Rationalizing race in thinking about the future: The case of low‐income black men

Abstract

This paper reports on the views held by four low‐income African American men concerning how mobility operates in American society, their sense of their personal life‐chance prospects, and how they believe that being African American relates to each matter. The central finding was that the extent of social isolation experienced in life (e.g., lack of direct interracial exposure, lack of intimate exposure to institutions of social power and authority) shaped the capacity to articulate an importance for race in these issues. This paper also argues that an investigation of how low‐income Black men made sense of race in their constructions of social reality moves academic and popular considerations of them beyond a preoccupation with the behavioral attributes that are subsumed under the “crisis of the Black male” scaffold. Thus, while each of the men maintained some of the attributes associated with this crisis (e.g., lack of consistent employment, involvement in illicit activity, incarceration), their capacity to form contrasting conceptions of the importance of race indicated a crucial dimension of variability in what might initially appear to be a cluster of similar individuals. Lastly, this paper argues that an acknowledgment of the bases for such variability is critical for any attempt at remedial intervention in their lives.