many walls he has established concerning kinship. On the other hand, this experience has given him genuine insight into the ways one can establish relationships while remaining true to oneself. After immigrating to Canada at the age of ten, Taureen lived in the Martin Grove area of
Etobicoke where he attended Martin Grove Collegiate. After his junior year, he
Morris 43 transferred to Applewood Heights in Mississauga. He eventually earned enrollment at
Wilfred Laurier University where he studied sociology. Taureen is now a police officer employed by York region.
Braxton’s Story
Braxton grew up in the Malvern area of Scarborough. He is currently 21 years old and expresses a being that is fully engulfed not only in hip-hop culture, but culture itself.
The only son to parents who espoused a “live and let learn” form of experience and mentality as Braxton states, he dabbled into many endeavors as a youth. At Lester B.
Pearson Collegiate in Scarborough, Braxton played on the basketball team, was part of
Pearson’s hip-hop dance collective, and on many occasions, was suspended from school.
Subsequently, Braxton was transferred from Pearson Collegiate to SEED Alternative
School. There he earned stellar grades and was awarded an academic scholarship to
Wilfred Laurier University. Braxton eventually decided to leave the university due to systemic issues that I will not comment on and is currently working as a youth counselor while also holding a part-time job.
Mitchell’s Story
Mitchell is currently pursuing a degree in commerce and criminology at the
University of Toronto. Currently in his sophomore year, Mitchell is also a contributing member of the Black Student Alliance at the University, is an active contributor to the
Black Lives Matter movement in Toronto, as well as many other student-led organization
Morris 44 movements at the University. Mitchell was raised in the suburb of Mississauga and extensively attended schools that, by his accounts, were predominantly white. His father is a social worker and his mother is a nurse, both of Jamaican descent. He attended a
Northstar Montessori in elementary and then a predominately white high school, St.
Francis Xavier, as a teen. Mitchell plans to attend Law School and become a lawyer.
Cory’s Story
Cory was raised in the Markham and Lawrence area of Scarborough. He attended
Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute in Scarborough where he expressed an “up and down” relationship with schooling, teachers, and his grades. Cory is of mixed-parentage: having one parent who is Caucasian and one who is Black. Throughout my interview, he explicitly pointed out this understanding on several occasions. Cory later attended Sir
Wilfred Laurier University where he earned a degree in Political Science. Ironically, this is the very subject he had experienced issues with in high school. He is now a high school teacher at a private school in the Forest Hill area of Toronto.
Chapter IV. Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Academic Performance
“What’s the price for a Black man’s life, I check the toe-tag, not one zero in sight, I turn the TV on, not one hero in sight, Unless he dribble or he fiddle with Mics”
- J. Cole, January 28th, 2014 Forest Hills Drive
Morris 45 In high school, there is a close-minded perception of what being an urban Black male entails. A major factor contributing to the fixed identities of the Black male are the processes that produce subjectivities and construct bodies as subjects, which can be
“spoken” (Hall, 1990). Media discourses cycle a reproduction of ‘Black masculinity’ that engrain an idea that to be an urban Black male, one must embody some type of, “slang, broken English, saggy pants, the N word…the commercialized idea of what a black man should be” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015). For urban Black males who grow up immersed with this quasi-ideal on a daily basis, this representation of identity becomes part of their existence as one’s heritage intersects with contemporary lifestyle to create a meeting point. As Stuart Hall (1996) notes, “on the one hand, the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpolate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities” (p. 5-6). The feeling for a sense of belonging to a collective
(particular age group, social class, race, gender, generation) intervenes in the construction of our identity. Thus, identity for the urban Black male becomes fashioned by the perception of what it means to take up that particular body combined with the subjective experiences one internalizes through his experiences.
The idea of Black masculinity has long been engrained within contemporary society. What one looks or acts like is equated with what one “is like” (Ibrahim, 2008).
Hence, it impacts various actors within society, especially Black males and the very ways in which they read themselves. Media discourses augment the aesthetic and identity representations that Black males are subjected to. Because of this, the breeding ground of
Morris 46 the Black male aesthetic is cyclically reproduced in urban areas where many young,
Black males grow up. As Taureen asserts:
“For the most part, I don’t want to put a percentage on it, but 90% of my peers in those communities embodied those things I just stated, you know? Not that they are all negative, but for the most part, they – it was a situation where they fed off of each other. We lived in neighborhoods where your parents had two jobs, they were never home. We were pretty much our own parents – we policed each other. So whatever your peers did, you did, right. And, a large majority of the time there was no positivity surrounding that.” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015)
Before, during and after school, the urban Black male is immersed in this identity game. In this case, race and identity “becomes a process of signification, an ideological event where the meaning does not lie in the object but how the object is signified”
(Ibrahim, 2008, p. 301; italics in original). The immense negativity, perpetuated by the media and replicated by urban neighborhoods, becomes an interwoven part of the urban
Black males’ reality, and ultimately his schema. This has connotations towards his academic success and attitudes towards schooling. As we can see, identity, espoused through media representations, individual suturing, and cultural epistemologies, is an act of “becoming” as well as “being” that representation that belongs to the past as much as it does the present (Hall, 1990).
This sentiment is especially valid when one considers the impact that aesthetics and representations of hip-hop culture have on one’s schooling experience and identity performance. Taureen expresses an example of this:
“Granted friendship is not dictated upon the way you dress or the way you speak or the way you carry yourself. But in high school it is very fragile. You gotta fit in! Right. And if you don’t fit in, you’re not going to be in the in-crowd, you’re not going to be cool, you’re not going to be whatever it is. So we’re all going to be a victim of
Morris 47 that, at some point in life, especially at a younger age, ‘cause you want to conform. You need to conform, and at that age, self-worth is based off of how your peers view you. A large majority of it, you know what I mean?” (TA, personal communication, December 11, 2015).
The notion of “success”, during teenage years, is primarily founded on an impulse to conform. For urban Black males, hip-hop culture is the basis for how one can draw upon this insistence of conformity. Here race and identity, defined in terms of language, culture, and aesthetics, are fused together, and internal differences among and within urban Black male youth become erased because, from an outsider’s point of view, ‘they all look alike!’ This process of identification by means of “racial lumping,” tightly knits itself to racism and the subsequent racial logic that follows from it: an establishment and maintenance of some type of ‘color line’ (Lopez & Espiritu, 1990; Omi & Winant, 1998).
From this, some would argue that the very culture that is authentic to urban Black male identity, hip-hop, superficially embodies an apathetic view towards academic endeavors. Successful Black males are seen as entertainers and athletes; in this stratosphere of what discourse presents itself as success for the urban Black male, schooling takes a back seat. In essence, identity becomes something that comes from somewhere and has a history (Hall, 1990). Because identity is co-created; taking a form of agency that is contingent on traditional notions of the particular body, the establishing of peer networks based off of vernacular and aesthetics becomes the focal point of kinship, particularly in high school. Students, like Taureen, are forging networks, not based off of an enlightened pursuit of future growth, bonding, and evolving, but based off of how “cool” or “Black” you could represent yourself.
Morris 48 “Black masculinity then becomes, “kinda like a box or an image of what a black male should be, or their role in society so to speak” (C.A., personal communication,
November 8, 2015). One’s identity thus becomes an entrapment of perception and subjectivity. This “box” offers a bird’s eye view of how a society is seen by its members and how the latter interact (Hall, 1990). When the Black male diverges from presumptions regarding what he ought to be, then he himself most importantly internalizes these challenges. The identity politics that Black males experience represent a fixed reality about himself in a society that has already placed limitations on his body in accordance with particular aspects of social life and success. The dynamics of such a situation should not fall upon race, but on the process of its signification, or to use a more concrete term, racialization (Lopez & Espiritu, 1990).
Unfortunately how Black males affiliate or disaffiliate with an identity that replicates an aesthetic connection to hip-hop culture forces them to take on traits that on the one hand, promote and prioritize their connection to an identity that is integral and authentic to their being, and on the other, delegitimizes them by subjecting their bodies to the historical and contemporary constructions of that image. Thus, Black masculinity is
“constantly in question when black males challenge it or act outside of that norm that society dictates in regards to what a Black male should be or act like” (C.A., personal communication, November 8, 2015). In high school settings, Black males are unfortunately placed in a unique binary that challenges the means of subverting the idea that representation is merely a re-presentation of what is already there. They are navigating this while trying to develop their own identities and future paths leading toward academic success. As Braxton states more poignantly:
Morris 49 “[a]nything dealing with black masculinity and experiences is always paired with all negativity. So it’s like I’m caught in the middle where it’s like I contribute to some of these things but I don’t want to be the taste-maker of these things, you know what I mean? Like I am part of Black masculine culture – but what is it defined as? Because I am trying to define it differently. So I am always trying to find ways where I can give the term a different connotation” (BX, personal communication, November 23, 2015).
This constant “redefining” of Black culture and what a Black male is, and ought to be, is a burdensome experience while many other bodies have the luxury of being naïve. The notions of what it means to be an urban Black male, grounded in hip-hop culture, are tied into an understanding of aesthetics which suggest the limitations of particular Black masculine identities that are both self-imposed and directed by society at large.
The experience urban Black males undergo gains further saliency when one considers hip-hop’s correlation with the culture of school. Hip-hop culture is arguably the most impactful source for demarcations of aesthetic performance in relation to identity for the urban Black male. As Cory asserts, “Hip-hop, or the culture, was definitely something that I could put an ear out for and get something to respond back that I could feed off of. Also, it is sometimes…it it’s kinda like your guide to figuring yourself out within the school” (C.A., personal communication, November 8, 2015). Discourse saturates the image of what it means to be an urban Black male; subsequently, it subjects urban youth to interpret how they can represent their identity in a way that validates a cherished hip-hop aesthetic. Braxton’s experience reveals the typical internalizations that come with aesthetic representation for the sake of a collective identity:
“So I was trying to figure out how I could become the “Black masculine”, you know? [laughs] So I thought about how I could do that. Do I need to buy Jordans? So I bought a bunch of Jordans.
Morris 50 Should I have to go find some girls? Should I go to the mall instead of going to class from time to time. You know. So I was trying to fit the negative type” (B.X., personal communication, November 23, 2015).
Specifically enacted ways of dressing, talking and associating with peers, becomes the focal point for one’s assertion of identity in the Black community. How this aesthetic performance becomes intermixed with school indicates the various pressures urban Black males experience as they navigate high school trying to “look the part” of the cool black dude, as Taureen asserts:
“I felt obligated to conform to hip-hop culture if I had any chance of fitting in with my peers. Being an individual that was goal- oriented, I always knew what I wanted to accomplish in life, accomplish in school. Um, but getting through high school with a positive experience was necessary for you to fit in, was necessary for you to have bros, brothers, friends. Um, and a lot of those folks, adhere to hip-hop culture. Were you gonna be an outcast and not do that?” (T.A, personal communication, December 11, 2015)
Fitting in for the sake of having a positive school experience is of utmost importance to all teenagers. For urban Black males, the notion of fitting in by means of a prescribed Black masculinity often comes into contestation with school as an institution.
From a discourse perspective, hip-hop culture is viewed as the opposite of implicit school culture. Ironically, through a developed understanding of how that particular culture, like hip-hop, works is a sign of identity. Understanding, embodying, and defining oneself by a particular culture, like the participants who read my flyer posted outside of various educational institutions around the GTA and were hailed to a belonging that spoke to their sense of being an urban Black male. This points to Hall’s (1996) discourse on the fractious state of identity: Old identity and New identity. Hall (1996) explains that the discourse of Old identity:
Morris 51 “[c]ontains the notion of the true self, some real self inside there, hiding inside the husks of the false selves that we present to the rest of world. It is a kind of guarantee of authenticity. Not until we get really inside… do we know what we are ‘really saying’. It is, in short, an expression of a Cartesian, stable self where the subject is situated within the static discourses of history, self, and memory” (Hall, 2000,p. 145; Ibrahim, 2008).
In effect, urban Black males who cling to a hip-hop identity, and by extension may alienate themselves from school culture, are doing so because they are holding on to a sense of how they truly are despite the constant bombardment of what discourse says about them. Understandably, how the urban Black male defines himself while maintaining a group-based identity while in high school is a challenging dilemma. Tajfel and Turner’s (1986) social identity theory posits that individuals are motivated to achieve positive social identity. This motivation prompts people to engage strategies to maintain and/or construct constructive social identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). So, in the matter regarding hip-hop, Black males and identity become contextual. For youth who are influenced by hip-hop culture, positive social identity does not always result in a productive identity that relates to academic excellence or notions of the “universal” student. As Taureen explains,
“In high school, I wore my pants low. Every year I wanted to get the coolest, brightest thing, from whatever hot store was poppin’ at the time so I could, you know, fit in with my peers. It was necessary for me to feel comfortable in that realm to be able to get through high school with a positive experience. But in that moment I’m not thinking about getting through high school, I’m thinking about fitting in right.” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
Thus, one form of social identity takes precedence over another. When one’s affinity towards representing an identity that demarcates hip-hop culture supersedes one’s appearance as a student, consequences in the form of silencing or negative connotations
Morris 52 regarding that body occur. School then becomes juxtaposed with hip-hop culture and subsequently the urban Black male. It does not, then, take a major intellectual leap to suggest that many urban Black males passively contest the institution of schooling which they already feel that they do not belong to by finding comfort in residing in their subjective understanding of hip-hop culture and Black masculinity.
Completing homework, acting “properly” and subjecting oneself to the authority of the institution of school are all means that some urban Black males utilize when attempting to indicate that they are preserving their culture and identity, or for lack of better term, their miss-guided notions of what Black masculinity entails. Of course, this type of “honorable” sacrifice eventually leads to disastrous outcomes (dropping out, expulsions, etc.) for many urban Black males who proceed to utilize this form of aesthetic performance and group acceptance. Urban Black male students may not be able to earn an A+ by providing their teacher with a deep theoretical understanding of The Chrysalids, written in the medium of a structured five-page essay. But, ask them to explain the lyrics behind the latest Drake song or Kendrick Lamar album, you will find a rich explanation of understanding. This has more to do with an understanding to how identity works, and not some falsified sense of education being universal.
In particular, hip-hop culture explores “how displaced from a logocentric world – where the direct mastery of cultural modes meant the mastery of writing, and hence, both of the criticism of writing (logocentric criticism) and the deconstruction of writing – the people of the black diaspora have, in opposition to all of that, found the deep form, the deep structure of cultural life in music” (Hall, 1996, p. 473). When urban Black males choose to cling to a particular culture like hip-hop, they are doing it because of the
Morris 53 subconscious and subjective understanding they have about their identity, which under most, if not all, circumstances, weighs more heavily upon their being than the school work they are told to do.
Regardless of the tools or strategies used to straddle a critical factor of identity and at the same time navigate school, the constant battle and internal friction that is heaved on urban Black male bodies demarcates a unique struggle between identity and academics. Unfortunately, it seems as though very few “tools” that appease both worlds, the school and hip-hop culture, are at the urban Black males’ disposal. The most promising and least detrimental tool that can be utilized by these young men is an understanding of how to negotiate both realms through modes of adaptability.
Furthermore, the lack of perceived “positive” role models leaves urban Black males with a limited scope for the need to persevere through school, which is inherently a domain dominated by white supremacy and hegemonic practices. As Michael asserts:
“Well, when you look at sports, and when you look at sports like basketball and football…it’s predominately Black athletes…so growing up, you feel that is what Black people excel at. Of course there are many other things that Black people excel at. But this is what is put in your face, all the time. This is what is on TV. This is what you see all the time. So…it..um, it shapes your identity, as in, damn, I eventually want to be like these guys. They’re successful, they’re on TV, and of course when you are in high school growing up you don’t have your own idea of success exactly. So you see these guys in front of you all the time, on TV, so your mind tells you this is success. So essentially trying to be like these guys is what your goal becomes” (M.B., personal communication, October 24, 2014).
Popular culture begins to construct the urban Black male identity. Through tangential demonstrations about the urban Black male, other Black males begin to
Morris 54 junction their aesthetic identity in ways that they have perceived through media discourses. However, Black popular culture is a contradictory space, a site of strategic contestation. But, “it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out; high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus unauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization” (Hall, 1996, p. 473). Important factions of their identity, or collective individuality, are not necessarily achieved through the classroom; so school and scholarly habits are seen as less important. Most notably, the tropes of hip-hop and urban remain in constant flux, but when tied to race, establish relations of domination and subordination and continues to signify difference and inequality (Hooks and Miskovic, 2011).
Even for urban Black males who did excel in school, there is an arresting nature to one’s identity that was felt as they experienced education. The dichotomy between hip- hop cultural aesthetics and academic performance evolves into a palpable friction between school and identity, as Cory asserts:
“So, I was one of the smarter kids in the grade. But by no means did that mean that I wouldn’t dress in baggy pants, or I wouldn’t blast my headphones, or like shout profanity lyrics in the hallways. And if teachers did care [about my behavior], I would say, ‘Well, this is the music I like and this is who I am and that should not – and if anything I am proving to you that I could be a good student while identifying with this particular culture” (C.A., personal communication, November 8, 2015).
These perceived impediments to one’s value on aesthetic identity, for Black males, come with an ever-present friction inside the high school setting. As Cory asserts, he was a “smart kid”, but by no means did that impede his aesthetic performance. This performance as related to identity construction builds on Butler’s (1999) notion of
Morris 55 performativity. For Butler, performativity is a concept that is framed in terms of repetition, parody, and a continual act of becoming any sense of fixity (Butler, 1999). As
Ibrahim (2008) further states, “[i]t suggests that the subject can never be fully and completely; rather, it is always in progress, always becoming” (p. 56). Blasting music and shouting profanities almost becomes an act of performance because Cory earns good grades. The modes of walking, talking, and behaving are indeed performative acts of desire and identification (Ibrahim, 2008). The fact that he was excelling by hegemonic measures most likely made him assert his hip-hop identity even more so!
This idea of a dualism between academic excellence and Black masculine representation demonstrates an internal friction that occurs within Black males through the process of subjectification. Thus, when one does excel in academics, it unfortunately almost feels like he is abandoning part of his hip-hop culture. This type of elaboration on experience begs the question: ‘Do teachers create a schism between identity production and the role students are supposed to take up, or is this simply a manifestation of internalized ideals of how urban Black males think they are being perceived when they walk into classrooms enacting and embracing hip-hop aesthetics?’
This role of aesthetics speaks to what Rinaldo Walcott terms as “multiple masks” that urban Black males must wear as they experience school. Through manifestations of the hip-hop aesthetic, “the role of the mask might be so primary to black manhood that it obscures and covers over how black men have been able to articulate their selfhood both consciously and unconsciously to themselves and others” (Walcott, 2009, p. 75).
Aesthetics, in this sense, serve as a form of survival in the constant re-racialization that urban Black men must endure. “Hence, we perform our identities, desires, and
Morris 56 investments, at least in part, in and through our complex semiological languages of dress, walk, and talk” (Ibrahim, 2008, p. 56). Through this re-racialization in school, urban
Black males cannot help but feel a tinge of anger when forced to address both identity politics and schooling, as Cory has illustrated. The anger that is expressed is often translated in action. In this context, action in the form of shouting profanities in the hallways, while still maintaining good grades, is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification and identity performance. These acts of identity proclamation serve as an example of the process of translation that urban Black males articulate inside the school, even if these articulations have detrimental outcomes resulting in academic subjectification. With the overwhelming consumption that hegemony figures into schooling practices, it is no wonder that, “the masks black men wear are many and varied and might be understood as congruent with the difficult history of the agency or lack thereof of black masculine self-fashioning that is autonomous and wholly self-interested”
(Walcott, 2009, p. 75).
These “masks”, or as I term it, the aesthetic manifestations of hip-hop culture
(read: “swag”), not only serve to insulate Black males from the historical subjectification that they subconsciously continue to endure in schools, but they also serve to empower and forge avenues for an ever-continuing, progressive understanding of Black masculinity. The insidious side of this aesthetic performance is that, by the same sword, it empowers Black males to create their own individual collective identity all the while pressuring them to perform a prescribed role in order to fit into high school spaces.
In contrast, the types of “performance” that Black males enact in university take on a contrary role. As Mitchell explains:
Morris 57 “When I am in class [at the University], I have to participate and prove that – it’s kind of unfair that it has to be that way, that I feel pressure to speak up. Not just because I am a student, but because I am a Black student in a largely non-Black program. It’s like I have to show them that we didn’t just get here because of Affirmative Action or whatever, right. We actually deserve to be here and we can succeed in these programs just like anyone else, right” (M.C.W., personal communication, January 19, 2016).
The idea of how one ought to perform his Black masculinity shifts in university.
While equally pressuring, the shift in representing one’s identity as a Black male includes an overall sociological understanding of ways to counteract the methods that discourse uses to continuously position the Black male as abhorrent to academic culture. Thus, to an unintentional extent, hip-hop aesthetics, while creating autonomy for the Black male body, also bottles Black masculinity, especially within the parameters of high school.
Cory’s illumination on how he navigated the high school classrooms provides a clearer picture. He explains that:
“So, whether my friends were there or not, I always tried to be the cool kid in class. But the extent to which I would go, to actually find that level – that would change. So if my friends were in that class, there would now be an element of competition with who’s the coolest, or who’s the most deviant, who’s the funniest, etcetera. And that would obviously elevate me to – in my misbehavior, to then act out to try to keep that title as the funniest or the coolest in the class” (C.A., personal communication, November 8, 2015).
The culture of hip-hop, which provides much validation and voice for urban
Black males, also creates a narrowing of aesthetics that must be parlayed into performance if one hopes to maintain his identity. The notion that one would choose to navigate this space in such a demeanor seems ludicrous, but this is a poignant reflection on the navigational strategies for urban Black males, for better or worse. The agency
Morris 58 demonstrated by urban Black males is not solely unto them; high school space, in its rigid standards pertaining to what makes up an “ideal” student indeed fosters this type of self- fashioning and aesthetic articulation all the for the sake of fitting in.
This understanding is manifest in a realization of the power of hip-hop aesthetics on urban Black male identification, as Mitchell asserts,
“I wouldn’t say it wouldn’t change how I dressed per se, but just that I paid attention to what I wore. Like maybe I would have worn the same stuff anyways. But now I was like, okay snap backs are in, let me get a few snap backs. You know those wooden, Good Wood Jesus pieces, right? That’s in - so let me get that. And you obviously pick up on the slang right. And it wasn’t so much that I necessarily changed, but I paid attention to it. And I paid attention to whatever it was – how you walked, how you dressed, how you spoke” (M.C.W., personal communication, January 19, 2015).
For the most part, urban Black masculinity, seen through the precarious lens of hip-hop aesthetics, is fostered through external representations. That is to say that a hip- hop aesthetic is constructed on the back of “recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person, or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation” (Hall, 1996, p. 16).
Identity performance, as an urban Black male, becomes grounded in notions of how one looks, walks, talks and behaves, regardless of spatial implications or future repercussions.
In high school, this aesthetic (and navigational) assertion becomes clearly stated by urban
Black males, as Kevin asserts:
“There’s a different way of talking, it’s not proper grammar. There’s a different way of dressing, it’s not what you see, it’s not what you see ummm…it’s not a suit and tie, or you know like, dress pants. It’s baggy jeans, the hoodies, it’s chillin’ on the block with your friends just listening to music…Just doing what you want to do and not conforming to regular norms” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014).
Morris 59 Through the constant aesthetic portrayal of who and what the urban Black male is, many Black males’ internalization of their identity comes at odds with the hegemonic practices of schooling, especially in the high school context where parameters for behavior are so heavily monitored. Popular representations of the urban male combined with the affinity towards a prescribed urban hip-hop culture foster a sense of
“unbelongingness” in a high school setting that can, at times, lead to a passive resistance in the quest to represent an “authentic” young Black male persona. When combined with the reality that high school is the sole place for earning validation, many urban Black males feel stratification between their identity and the larger institution of school, and education in general, as Braxton states:
“In that space there was no real motivation in our circle of people of color to actually do better. There were a few, but they weren’t part of the cool circle, you know? They weren’t in the cool crowd; they weren’t with us. You would see them in the halls like studying, but you were like, that isn’t for me, right” (B.X., personal communication, November 23, 2015).
This perception about one’s identity, combined with aesthetic factors of representation, fosters a marginalization of a culture that ultimately creates a mental schism for urban Black males when that body contemplates how identity mixes with academic aspirations. What many scholars have failed to stress is that the burden of being
“cool” and fitting in but also being academically validated is beyond arduous when navigating high school for urban Black males. Urban Black males, then, easily use high school as a site to resist power and accordingly look upon their peers in a hierarchal fashion primarily based upon those that are doing the same. Thus, in high school, the litmus test of one’s urban Black masculinity oftentimes becomes measured by his willingness to disrupt the traditional customs of school and subsequently, his academic
Morris 60 performance. This phenomenon of representational identity performance, particularly for urban Black males is reminiscent of how cultures have used the body, “as it were, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation” (Hall, 1992). Inability to refuse the Black binary of cultural difference as a site, the body, and the subsequent ways urban Black males utilize it, remain a space of constant contestation. Kevin alludes to this idea in his description of how to “act
Black” in a classroom:
“Hoodness is enacted in classes all the time. You see the person acting as the goof in the class. That goof in class is trying to act his hoodness. He is trying to rebel. He is trying to rebel against the higher authorities. He doesn’t want to listen to the higher authorities. Not doing your homework. Of course for some reason, it’s ‘cool’ not to do your homework, not to listen to what your teacher tells you to do. Doing your own thing in the classroom is what hoodness is. So when you try to break from that and do your homework and answer the questions in the classroom and to be able to articulate yourself when the teacher asks you a question, you are breaking from that hoodness” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014).
The idea of equating ones “Blackness” or his “hoodness” which interweaves with some irrational message that in order to do so means holding a nonchalant disdain towards academics, teachers, and school is a point that many scholars have attempted to analyze but have misfired upon. What many fail to realize is that that C+ in class only cements this ideal of “Black masculinity” amongst his peers, which at that point in his life, is all that he is really concerned with. Thus, academic performance takes a back seat to hip-hop aesthetics, especially in the high school space.
The reality of “fitting in” superseding, or at least equally prioritizing itself, with academic achievement is a daunting and, at many times, devastating experience that
Morris 61 urban Black males are forced to juggle. Through a cultural reading of hip-hop aesthetics, the identity performances that Black males are involuntarily limited to cripple the academic self-worth and academic self-aspirations of the urban Black male. In one sense, hip-hop aesthetics provides a vehicle for comfort, agency and individuality. But in an opposing sense, it limits definitions of urban Black masculinity. In high school, the urban
Black male does not feel that he can be whatever he wants to be. Through this arrested development, we can come to understand a more poignant analysis about the crisis of academic “underachievement” of urban Black males within the school setting.
However, the vehicle that provides both comfort and validation in the same vein can be acquired through means of accommodating and manipulating one’s identity through an understanding of context. Manipulating an urban Black identity for the sake of academic performance is challenging because of the discourse surrounding Black masculinity that ties into teacher expectations. As Mitchell explains:
“They didn’t expect someone Black to be, you know, the head of the class or something like that. And because they didn’t expect it from me…not that I didn’t expect it for myself. But I felt that it was much easier to just not – like I felt that they’ll accept me better, or easier” (M.C.W., personal communication, January 19, 2016).
Whether teachers actually did or did not have this expectation from Mitchell is a moot point. This is what he felt, which is more important, as his sentiment speaks to how urban Black males avoid unnecessary stresses that are created by hegemonic practices.
Avoiding this by means of succumbing to the traditional and persistent ideology of a
‘Black man’ is a course taken by many urban Black males. This is an efficient but oftentimes ineffective opt-out route that many Black males take in school. Aesthetic representation by means of a hip-hop representation, while providing comfort and
Morris 62 allegiance, interrupts schools by the way of prioritizing measures of identity, which lead to subjective opinions about one’s self coupled with stereotypical judgments from both peers (good or bad) and teachers.
Straddling the line between “cool” Black kid and effective student is a more complex, but an exponentially more effective strategy that when employed, steers urban
Black males into the realms of academic excellence while simultaneously maintaining their vital kinship loyalties. Taureen provides some surface insight into this strategy by the means of a timely example: “You see all the Obama parodies or whatever. Every time he sees a brother, he gives them ‘daps’, every time he sees a white guy he gives them the handshake. That’s fitting in, right. It’s necessary to be a chameleon, um, I think, in the environment I grew up in” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015). That
“unnecessary stress on your plate” is avoided by adapting to context, situation and environment. Adapting, as Taureen states, is done by creating a schism of Black masculinity and being open to the fluidity of identity dependent on situational contexts.
Ultimately, adapting one’s identity is a means for reaching the end goal, which is succeeding academically, as Taureen asserts:
“I wanted to be a part of something, a brotherhood. But at the end of the day, I knew what my goals were. And if people weren’t uprising with me, if they trying to bring me down then at some point I’m going to have to separate myself from that, seen. But in the meantime I know I didn’t have to separate myself physically. I could separate myself mentally. But at the same time be there in the physical presence, right. So, um…it was a juggling act, pretty much. So that’s the reason why, 100 percent, I had to fit in, I had to be a part of the popular culture or the hip-hop culture that was going on at that time, but I realized where to draw the line” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
In a sense, high school provides a site for urban Black males to develop an important kinship and express their identity. But through the articulations of my
Morris 63 participants, one can conclude that identity construction also carries an arresting element for the urban Black male. The juggling act, or adaptations that urban Black males consciously engage in, represent how they navigate school both positively and successfully by simultaneously adapting and manipulating their presence. However, this insistence on the need to adapt points to the static co-existence of reality for urban Black males when looked at from the perspective of education and schooling. Ultimately, this re-articulation of multiple identities, whether it is expressing identity through aesthetic forms such as lingo, style, and overall attitude, places urban Black males in a box. The box begins to open when urban Black males adopt adaptive identities that challenge notions of Black masculinity inside the classroom.
Fitting into polarizing forms of identity represents the unique burden that urban
Black males in high school experience. Because hip-hop culture is framed as an identity that is opposite of scholastic excellence, some Black males make conscious decisions to create a schism in their identity in order to produce a counter narrative that is not detracting from their educational aspirations. Once again, Taureen’s employment of a story, which alludes to the title of this Thesis, is useful in explaining why this dichotomy occurs:
“If you watch the Fresh Prince episode where Will was hiding his books in the pizza box, right. Like, you’re trying to be a school boy right? Like, I don’t know why they would try to make fun of somebody like that. But again, like it wasn’t cool for somebody to be a nerd. You know what I mean? It wasn’t cool to be smart. It wasn’t cool to go home and do your homework and not go outside and be on the ball court and be with the dudes that were just chillin’ all night or hoopin’ all night instead of working on the stuff that they needed to work on to get good grades or whatever. You know? Like that wasn’t cool” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
Morris 64 This example explicitly indicates the importance of “performance” for the urban
Black male at school. Constantly reminded of the subjective ideals of what it means to be
“cool” impact scholastic initiatives to the extent that many urban Black males are forced into choosing strategies that subtly allow them to succeed academically through means of
‘straight up’ hiding the intentions regarding educational pursuits. Creating a chameleon identity, as Taureen asserts, or adapting one’s behaviors to suit both school and hip-hop identities creates an appeasement, or opportunity, for the urban Black male to excel academically while still maintaining group ties.
Practically speaking, this type of navigation requires one to (unfortunately) ‘tone down’ his authentic urban Black masculinity and take up representations of hegemonic ideals that pertain to traditional or conservative scholastic identities. Ironically, both forms of identity manipulation provide opportunities for personal growth:
“So, it’s necessary to be a chameleon in a sense that, as I said, with my peers, with my black peers, or my white peers, or whatever it is – it goes one in the same – both directions. Um [pause]…You have to fit in. To be accepted, in any group, you have to fit in, right? Doesn’t mean that you have to conform to every idea that someone presents in that group. But in some way or form you have to connect with them. Whether that be the way you speak, whether it be the way you carry yourself” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
Taureen, reminiscing upon a realization while still in high school, demonstrates an understanding of, for lack of a better term, “playing the game”. Adjusting to the dominant culture of schooling is imperative for urban Black students who aspire to succeed academically. With this, perhaps comes a subtle loss of authentic identity. This understanding of how to navigate as a “student” and be accepted shows the drastic differences that are manifest in the culture of school and the culture of hip-hop. Adapting, as Taureen eloquently reminds us, works both ways, with “the main focus of fitting in, so
Morris 65 that it wouldn’t detract from my educational goals” (T.A., personal communication,
December 11, 2015). This statement has profound implications. It demonstrates that urban Black males feel alienated from school and, unlike many other bodies, must divorce certain elements of their authentic identity simply in order to fit in with modes of schooling. On the other hand, it also implies that urban Black males feel that fitting into hip-hop culture is arduous as well!
As Taureen explains, through answering a question pertaining to his actions in the hallways versus his actions in class, he says that in high school he had to, “adapt and adjust to your environment. The same way you were a chameleon in the hallways is the same way you’re going to be a chameleon in the classroom. You gotta adapt and adjust”
(T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015). This short but powerful sentiment emphasizes the struggle that urban Black males constantly face in their negotiation of identity and navigation in school settings. From this, one can’t help but deduce that high school is a space for constant aesthetic performance, adaptation and negotiation. Students undergo and complete a plethora of tests in high school. Most students are solely concerned with test scores in classes and on exams. The layers of complexity that urban
Black males are tested on, in terms of the constant assessments they face pertaining to their authenticity as human beings, makes it clear as to why so many of them give up on schooling.
Historical and contemporary depictions of hip-hop identity, as seen through aesthetic cleavages, foster a performance from Black male youth that they feel compelled to take part in. The role of hip-hop culture, like popular culture, is “to fix the authenticity of popular forms, rooting them in the experiences of popular communities from which
Morris 66 they draw their strength, allowing us to see them as expressive of a particular subordinate of social life that resists its being constantly made over as low and outside” (Hall, 1996, p. 472). From aesthetic performance, we can come to see how vernacular is utilized amongst urban Black males and how peer networks are formed. All of these navigational aspects describe a situation for the urban Black male in schools that is fragile to say the least. Adapting to situational contexts by means of manipulating one’s identity undoubtedly has its downfalls. However, particular students who consent to utilizing two adaptive roles of identity in particular circumstances find ways to navigate educational experiences that are both positive to their self-worth and forwarding for their academic integrity. Navigation by means of varying identity allows urban Black male students to succeed academically. The question then becomes, ‘What type of detriment does this type of personality friction do to the mental health and well-being of particular students who engage in a chameleon-style adaptation of identity?’
Urban Black students face friction when deciding to engage with such performance, as Taureen asserts, “[m]y boys made fun of me. Because when I was in the classroom I was a completely different dude than when I was in the hallways” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015). The pressures that come with continuously articulating external representations that become manifest with the schism that some urban Black males seek out in order to merely become successful in school while still maintaining group allegiance fosters an internalization of what it ultimately means to be Black, “cool” and smart. A box often unfilled; by society’s discourse surrounding the Black body and hip-hop’s voice regarding Black culture, many urban
Black males find themselves on an island, trying to re-articulate that they can be
Morris 67 “swaggy” and intellectual at the same time. Because this is a look that is silenced by discourse, attempts to become this type of complete individual are challenging and accosting at every single turn one takes when one decides to maneuver down this lane of individuality simply for the sake of maintaining both close friends and good grades.
To agree to learn from an institution who does not represent one’s integrity causes a major loss of self. This is why we see the remnants of the major alternative: to not learn and reject the stranger’s world. This is precisely what happens with many urban Black males who cling to a hip-hop aesthetic. When gazed at from this perspective, it is understandable while so many are pushed out (Dei, 1997). Black males feel that they do not belong. And without adapting, many find it hard to continue on with schooling.
Michael expresses how aesthetics affects academics when he states,
“High school – I changed into ahh, the ideology of a Black man. The way I dressed, the way I carried myself. I tried to juggle both but grades suffered. Instead of getting 90s I was getting mid 70s, low 80s, which is alright, right? But when you know you have potential to do greater things, you know something is wrong? But juggling, fitting – you know what I mean? Hanging out with the man dem on the block, playing dominoes or ball sometimes, it wasn’t always trying to do my nerd thing” (M.B., personal communication, October 24, 2014).
In terms of the urban Black male, culture has a tangible correlation with academic excellence. But is it the student’s fault? Most would not argue that competing in and mastering the game of dominoes takes intellectual aptitude. But this type of skill is overshadowed by instances of truancy because these students choose to continue an engaging game in the cafeteria instead of showing up to science class for a lesson on photosynthesis. For urban Black males, schools must take some of the responsibility. As I stated earlier, many Black males, told to excel in a site that does not validate their culture, choose to not learn and reject the messages, learning opportunities, and schooling that
Morris 68 high schools offer. Again, the result of the disproportionate push out rate must be equally levied against the institution as well as the individual. We must get to a point where we can have a candid discussion about challenging the Eurocentric philosophical standards of education that will ultimately lead to troubling the Eurocentric belief system surrounding the purpose of education, and ultimately, the “universal” student. We can no longer discredit the importance of culture and identity as it pertains to the perceptions that urban Black males feel they need to occupy. Furthermore, we cannot silence the truth that schools incorrectly view this type of identity performance as deviant. Hip-hop culture is not deviant culture; the contemporary perception of it boxes it in as such. But in truth, hip-hop culture is the result of, “selective appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulating of European ideologies, cultures, and institutions, alongside African heritage,” which led to, “linguistic innovations in rhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupying an alien space, heightened expressions, hairstyles, ways of walking, standing, and talking, and a means of constituting and sustaining camaraderie and community” (Hall, 1996, p.
471).
So what do we truly expect from our urban Black males when we ask them to navigate a space like education while they are also subjected to the discourse that sees hip-hop culture and its aesthetic representations as abhorrent and anti-intellectual? Until we root these types of questions into the forefront, urban Black males can learn the
“superficial features” of dominant discourses, as well as the more subtle aspects, and if placed in proper context, can acquire these traits without feeling that they are bowing before the master (Delpit, 1992). Taking an understanding that identity is fluid and that one needs not hide his textbooks in a pizza box for sake of disaffiliation with his peers
Morris 69 must be a central point of conversation if we want to reverse the detrimental discourse that surrounds Black masculinity, hip-hop aesthetics, and identity that urban Black males experience and navigate through while in high school.
Lastly, it must be noted that, for many urban Black males, there is a moment of minute liberation once one enters university. The effects of developing a particular type of high school urban Black masculinity speaks to Poynting, Nicole, and Tabar’s (2003) reference to a “protest masculinity” which can be understood as “a pattern of masculinity constructed in local working-class settings, sometimes among ethnically marginalized men, which embodies the claim to power typical of regional hegemonic masculinities in
Western countries” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 847-848). Unfortunately, navigating educational institutions by explicit means of producing this form of masculinity lacks the economic and institutional authority that underpins global patterns.
I would venture to deduce that, urban Black males are situated in a lose-lose situation when it comes to figuring out how to progressively navigate high school with an authentic identity that can remain intact without losing some ground on the academic terrain. As it currently stands, performing (to contextual and contested degrees) both with peers and with teachers/the classroom is the urban Black males’ best option.
University however, forces a re-negotiation of urban Black identity that untangles the web of contradictions that urban Black males find themselves in throughout their high school careers. The shackles of limited identity, for better or worse, begin to fade. This, in large part, is due to a plethora of internalized realizations that occur through maturity; being privy to a multitude of locations that one can assert his authentic identity, and the voluntary aspects that post-secondary education elicits. Thus, it is important to
Morris 70 understand that the phenomenon of identity performance pertaining to the urban Black male is predominantly tied into one’s space. More precisely, space plays a fundamental role in validating and, conversely, limiting particular identities.
Chapter V. Space
“Now all the teachers couldn’t teach me. And my momma couldn’t beat me. Hard enough to match that pain of my pops not seeing me. So with that disdain in my membrane, Got on my pimp game, Fuck the world, my defense came”
- Jay-Z, December 4th, The Black Album
“Western ethnocentrism defines progress according to a Western model and evaluates different people’s conditions in relation to such progress” (Flecha,1999, p.
156). When the aesthetics of hip-hop masculinity are performed in relation to space,
Black males find themselves in a reality of limited modes of individual (re)production.
This is because, “individualism was – and continues to be – inextricable ties to a specific concept of space and the technologies invented for dealing with that space” (Kirby, 1996, p. 45). In this sense, the “technologies” under discussion are schooling institutions.
Ironically, university, the site of all things liberal, becomes a space that is more conservative than high school. University, particularly an institution like the University of Toronto, is a domain that is synonymous with white space. Aesthetically, this reality is demarcated by a shift, or evolution, that is exaggeratingly external for urban Black males.
Taureen, in his understanding of his differentiated experiences in university states:
Morris 71 “It kinda shaped the person I needed to be, in the world outside of school; because it forced me to buckle up my belt, if you will. Because, uh, a lot of people you’re dealing with are not going to understand your lingo, or the way you talk, or whatever it is. So, it was another situation where I had to figure out how to fit in. The baggy, saggy jeans – that wasn’t flyin’, in that sort of realm, right. So now I had to conform again. So I had to, uh tighten up the pants, you know, tighten up the shirt. The look was different. The talking was different. The lingo was different” (Taureen, personal communication, 2015).
For urban Black males, the change in educational environment can often spark
(re)creation of identity. This forceful manifestation of identity construction through space is linked to multiple discourses of subjectivity, language, difference, history, memory and power relations (Althesser, 1971; Yon, 2000; Ibrahim, 2008). Those tropes imply that space, then, becomes a primary factor in one’s re-assessment of the self. Cyclically, space, which is originally devoid of energy, implicates whom urban Black males identify with which in turn influences how they are taken up (Ibrahim, 2008). Thus, Taureen’s sentiment expresses the idea that predominantly white spaces of education silence the aesthetic agency that was once produced in alternative sites, like high school. Because the university spaces in most Canadian schools are so saturated with white bodies, and thus a white hegemonic positioning, it produces an exaggerated sense of a dialogic process. This split between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ is so explicit in university, as the Self indistinguishably comes to know its virtues and re-internalizes how it is perceived (Ibrahim, 2008). This type of realization is further amplified by the changing dynamics between the teacher and the student in such university spaces. Whereas,
“[In high school] if there was a point in time when I wanted to turn my grades around in a class, that support system was already shattered, and I was already labeled and there was no turning back. But in university, because I was just a face, and there’s not really that
Morris 72 connection, so when you did come [to speak with a professor] it was like open arms” (C.A., personal communication, November 8, 2015).
The hip-hop culture urban Black males most directly affirm, and relate to, is one that is read through a system of alternative values according to intellectual, cultural, economic, and political progress. This has significant consequences in the student-teacher relationship. It is vital to examine teacher-student relationships under the context of the experiences of urban Black males in school because, “inherent to the study of classroom climate and culture is a close examination of student-teacher relations and how teachers connect or try to connect with their students” (Hooks and Miskovic, 2011, p.191). Given that high school is essentially mandatory, the teacher-student relationship takes on an added level of subjectivity; it is simply more judgmental. Teachers, knowing that students are, to an extent forced to be there, read students in terms of their academic intentions and view their potential through a prophet-like silo of relating and advising. As Braxton reminisces on his high school experience,
“[e]verywhere you look, someone looks at you a certain way – I’m talking like staff, you know? They see you a certain way, they don’t value your smarts, they don’t think you have any smarts and they think it’s like ‘I know what’s best.’ There was never any inquiry into our minds. Unless it’s like on the test. The test okay, check in the box or whatever. There was never any genuine care for the student body. I felt. Unless you were that academic person who was getting A’s on your tests or whatever, or who was doing everything they asked you to do” (B.X., personal communication, November 23, 2015).
Unfortunately, high school educators are quick to assess students based on past experiences (communication with other teachers, prior report cards, etc.) and the way that students aesthetically represent themselves. In the university setting, the professor- student relationship is founded on more objective terms. Students are in university voluntarily. Thus, the relationships students attempt to build with professors are prefaced
Morris 73 with an understanding that the student indeed intends to succeed academically, regardless of identity performance. The idea of academic excellence is never as fixed for the urban
Black male university student as it is for that same student while in high school. Space, time, and energy are intertwined in creating experience (Lefebvre, 1991).
The changing dynamic between students and educators is a direct result of space because social space contains and assigns appropriate places to the social relations of reproduction and the relations of production (Lefebvre, 1991). The hip-hop culture that
Black males embody and re-articulate in educational spaces does not mean that it is unequal and therefore less valid. It simply means that it is different. It is in the space of education that hip-hop culture clashes with the quasi-ideal of classical culture. By classical culture, I am referring to a romantic understanding of culture that sees (and thus values it) primarily in terms of immediate appearance. This is where the aesthetic forms combine with the situational contexts of space to present and promote a model that distinguishes bodies. Because hip-hop culture is considered abhorrent to the universal model of the ideal student, Black males who engage in this culture are viewed in delegitimizing terms. This negotiation simultaneously disrupts their ability to be authentic individuals while forcing them to adapt, negotiate, and to varying degrees, assimilate certain aspects of identity that are naturally foreign to them. Although many of the accommodations urban Black males must make are benign, the intangible stresses to their psyche and self-identity are troubling and part of the reason why urban Black males face such friction while in high school. However, the sentiment in university suggests that most students are “just a face,” further indicates that there may be less pressure to perform Black masculinity inside of the institution. The inability to attain attention
Morris 74 through means of implicit behavior (being the class clown, hanging out instead of going to class, etc.) creates a shift in identity politics that Black males negotiate in order to, once again, fit in with peers and succeed simultaneously.
University, particularly in the spaces where classes are held, is a site that creates
“academics” as its primary, fundamental, and sole objective. Fitting into this space imposes a new culture; a culture where fitting in by means of academic intent, in almost all cases, now supersedes fitting in socially. Aesthetically, because this space signals a site solely fashioned around all things pertaining to academics, it unintentionally equates to the university space equally a white space. A space like a university creates, “subjects, like spaces [that are] homogenized in favor of the generic, so that the social policy based on humanism has proven insensitive to the varying needs of ‘different’ subjects” (Kirby,
1997, p. 46). This is especially true at the University of Toronto, where one could spend three hours there and not see another Black person. When Cory would “turn up” in the presence of other Black peers in his high school classrooms, he was able to elicit some type of experience that would validate his identity. One can deduce that when in university, sitting in class after class and seeing no other urban Black males, this performance he once communicated (in high school) would lose its appeal and familiarity over time. That is because the function and scope of speech participants defines the effectiveness and authority of speech acts (Delpit. 1992). In university, the function of vernacular then, changes due to the scope of participant. Fewer participants for the urban
Black male to share a similar speech performance with equals altered vernacular. As
Taureen asserts, the university setting,
“really flipped the script on me. I went from being focused on being more black to me focused on being more white, if you will. You
Morris 75 know what I mean? Not that you can categorize any one race of being a certain type of person. But culturally, we have that ideology of how certain races act” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
Taureen’s assertions that university forced him to “act white” illustrate a significant consequence about schooling and how certain bodies perceive it. University, in its ability to stand for a supreme symbol of academics, continue to further the poisonous ideology that implies that doing well in school, wearing button-ups, and dropping cultural vernaculars equates to “acting white”. His misguided analysis of how university shaped him to become “more white” is evidence that, “the philosophico- epistemological notion of space is fetishized and the mental realm comes to envelop the social and physical ones” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 5). Although, seen through the eyes of many young Black men, this type of recreation of identity is synonymous with liberation and progression, the departures that one must make to their identity further implicates hegemonic discourse surrounding urban Black masculinity. A scary consequence when one starts to think about how the production of space impacts identity, and by extension, aesthetic representation. The idea that in order for one to become academically successful he must adopt certain styles of aesthetics and vernacular, while divorcing others, indicates just how potent hegemonic power is within scholastic institutions. Essentially,
“it is a White supremacy that has adapted and repackaged itself; racism that operates without racists” (Hooks and Miskovic, 2011, p. 193). If university is the site that symbolically and manifestly represents hegemonic power, it is not surprising why so many urban Black males resist measures of schooling and do not even attempt to make it to university.
Morris 76 The adaptation of dominant children to a school culture that generally replicates their own is typically easier than for non-dominant children (Delpit, 1992). For urban
Black male students, the restricted confines of the high school setting serve as a barrier for authentic articulation of urban Black masculinity. Because high school so heavily restricts the autonomy of Black males, many see this as a focal site of passive resistance.
For instance, hats are not permitted, forms of a traditional classroom “call and response” teaching dynamic is instilled, and “politically correct” ways of behaving are espoused.
High school becomes a practice of exercising upon the body micro-processes for the sake of disciplining the body in order for it to subsequently produce subjective bodies. Spatial practices then organize social life in specific ways through everyday schooling routines that come to produce a space that, “[itself] performs something in the social order, permitting certain actions and prohibiting others” (Razack, 2002, p. 9). Too often does school culture run contradictory to elements of benign urban Black familiarity. To some
Black males, the space signals a material obligation to shift personas in a way that is incredibly tangible and consciously uncomfortable. Michael furthers this point when speaking about his experiences in a predominantly Black high school, located in the
Rexdale community, and the difference simply between urban Black male performance in the hallways and the classroom:
“I feel it’s two different realms. Being in a classroom, I feel you need to switch your focus 180. Being in a classroom I feel you need to show a whole different focus and you need to uh, not so much perceive, but you need to demonstrate a whole different type of behavior while you’re in a classroom. Uh…that’s… in the classroom, that’s not exactly a Black males’ regular day-to- day life! [chuckles]” (M.B., personal communication, October 24, 2014).
Morris 77 Michael’s comments highlight a dichotomy that exists internally between identity performances that urban Black males perceive as “natural”, or a preferred way of being, and a type of identity performance that is marginally foreign but nevertheless prescribed by the hegemonic practices within the space of schooling. Further, it speaks to the difficulty in converting cultural resources into cultural capital in school (Lareau and
Horvat, 1999).
The urban Black males’ identity and the ways he negotiates fitting in with his peers within the school space is performed and asserted chiefly through the high school confines. This is especially true since in high school there is little that differentiates one
Black urban male from the next. Most high schools operate by zoning standards; thus many Black males in a school all come from a similar environment. The bond they have coming from a shared community, seems to be an invisible point and counter intuitively, not much to build a support network around. Thus, Black males seek other ways of validating their urban masculinity. Recognition is not attained by “coming from” a particular neighborhood in high school, since they all primarily come from the same neighborhoods. In the über restrictive location of the high school space, some Black males face the dilemma of performing their “Blackness,” or else face the penalty of loosing out on a kinship group that is important to them. This experience is reflected by
Kevin’s sentiment towards being deemed “white washed”:
“[m]y Black friends in high school, I was always considered ‘white washed’, because I did my homework. I answered questions. I got the Italian award and the French award because I did my homework. So when they saw that, it was like, ‘He is not one of us. He’s ‘white washed’ because he listens to the teacher. He’s not one of us who makes fun of the teacher and doesn’t do the homework. He is a guy that does it
Morris 78 and doesn’t talk back to in class.’ So those guys, my friends, sort of out-casted me for trying to do better” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014).
While still in high school, Black males feel they can only achieve a sort of “urban
Black male validation” through limited and limiting means. Kevin, who comes from the
Jane and Finch community, expresses his alienation as the result of what his peers term as being “white washed”. Instances of “acting up”; not conforming to authority, demonstrating an apathy towards schooling, and participating in sports are some of the few ways in which these Black bodies feel that they can assert their autonomy by establishing a coherent Black identity at such a young age. As has been said, “the ability of young Black men to create new masculinities is restricted” (Wright et al., 1998, p. 82).
This idea of resistance capital, albeit damaging to urban Black males’ academic intentions, is important to their identity construction. The ability to assert oneself as intelligent, strong and worthy of respect within structures of inequality by engaging in behaviors and maintaining attitudes that challenge the status quo takes agency. The learned behavior of hip-hop culture is one of learning to be oppositional with one’s body, mind and spirit in the face or race, gender and class inequality. This cultural wealth of hip-hop, when juxtaposed within the hegemonic space of school, is looked at as a detriment more than as a positive. These forms of resistance, instead of being read as transformative, are viewed as self-defeating or conformist strategies that simply feed back into the system of subordination. Reflecting “hoodness”, as Kevin states, or aspiring towards goals and career paths that read as being appropriate for Black males, become two of the limited options that urban Black males are forced to take up in the space of high school. These teenagers have minimal opportunities in other public spaces to assert
Morris 79 their autonomy and ultimately construct their own identity; thus, many use high school as the primal location to demonstrate Black masculinity in its popular form. For the high school-aged urban Black male, high school is life. So because “every space is already in place before the appearance in it of actors; these actors are collective as well as individual subjects insomuch as the individuals are always members of groups or classes seeking to appropriate the spaces in question” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 57). The individuals in the urban high school create an atmosphere different than that of the university setting. Mainly due to demographics that suggest there are many urban Black male bodies in urban high schools and few in university. Thus, in high school, every inch of that space is used to
(re)produce identity formations and build peer networks.
However, it seems as though a shift in identity representation occurs within these urban Black males who do “make it out” and enter into university. Contrarily, the Black male university student is no longer a minor. With this passage in age, comes driving, going out with friends, being privy and having opportunities to demonstrate one’s personhood in a multitude of different locations. The school no longer needs to be the central site of identity assertion. Also, an opening up of what success means and the possibilities of multiple career paths start to materialize. Dreams of making it to the NBA may have faded and the urban Black male university student must now (re)evaluate and
(re)invent aspirations. University, instead of becoming a site of resistance, becomes a site of possibility and/or opportunity. And no longer a minor, the urban Black male furthers his realization that responsibility is on himself. Kevin explains this sentiment when he states, “[b]ecause I came from Jane and Finch, I wasn’t supposed to be in the position
Morris 80 that I was in. I made it to university. So I looked at it like, I made it this far, how far can I take it next?” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014)
While in high school, Black males are faced with a friction of existing in a space that again impacts their already limited autonomous life. Some sense that doing things like excelling in class and being perceived as having a high priority on academics are stifling to their urban masculinity. The space of high school, to many urban Black males, becomes a default location of passive resistance and used as a tool for claims of identity.
While university, because the Black male is now a man combined with the context of university life being less restrictive on one’s identity, no longer serves as the battlefield for asserting one’s identity.
However, the analysis of identity assertion becomes further complicated once the focus shifts to the challenge of navigating “two worlds” once an urban and hip-hop centered Black male enters university. Whereas most university students find the campus life and their home life analogous, the urban Black male is now experiencing two polar realities: campus life and an urban environment he knows as home. The urban high school is saturated with Black bodies, thus the space doesn’t invoke the reality of having to cope with two divergent worlds to such an extreme degree. Therefore, the university space evokes a sensory phenomenon of understanding that a new way of imagining oneself is inevitable.
The “othering” that the western educational system creates through hegemonic functions of schooling by claiming that subjective practices are universal augments this dual reality to a certain degree. Schooling, by means of reproducing what we consider knowledge, at times, perpetuates epistemological racism. Simply put, epistemologies, not
Morris 81 our use of them can be racially biased ways of knowing (Scheurich & Young, 1997). The space of school creates an arena for institutional racism to thrive; that is, the standard operating procedures hurt members of one or more races (Scheurich & Young, 1997).
High school in particular creates these congruent procedures of culture that appear to apply to universality but provide experiences, relations, and spaces that are not harmonious with particular bodies. And all of our current epistemologies in North
America arise out of the dominant white race (Smith, 2005). These epistemologies, or forms of knowledge production, logically reflect and reinforce that social history and that racial group (while excluding epistemologies of other races/cultures), and this has negative results for urban Black males navigating such a system.
Thus, one must assume that the high school space informs this type of
“knowledge production” and add to the separation of realities urban Black males experience. But in high school, this is at most a separation of the mind (e.g., urban Black males mentally disconnect from school due to many factors pertaining to explicit and implicit hegemonic functions). Whereas in university this separation of two distinct, concrete spaces is more than apparent as soon as one steps onto a prestigious university campus, like the University of Toronto. The lack of Black bodies in university juxtaposed with the abundance of Black bodies in urban neighborhoods constitutes a form of culture shock for urban Black males and forces them to (re)negotiate their identity, peer relationships and aesthetic manifestations. For urban Black males, high school is rich with similar faces, vernaculars and aesthetic representations. As such, the schism of identity for urban males yearning to succeed academically may only take on a mental manifestation. In university, the reality of experiencing two completely different
Morris 82 environments is so tangible that it subsequently forces Black males, who find comfort in familiar peer groups similar to the ones they had in high school, to seek out other Black males for network purposes that now involve navigating the alien realm of university as a mere means for survival; entailing a separation of mind and body.
Thus, the academic spaces of site like the university; buildings like Sidney Smith
Hall, New College, and OISE, represent a place purely stitched to academic orientations.
This positioning of the Black body in an educational space is unique to university. High school sites represent the contrary. High school is a space that carries a multitude of signifiers that are adjacent, and at times even supreme to academics. Hallways can represent social life, gyms can represent athletics, and the cafeteria can represent all things in between and beyond. High school is experienced as a space that represents diverging and intersectional identity proclamations, while the university is a site that funnels a collection of identities into one chief destination ⎯ academics. The
“whitening” of this space douses its corners, nooks and hallways. In a sense, the university space ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space on the one hand, and physical space on the other (Lefebvre, 1991). The challenge then becomes seeking ways to provide both spaces with abilities to take on positive aspects of their counterpart while preserving the essence of integrity, scholastic acceptance and pursuit, and understanding.
Its second challenge is to understand how the social practice of mapping space both reflects and reinforces ways of conceiving and understanding the subject.
Chapter VI. Aesthesis x Space: Impacts on Vernacular & Peer Relationships
Morris 83 “Why every rich black nigga gotta be famous, why every broke black nigga gotta be brainless, that’s one stereotype” - J. Cole, G.O.M.D., 2014 Forest Hills Drive
Most individuals seek out support systems that can be used to provide comfort, reassurance and validation (Wright et al., 1998). In urban high schools, Black males have larger, more abundant support systems resulting from the presence of many other Black males. This can be a double-edged sword due to the competition some place on performing a discursive urban Blackness as represented through hip-hop culture.
Compounded by systemic barriers that validate particular forms of the “universal” masculine student while negating others, the constant friction that many Black males face derives from maintaining high school peer networks and good grades, forms of a dichotomy within their identity(ies). I must explicitly note that this dichotomy of identity is not on the intellectual path towards an “either/or” submission of identity and subsequently that peer networks serve as an example for pathologizing Black culture.
Rather, this phenomena and analysis of it imply important aspects of academic navigation that are uniquely contextual to urban Black males immersed in hip-hop culture.
This schism is manufactured not only through identity and vernacular, but how urban Black males engage in peer networks. In some communities, like Jane and Finch and Rexdale, the clashing values of urban culture and school present a conflict for the
Black male and affect his choice of support systems within his school. Failing to follow a certain prescription for performing urban Black male masculinity may come at the cost of one’s stripping of identity by peers, and subsequently lead to rather ineffective support networks that become crucial to adolescent identity construction and positive self-
Morris 84 perception. The experience of being torn between two opposing cultural systems has real and devastating consequences on the young Black male, as Kevin suggests:
“So my younger years, especially like early years of high school, it hurt, because you don’t want to be considered ‘white washed’. You want to be one of the guys; you want to fit in with your group of friends. So when they consider you white washed because you try in school and you want to pursue education because you know that it is going to take you higher, it’s like…it hurts because you know what you have to do to get to where you want to be. But you also want to have your group of friends. So when your group of friends are calling you names that are almost prohibiting you from going further, it is painful. Because now you are stuck between thinking about which way do you go. Am I going left to the hood side? Or am I going to go right to pursue what I need to do” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014).
Kevin again, wounded by the discursive metaphors flung at him by his own support group, is faced with options of whether to abandon a part of his personal goals or abandon a part of his identity. Establishing peer networks based on vernacular and aesthetics becomes the primary viable option for urban Black males in high school. Peer network affirmations by means of external representations of how “cool” or “Black” one could be are fostered in this space because high school so closely allows students the opportunities to engage in social relations in a variety of forms while simultaneously asserting which ones are legitimate and illegitimate. In high school, finding a peer network, or “fitting in,” supersedes academics. In the case of many Black males, this means aesthetically representing hip-hop culture at all costs – even the cost of a future that is dependent on academics.
The problem then is that hip-hop culture, as viewed by teachers and the institution of high school in general, sees this mode of representation as evidence for deficit culture
Morris 85 with little allegiance to academic intent. Thus, both hip-hop aesthetics and the space of education work to isolate urban Black males from thinking about themselves in academic terms. As analyzed in the preceding chapter on space, school creates an environment that is non-conducive to the complexity of identity, particularly urban Black identity. The architecture, urban design and spatial relations tend to become acts of repression, separation, and fantasy (Mbembe, 2004). Under the contextual arrangements concerning how teachers perceive, communicate and ultimately form relationships with students in high school, validating both the hip-hop body with the academic one is extremely difficult. In essence, “perceptions that the black fictive kinship system does not value schooling and of the cultural discontinuity between black and the structure of schools can result in pejorative symbols/means being attached to ‘blackness’, particularly in academic settings” (Harris and Marsh, 2010, p. 1246).
School corners urban Black males into a form of internalization and subjectification that renders experience with peers, hip-hop culture, and education as a reality that can only exist on conflicting fields. Thus, they seemingly choose one of three positions: 1) resist implicit manifestations of school in order to affirm their counter- hegemonic identity and strengthen peer networks with others who do the same; 2) abandon Black culture and effectively desert Black fictive kinship groups for the sake of adopting some mythical and highly troubling “raceless” strategy of identity that more appropriately ties into schooling or; 3) embodying a performance that transcends these opposing realms of culture by forming a schism of identity that allows them to maintain their fictive kinship group whilst also allowing them to excel academically. But again, fitting in for an adolescent (of any color or culture) arguably supersedes all else in this
Morris 86 stage of development. Academic priority is secondary to creating, finding and maintaining friendships that provide comfort, stability and a sense of self-worth. For urban Black males, because of the discourse related to their culture, fitting in with friends comes with more perils than other bodies.
The vernacular used to legitimize Black males in their social groups denotes the notion that forms or contexts of discourse and communication is an important power resource. If Black males are able to navigate the realms of appropriate Black cultural vernacular, this implies that appropriate ideals of dominant vernacular also exist and thus, can also be used as a power resource. Cognition and action is in one hand liberating to urban Black males in terms of their self-expression and agency in being able to belong to an important cultural group. But because hip-hop vernacular is seen as ‘uniquely Black’ it may also make it easier for the hegemonic group to demarcate and limit the freedom and actions of subordinate groups (Rose, 2008), Thus the actual discourse that encapsulates hip-hop culture, a discourse in which Black males consistently represent, can be strategically used by those in power to manage the minds of others through the function of text and talk. As analyzed through the comments from participants, this manipulation is not always blunt and direct, but occurs through subtle, routine, and everyday forms of communication that appear to be “normal,” “natural,” and ultimately, “acceptable”. For instance, Cory mentions how subtle forms of communication can ultimately imply racial tones:
“Just like the little things, like how they look at you when certain subjects come up. Or how they expect you to respond – singling you out. Or just their little anecdotal lectures when you’re late or anything. I’m just like, ‘well, you didn’t really do that for him. But now I’m taking the brunt of it’” (C.A., personal communication, November 8, 2015).
Morris 87 The cultural resources that urban Black males take up in school settings facilitate an understanding of compliance with, or deviance from, dominant standards of school interactions. Demarcations of how being “cool” is personified by the urban Black male, allows teachers to automatically read the aesthetics, vernaculars and peer groupings that urban Black males create as illegitimate and evading associations that more appropriately connect to school and students. At this point, in order to succeed academically while maintaining positive peer networks, “Blacks who aspire for high achievement must find strategies for circumventing the adverse consequences associated with membership in the black fictive kinship system” (Harris and Marsh, 2010, p. 1246). It is unfortunate we have not opened up opportunities that allow for a positive discourse and understanding of how many urban Black males have found the ability to be a chameleon; to create a schism and adapt to school, peers, and identity in a way that positively (re)negotiates such a hip-hop identity that is equally authentic but devalued by school while also excelling in the fundamental aspect of schooling, academics and being a student. We must open dialogue concerning how some urban Black males have survived through excelling in both school and “swag”.
The experience of adapting speaks to the linguistic capital that urban Black males have the potential of possessing. The ability to experience school and build upon multiple communication skills is an important, but overlooked, aspect of urban Black male intelligence. The ability to connect and draw upon various language registers, or styles, and to be able to communicate with different audiences, creates multiple social tools of
“vocabulary, audience awareness, cross-cultural awareness, ‘real-world’ literacy skills, math skills, metalinguistic awareness, teaching and tutoring skills, civic and familial
Morris 88 responsibility, and social maturity” (Orellana, 2003, p. 6). However, an appreciation for this type of identity adaptation is not valued at school because of the very nature of the dynamic or friction between the perceived values of hip-hop aesthetics/vernacular and traditional schooling. So instead of this multi-linguistic repertoire that many Black males are forced to create and adopt, the adulation for such a skill is usually masked by the individual or, even worse, ostracized due to the hegemonic nature that schooling projects.
The inability to be appreciating for this unique aesthetic craft creates a schism of identity for the Black male which inevitably fosters more conflict in relation to his schooling experiences.
It cannot be expressed enough that the friction experienced can become so perverse that young Black males are forced to make drastic and life-changing decisions while still in high school. Taureen illuminates an example:
“In my grade 11 year, I knew if I stayed in that environment, I knew I wasn’t going to get the necessary grades that I need to get to be accepted into the certain schools that I wanted to get into. Cause I still wanted to fit in – I still wanted to be a part of something, you know? So um, like you got boys. You got people you’ve known for so long, right. You’ve got to give them the time, right. You can’t just like flip the script 100 percent. So I made the business decision to transfer schools” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
The pressure of aesthetics, vernacular, and peer networks for urban Black males in high school is tangible to the extent that one can understand why we must push for further, “insight into the crucial role of discourse in the reproduction of dominance and inequality” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 253). An initial move must come in the form of categorizing urban Black male “drop outs” and re-term them as “push outs” (Dei, 1997).
This is a much needed step as it speaks to the theorizing of masculinities that are not only
Morris 89 racialized, but pathologize the very different ways that young Black men respond to their experiences in school (Wright et al, 1998). It becomes clear that schooling, accentuated by discourse surrounding hip-hop culture, acts to position urban Black masculinity as illegitimate. Can we blame Taureen when he expresses the following sentiment?
“A lot of challenges presented itself. You are only going to get deeper and deeper into it. And I watched it. Dudes were getting deeper, man. And 11th grade I skipped a couple classes…um, to do some stupid shit. And I was like, “yo what am I doing, bro? That’s not me.” But it sucks you in, right” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
Taureen had to make the conscious decision to leave his school simply in order to free himself from the tentacles of explicit reorientations and the interpellation between urban Black identity and schooling. He became unintentionally caught up and “sucked in.” This is a clear indication of how powerful hip-hop culture and fictive kinship groups immersed in such culture is for the urban Black male when navigating school. Regardless of how one may attempt to paint a pathologizing picture of urban Black males, we must note that, “although embodied in the minds of individuals, social cognitions are social because they are shared and presupposed by group members, monitor social action and interaction, and because they underlie the social and cultural organization of society as a whole” (van Dijk, 1993, p. 257). The sentiment detailing his decision to leave implies the potency of hip-hop culture. Simply put, the relationship between hip-hop culture and urban Black males carries profound significance; indicating how hip-hop culture is perceived as the antidote for academic identification. Both the hegemonic structures of schooling and the student buy into this notion, especially in high school. Fortunately, individuals move through various stages of racial identification and these stages are hierarchical and have direct impacts on the dynamic of peer networks.
Morris 90 In university, despite the experience of entering a space that amasses far less urban Black males, some Black males seek out support systems that offer familiarity, this being in the form of other Black males. Contradictory to high school, the support systems that these urban Black males form rely on shared common experiences and newfound ways of navigating a different educational space. At this point, even the tools of individual agency have progressed so that Black students, who make it to university, can battle and re-negotiate instances of racism. This comes,
“from being around other like-minded black people and from reading and learning how to combat struggles. In high school, if someone would call me “white washed” I wouldn’t know what to say. And I internalized it. Like, to be white is good and to be black is bad” (M.C.W., personal communication, January 19, 2016).
Mitchell’s experience reflects a growing understanding of subjectivity in a hegemonic space. In high school, such a demarcation would raise an internalization that speaks to how discourse breeds a particular kind of masculinity about Black culture that is harmful to Black students. It has a type of political vernacular that carries detrimental intimacies on the subjectivity of the urban Black male. Because peer networks in high school are so abundant and explicit, articulations pertaining to either/or dichotomies of identity carry momentous implications. In university, due to the silencing and lack of urban Black bodies, the onus of establishing peer networks is founded not so much on resisting the hegemonic norms of educational space, as it is as much on surviving it. For many urban Black males, “making it” to university is an arduous task in itself. With that realization in itself, urban Black males understand university as a new frontier, as
Mitchell explains:
Morris 91 “[m]y first feeling was definitely fear and nervousness. The thing I was thinking was that, I did really well in high school, but like that was it. I was thinking that it wouldn’t really translate into university. I thought that university would be completely different” (M.C.W., personal communication, January 19, 2016).
With this perception that university is going to be completely different, one can assume that everything that university entails is going to be different as well, including peer networks. Due to this recalibration of understanding the school space, the dynamic of the support network shifts in university to being one that still looks to assert each individual’s urban Black masculinity, but now more so on the plane of making it through another institution of hegemony. Many find out early that one’s positive experience, unlike high school, is not determined on the basis of displaying some quasi-form of Black masculinity within an educational space but rather, “get in, get out, get the grade. On to the next. Just to get that means to an end. To get that degree at the end of the day, right.
Very transactional. Um, cause all you could see was like, at the end of this road – you get a job, you start your career or whatever” (T.A., personal communication, December 11,
2015).
This sentiment regarding an evolution of peer networking in university was further demonstrated through participant observations. I entered a university located in downtown Toronto looking for a space to sit and conduct observations. Upon entering and walking around for a few minutes, I asked a Black male where a particular place was located and he was quick to help. We began talking and he casually asked me my purpose for being at the university. As he led me and we talked, I purposely tried to evade any direct sentiments towards the nature of my research. Surprisingly, he stated that it sounded like I was speaking about “guys from the hood” and wanted to “support the
Morris 92 cause” any way that he could. He offered times and locations of places that would illicit what he perceived me to be looking for and to exchange numbers and even give me an interview if I wanted. When I arrived at my destination he wished me luck and went on his way.
This interaction represents in my opinion, the shift from the high school peer networks the urban Black male makes to those that one forms in university. The vernacular used to express masculinity no longer needs to be represented in a gaudy external fashion. In university, vernacular amongst urban Black males is simply orated through already learned nuances (like stylistic ways of vernacular and aesthetic representation) and understood amongst those that share a common experience. Despite my conservative attire and subtle articulations, through my conversation with this student, there seemed to be an understanding of supporting each other simply because we understood each other. Often times, being Black and being in university is enough to begin a bond and support network. Thus, that litmus test that demarcates “fitting in” through expressive modes of hip-hop aesthetics and vernacular performed in high school fade away in the university setting. It does in large part because urban Black males, once there, realize that asserting one’s identity is no longer read in the same way that it once was while in high school. The sheer fact that there are so few Black male bodies in many
Ontario universities enables Black males from urban environments to connect and validate themselves on terms that are less detrimental to their success in a traditional schooling sense.
Means of asserting one’s urban identity no longer has to come in the form of representing a passive resistance towards the school system that is derived through the
Morris 93 subjective nature of hip-hop culture in the educational space. In university, support systems for urban Black males are formed in other ways. For example, through a simple understanding between peers that share a common experience of having to endure the reality of experiencing two opposite “realms of life;” a “high priority” neighborhood that espouses hip-hop culture and; a university setting that, quite frankly, does not, and figuring out how to navigate within both. These support systems in university shift from a constant battle of proving legitimate explicit urban Black masculinity amongst peers to understanding the struggle of what it means to be an urban Black male operating in a space so dominated by bodies that are constantly viewing you as the “other”. As Kevin states:
“[l]uckily for me, I played football. So I had a lot of guys on the team that were just like me. There were a lot of guys that came from impoverished neighborhoods. So I was able to connect with them, to better understand how to navigate through university… That’s where I was better able to mesh with people and get a better grasp on how to handle university, the university lifestyle, especially when we we’re the minorities in that sphere.” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014)
Unlike high school, where peer networks are grounded through the ability to externally represent hip-hop culture, the mere ability to “relate” becomes the emphasis of support systems in university. Kevin again provides an instance:
“[m]y cousin, he shared the exact same experiences as I did, growing up in Jane and Finch. He had both his parents but still, he knew how to navigate the ‘hood’ life and the ‘university’ life. Um, my coaches, Coach Gary per say, he comes from southern Cali, he knows exactly what it is to grow up in a neighborhood that is deemed a ‘priority neighborhood’ and go through university, cause he went to Cal. So I was able to relate to them and they were able to relate to me because we knew exactly what it was like to go through school and live in a
Morris 94 neighborhood that is impoverished and navigate that sphere because it is very challenging to be…to have friends in an environment where you want to maintain in one sphere but you also want to succeed in your educational realm as well.” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014)
For some Black males, the support systems formed in university are initialized on the basis of a common understanding of what it is like to experience and navigate two completely different realms of life; that being an urban “at risk” community and the space of post-secondary education. Furthermore, the support networks formed in higher educational spaces are nurtured on the basis of a maturity of identity, and come with an understanding of how responsibility has shifted. In addition, the university, with its lax rules concerning what the traditional student persona entails, no longer needs to be a space of constant contestation and “proving” one’s urban Blackness. This release allows urban Black male students to form peer networks through other modes of validation, as
Taureen states:
“[o]nce I got into university, for me it was…my mom always told me, ‘show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.’ So for me it was, carrying the dudes in high school who has the same mentality as me, and, the people that I would surround myself by in university were all in the same particular thinking-path, if you will, as far as having the same type of goals, life goals, futuristic goals, and family goals or whatever. They all had that” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
In university, many urban Black males form alternative or recreated relationships that rely heavily on an understanding of the need to be able to navigate the
“hood/university” dichotomy steered towards a progressive future. This is a step advanced from the teenage peer networks formed in high school, which are largely based on demarcations of aesthetics or swag, regardless of academic outcome. Where high
Morris 95 school peer relationships and navigation processes center around how one looks, talks and “behaves”, university navigation and peer networks shift to a peer location and affinity towards other members of a collective group that demonstrate representing yourself not only based on your hoodness but also on ways that you can represent yourself as a university student.
Also important to the discussion is the notion that university is not mandatory.
High school, until a certain age, is. Thus, the actors who experience both settings do change. Equally important, the peer networks that are newly formed affect how individual sentiments towards academics change as well. The dynamic between aesthetic performance and academic excellence becomes increasingly intricate once an urban
Black male does reach university, as Kevin illuminates:
“[g]rowing up in the Jane and Finch community, there are two extremes. Growing up in Jane and Finch, you are either doing something that is completely against social norms. Like selling drugs or something like that. Or you are going to school and speaking in a proper way; learning how to articulate yourself properly, learning how to write essays, those things. So when you try to combine the two, it doesn’t mix. Because number one, your language changes. You speak properly. You speak with proper grammar. So when people from the hood hear you speak, it sends the message to them that you’re conforming to regular white society.” (K.A., personal communication, October 17, 2014)
Kevin’s sentiments speak directly to discourse that is perpetrated by hegemony and the relations between discourse and cognition. It also speaks to the hegemonic discourses that hip-hop has found levied upon themselves. That is, “discursive
(re)production of discourse structures result in social cognitions” (van Dijk, 1993, p.
259). The way he thinks he should speak as a university student illustrate the crucial mediating role that discourse plays in the symbolic reproduction of dominance.
Morris 96 “Conforming with regular white society”, as his peers back in Jane and Finch read it, is a function of how specific discourse structures determine mental processes and facilitate the formation of contextual social representations. How they negotiate their place in both university and high school is a function of how urban Black males respond to their positioning by emphasizing particular traits that have been levied upon them through discourse.
Nonetheless, as revealed through this chapter, the social relationships that urban
Black males form in high school are almost contradictory to the ways that urban Black males form social relationships in university. Of course, how one communicates aesthetic identity of a prescribed culture affects how that body is perceived by the hegemonic institutions that strive, explicitly or implicitly, to monitor, sanction and stream bodies into a preferred ideology that has become loosely and dangerously demarcated as the
‘universal student’ (Connell, 1989). Undoubtedly, we have come to the point where we intellectuals, concerned with education, must analyze how space implicates itself in the nihilistic understanding of how both peers networks and aesthetic performance amongst the urban Black community contribute to a disproportionate advantage for hegemonic groups, while leaving urban Black males in “no man’s land” – or white man’s land. And they are often left without any road map indicating how to get home.
Chapter VII. Conclusion
“You thinking life is all about smokin’ weed and ice, You don’t wanna be my age and can’t read and write.”
Morris 97 - Nas, I know I Can, God’s Son
Let me be clear, white supremacy and the hegemonic practices of schooling are the root of the alienation of urban Black males in high school. Succinctly stated, meaning does not lie in the object (Hall, 1997). With its biased discourses on what constitutes
“universality,” these urban Black male students are often faced with the dilemma, to varying degrees, of choosing peers over schooling or vice versa. When urban Black males actually do “make it out,” they are privy to transformative types of support networks and begin to develop the tools needed to understand how to operate and conveniently adapt under the constant gaze of white supremacy. These navigational tactics are used in support systems and identity construction in both high school and university for the urban Black male. In both instances, the urban Black male is attempting to navigate an educational space so that he may experience it in a positive way. However, the shift in what “navigating” entails changes from high school to university. The tool of adapting by means of adopting identity to suit situational contexts developed in high school becomes fully functional in university. For urban Black males adapting, like identity, is never fixed and constantly changes through certain accommodations while remaining somewhat stationary to hip-hop culture. This is because, “a lot of what I learned in university has come from hip-hop” (M.C.W., personal communication,
January 19, 2016). Hip-hop culture:
“in its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech, in its inflections toward the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counter narratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary…has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes…of elements of a discourse that is different – other forms of life, other traditions of representation” (Hall, 1992).
Morris 98
Regardless of curriculum, courses and knowledges, school can no longer ignore the role that hip-hop culture plays on the psychology and development of youth, specifically, urban Black males. Even through the styles, demarcations, and rhythms of hip-hop culture, schooling can begin to instill the idea that,
“[b]eing a Black male doesn’t have to be – you to don’t have to be a certain way. I would tie that into high school. In high school, when I listened to hip- hop it made me think that to be a Black man you have to act a certain way. But now I would say that hip-hop shows me that, as a Black male, there is no one way to act” (M.C.W., personal communication, January 19, 2016).
We also cannot mystify the central importance of acting, or identity politics, and how that figures into the life trajectories of the urban Black male. The central task for researchers, educators and policy makers is to recognize the continuing significance and ongoing instabilities inherent to the concept of race and racial rule; to argue against color- blindness as the social structure and trouble institutions as they continue to function along racial lines, shaping human beings socially and experientially (Hooks and Miskovic,
2011). The aim of the struggle, for educators and academics alike, must be, replacing ‘or’ with the potentiality and possibility of an ‘and’ (Hall, 1992). Coupling identities does not exhaust either side of our authenticity.
What it then comes down to is an understanding that for urban Black males, aesthetics, vernacular and peer networks unfortunately impede the academic wherewithal and complicate Black male identity especially in hegemonic schooling institutions. But aesthetics, vernacular, and peer networks also help these young men create identity. Thus, identity for urban Black males is wound in extreme complexities that are often silenced through schooling. Revisiting the ways that pedagogy can be understood, and curriculum
Morris 99 subsequently designed and employed is a first step that may see a greater engagement from urban Black males. Black males indeed are engaged in learning and teaching practices; however, they are not always engaged in the types of learning or in the spaces that educators recognize or value (Petchauer, 2011). A curriculum that infuses the contemporary tenets of knowledge acquisition with a framework that uses a hip-hop pedagogy can be one way to provide urban Black males with the autonomy to control their own image and maintain their individuality while connecting with school, the courses they take in high school, and the practices of traditional learning.
A hip-hop pedagogy is beyond simply using rap songs for a unit on poetry or infusing hip-hop context in math or science lessons. Simply replacing one textbook with another for sake of context or relevancy will do little to change the statistics that see Black males at the bottom or near the bottom of all academic achievement categories and the grossly over-representation among school suspensions, push-outs, and special education tracks
(Noguera, 2003). A reframed notion of using hip-hop culture in education must be understood beyond the beats and rhymes. Hip-hop culture can be instrumental to changing some of these downward trends in regards to urban Black male academic excellence when hip-hop culture is infused throughout schooling practices.
A re-framed hip-hop pedagogy is guided by a basic understanding that cultural products, be they material artifacts, expressions, or values, are produced in various ways where its producers struggle for power. One example of a reframing of classroom practices comes in the form of traditional teaching practices: typically the classroom is a call-and-response style of learning where student voices are only validated if they put up their hand, speak when called upon, and use the vocabulary that is traditional to school. A
Morris 100 revision that ties curriculum and schooling environment to hip-hop culture would see classrooms operating more as a rap cypher. Students are spatially arranged in a circular fashion, which eliminates traditional ideas of “the smart student who sits at the front,” as well as classroom dialogue that is more open and validating towards overlapping speech
(Emdin, 2010). The classroom, as it stands currently, can come to represent a foreign space to students who are fully immersed in hip-hop culture. A curriculum, or pedagogy that takes into account the nature of hip-hop culture and how it can be used to critically engage students is one step in a direction that may see less urban Black males disengaged with school.
Simply relying on an understanding of the urban Black body by judging his decision- making sells them short of the density of identity that most other bodies do not have to deal with. Currently, a reading of the urban Black body is mired in decades of negative imagery and a plethora of stereotypical assumptions. We must forge opportunities for both students and teachers to see Black bodies as more than a dichotomy between Yale or jail (Morris, 2016).
As we seek to re-envision education, policy makers must consider ways that promote positive learning experiences that can be created through a wide array of empirical subjectivity, including the experience of youth, in addition to statistical facts. Our problem is still the systemic barriers that force so many urban Black male students into thinking that there must be some either-or decision made in high school. It is a shame that the 24 to 54 year old urban Black males are forced to live with the decisions forced upon their bodies at the ages of 8 to 18. Yet, this is the dilemma we face.
Morris 101 Simply put, high school is not an inviting or natural place for the young urban Black male. Unlike many other demographic groups, he is forced to make serious decisions that impact the fragile state of his identity, which will ultimately have an impact on the trajectory in life. The important takeaway here is that urban Black males indeed exercise agency within the set of conditions in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, many of the decisions urban Black males make in this regard undermine their ability to achieve the desirable outcomes that public school educators might aspire for Black males.
Hegemonic institutions like schooling must foster the moral imagination of urban Black youth so that they have imaginative potential to, while rooted in reality, see beyond reality and discern diverse possibilities and consequences for acting. Currently, high school does not afford this flexibility of imagination. This implication points directly to the educators that are in our public school institutions. Educators must be equipped to understand urban Black males on their own terms. By this, I mean understanding urban
Black males in the spaces in which they live, create, and work and in the cultures, or domains, that offer them a sense of worth, validation, and belonging. A current impediment to this is the teacher accreditation process. This process impedes a great number of individuals to get into teacher’s college merely because of prerequisite university requirements and the ambiguous process that teacher-preparation programs currently hold. The filtering of the bodies that become teachers creates an abundance of particular demographics in the teaching profession. For many urban schools, despite racial representation, the contrast between student’s lived experience and teacher’s lived experience is stark. This implication does not rest on a simplistic notion that teachers must have gone through the same experiences (or even be the same race) in order to teach
Morris 102 particular bodies. But, we must re-configure ways of teacher accreditation so that we can provide more opportunities for a flow of professionals that have the tools to be excellent teachers but have given up on the profession, or haven’t considered it in the first place, because they are negated from the process before they can even think to reconsider it as a profession.
Teaching is not magic, but it takes unique traits to be an engaging and effective educator. Most of these aspects of teaching, quite honestly, are not learned in the faculty of education. And some of these traits have been honed by barbers, pastors, and a bevy of people in society that have the communicative power to make an impact on another person. Emdin (2010) posits a notion of “Pentecostal pedagogy” which maintains that connecting, relating, and inspiring are what teaching ultimately boils down to. While they may be pedagogical flaws to this brazen claim, one cannot dispute that in many Canadian urban high schools there is a cultural divide when one compares the socio-demographics of teachers to students (TDSB Census, 2011). We must provide pathways for individuals who are able to offer cohesive classroom environments that will subsequently encourage our traditionally “less motivated” students to excel academically.
The onus is as much on the agents of hegemony, the teachers, as it is on the institutions. The preceding findings laid out a framework that demonstrates how school officials place strong emphasis on transforming many aspects of Black children’s culture, which inadvertently communicates an inadequacy associated with Blackness (Tyson,
2003). These moments of exclusion and/or repression accumulate in creating a consensual and deterministic model of social reproduction. One that, when the urban
Morris 103 Black male fashions himself according to hip-hop aesthetics, vernacular, and peer allegiances, finds himself on the outside looking in at school.
Some deem the push out rate due to a said nihilistic culture that urban Black America
(and Canada) projects (Fordham, 1988). But are the dropout rates amongst Black males in university the same as they are in high school? Statistics suggest that this is not the case (Lofstrom, 2007). This is because the space of university provides a far less restrictive environment in terms of identity politics. Black males are not accosted at every corner for taking their hats off or coming to class late. Thus, the educational space of university no longer needs to be a space of resistance and identity assertion for these urban Black males. Black males still feel a pressure: but this pressure in university stems less from a stress to perform academically without losing ground and feeling the burden of correspondingly performing on a social level. In either situation, what limitations do we place on urban Black students who seek ways of affirming their identity and peer networks primarily by engaging in this innocuous behavior?
I must finally posit that high school needs to be more lax in its explicit rules pertaining to implicit curriculum. Aspects derived from hegemonic assertions of what the
“universal student” embodies must be reassessed. There is no problem with having an idea of what a “universal” student is, but whose tradition(s) are we following? And who has to make the biggest shift in their personalities, preferences, and behaviors when doing so? This unanswered question is perhaps one of the reasons for the dilemma with urban
Black males “dropping out” of our high schools.
High school is used as a space of activation. Black males who seek to belong to an urban masculinity (as understood through dominant discourse surrounding hip-hop
Morris 104 culture) read high school as the primal space to assert their cherished counter-hegemonic identities. Oftentimes for the urban Black male, “hip-hop gives [them] the Coles Notes on how to be current. Cause that is where everyone gets their ideology of again, what black masculinity is” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015). Are we willing to forsake young urban Black students simply because they want to survive high school with some friends and cling to a culture that they adore? Through hip-hop culture, many find ways to replicate a persona that is counter-productive to the schooling institution⎯ a space that has already denied them their right to be themselves in the first place. So, because it is so restrictive, they utilize institutions as a space to fight back by means of non-compliance. One can argue that this is operationally used because of how the urban
Black male already has considered what hegemony views and values of hip-hop culture.
For so many urban Black males, the reality is not only splintering to their authentic self, but then becomes an impediment to their growth as both a man and a student, as Taureen states:
“It’s challenging. It’s a grind and I think it’s [Black males failing out of schools] an epidemic because a lot of times when people criticize those people that come out of that environment, and the results that come out of that certain environment, it’s sad, because they don’t understand…Because it’s a whirlpool, man. It’s quicksand, bro. You can’t get out of it” (T.A., personal communication, December 11, 2015).
Intellectuals concerned with academics as well as educators “in the trenches” must both work towards understanding how salient hip-hop culture is to the experience of urban Black males and how these involvements impact and shape their personal development. In this translation, it is important to note that the White gaze is clearly invisible at this time, and so are the technologies of power and domination (Foucault,
1984). This study has demonstrated that there are macro-mechanisms of power, including
Morris 105 race and gender, and we can no longer afford to either disregard them or keep them outside our classrooms (Toohey, 2000). They constitute the axes of our identities, the ones we bring to the classroom, which in the language of antiracism education is the center of teaching and learning (Dei, 1996). We need therefore, “to link the macro- mechanisms of power with the micro-identity formation processes. That is what we need to link the cultural and the political with the linguistic” (Ibrahim, 2008).
The tactics used by Black males to assert their masculinity in high school garner little attention in the university setting. So, a constant reflection and assessment occurs for those urban Black bodies that do make it past high school. This is reflected and reinforced by the changing dynamics of their support groups and subsequently how they aesthetically navigate academic settings.
The intent of this work is not to pathologize urban Black males. There is an explicit reason why this work was layered with many interjections of my participants. That is because, “in discourse understanding and reproduction by the (dominant) audience itself, we generally expect the discourse to focus on the persuasive marginalization of the
‘Other’ by manipulation of event models and the generalized negative attitudes derived from them” (Van Dijk, 1993, p. 256). However, through the methodological processes of the phenomenological approach, and interviewing in particular, in the case of urban
Black males, we come to understand that, “if identities are performed in and through complex semiological languages of our own dress, walk, and talk, then they become our best access as researchers to our research subjects’ inner-identities (i.e. what they think and desire, and how they long to represent themselves and be represented)” (Ibrahim,
2008). Black males have carried the burden of their own shortcomings for long enough, it
Morris 106 is time for hegemonic institutions that produce, accentuate and inevitably reject urban
Black masculinity to carry some of the cross. This work explicates that it is necessary to understand the differentiated ways that urban Black males experience racism, though at the same time acknowledging that racialized identities are highly gendered. (Wright et al., 1998)
The onus is not simply on the individual, or a culture for that matter. Even being a
Black male in university still causes friction and different experiences of internalization and representation that Black males face that simply could not be discussed in the breadth of this work. In fact, many would argue that the presence of so few Black males in a university setting may cause Black males to enact their “hoodness” or some form of hyper masculinity even more! Analysis on aesthetics and peer networks that Black males choose to create often come with an opt-out clause that is an easy target for naysayers, because, “though it is important to situate the educational experiences of African
Caribbean males within an analysis of the interrelation between ‘race’ and masculinity, there is always the danger that this will reduce the problems experienced by some young
Black males in schools simply to the way in which they express masculinities” (Wright et al., 1998, p. 79).
With that being said, there are many other concerns and limitations that this research leaves us with. For instance, this study was based solely on qualitative data. Future studies in this area would benefit from employing data from a variety of empirical sources. It is my hope that this analysis will be assessed in other regions of North
America. Secondly, because the nature of this research is closely tied to participants who went to institutions like the University of Toronto, Waterloo, and Wilfred Laurier
Morris 107 University, one can assume that entering such a space that is predominantly white, experiences and ways to navigate such a system indirectly take on yet another unique form. Although Ontario universities and Toronto high schools provide a suitable litmus test for identifying and analyzing phenomenon pertaining to minority experience, it is also imperfect. I urge others to test my assertions in places such as Quebec where language also affects and facilitates culture and universities in the United States where racial incongruences in terms of students are not as stark from high school to university.
Furthermore, this research is fairly negligent to the importance that sexuality plays into identity politics ascertained by urban Black males through urban settings. This study makes the highly visible pageantry of heterosexual masculinity very clear. Although I feel my work provides analysis that refigures Black manhood outside of its current and historical stereotypes and offers a lens for seeing Black manhood differently, further research would benefit from examining how multi-sexual perspectives also complicate notions of urban Black masculine identity, group allegiances, and ultimately schooling experiences. Complicating the notion of thinking about Black manhood differently would indeed, “encourage dialogue about the ways in which black masculinities are queer beyond the practice of sexual desire” (Walcott, 2009). Ultimately, this work is simply meant to shed light on aspects of the experiences of Black males while not delegitimizing others. This study encourages scholars to look more closely at the everyday lived experiences of Black males with a focus on their successes in domains that matter to them and offer them validation. When educators complicate the current discourse surrounding urban Black masculinity and honor that Black males are agents working
Morris 108 within larger structures, we will better understand Black males’ educational, work and life aspirations (Petchauer, 2009).
The affects presented and closely analyzed could also reflect the mutual association between cultural practices (e.g., practicing for a sport and how that can transfer to academics) and certain personality dispositions like perseverance facilitate academic success. All participants coincidently either played sports in high school or at the university level or have also displayed a level of inherent personality traits that geared them towards goal-oriented identities that included a fundamental understanding of the importance of traditional academic progress for success in life. Furthermore, without detailed information that interrogates family processes and also school processes, the complexity of my analysis is at best linear. However, recent research on the positive affects of hip-hop pedagogy in relation to scholarship amongst Black males and Black male teachers has proven that most of the argument is, at the least, substantial (Hill and
Petchauer, 2013).
This work is a response taken up by many Critical Race theorists who claim to listen to the experiences of those marginally relegating to the bottom rung of society. “These experiences expose the racism underlying cultural deficit theorizing and reveal the need to restructure social institutions around those knowledges, skills, abilities and networks”
(Yosso, 2005, p. 82). Ultimately, what I hope this work elicits is the idea that, “the level of this negotiated acceptance is both class and race specific and it is here that we would argue for work on schooling masculinity to include a clearer integrated ‘race’ analysis in order to account for young Black male experience” (Wright et al., 1998).
Morris 109 By exhaustively injecting the sentiments of my participants, I hope to concretize the experiences and understanding that many other Black males undergo. Because, in the spirit of Hill-Collins, “neither emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason. Instead, emotions, ethics and reason are used as interconnected, essential components in assessing knowledge claims” (Collins, 2000, p. 266). For urban Black males, the claim of knowledge and identity in this contemporary era cannot be more poignantly illustrated by
Braxton, who states, “I’m going to be hip-hop no matter where I go, man. From the way I dress, talk, sound, its just all part of the culture, it’s going to be my spirit” (B.X., personal communication, November 23, 2015). The essence of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology always calls into question the content of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at the truth. I hope to do that with this here. Maybe then, for the sake of us as scholars and the countless educators who earnestly hope to make an impact on the trajectory plight of urban Black males, can we say, “we made it.”
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