The ‘absent Black father’ metaphor: analyzing education’s pathological pursuit of Black male surrogates

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we utilize the concepts of racial knowledge and subjective understanding to demonstrate how the metaphor of surrogacy encodes a racialized discourse via the epistemic authority of social science research. Taken together, we demonstrate how the pervasive use of surrogacy as a metaphor reflects the subjective understanding of Black male teachers produced through the racial knowledge of social science discourse. We argue that the metaphor of surrogacy has become so unquestioningly ubiquitous throughout education and popular culture that it has become the default conceptual framework regarding all reforms for Black young men and boys.

KEYWORDS:

• Black boys
• Black male teachers
• metaphors
• racialized discourse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Institute of Labor Economics published a 2017 report titled ‘The Long Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers’. According to the study, ‘Black students are 13% more likely to enroll in college if they have one Black teacher by third grade’ (Gershenson, Hart, Hyman, Lindsay, & Papageorge, 2018). This oversimplified notion continues to draw on a presumption of pathologically defunct Black households while positioning the return of Black men to the public sphere of education as the magical elixir for all unresolved educational debts within Black school districts.

2 In 2010, the former US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, made a speech at the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Duncan said, ‘As a nation, we have far too few teachers of color … It is especially troubling that less than two percent – less than one in fifty – of our nation’s teachers are African-American males.’ Since this speech, the pathological metaphor of absent Black fathers has become irreversibly tethered with the occupational ‘discourse of 2%’ around Black male teachers.

3 Wynter’s (2003) utilization of ‘degodded’ acknowledges Europe’s transition from a theocentric epistemic order in which theologians largely retained scholastic authority and social control to a secular intelligentsia during the intellectual revolution of humanism circa the fifteenth century. While Foucault noted the ‘invention of Man’ within this epochal shift, Wynter further contended that the coloniality of discourse also utilized secular racial knowledge to invent Man’s subhuman other (i.e., non-White/non-Europeans)