Boyz in the ‘Burbs: Parental Negotiation of Race and Class in Raising Black Males in Suburbia

Abstract

This paper explores the outlooks of black parents raising sons in a suburban school setting in a town that I call Rolling Acres. Dominant narratives about black males center on urban environments where hazards of violence, failing schools, and socially disorganized neighborhoods are prevalent. However, black parents in suburban settings are not immune to racial hazards when raising black boys. This article engages two domains of distinct concern for the parents of black boys: academics and social life. Through a series of in-depth interviews and participant observations with 18 families in a suburban context, I argue parents of black boys, though sometimes divided along gender lines, were concerned with a host of race-related challenges such as social promotion, special education classification, dating preferences, the stereotyping of black boys, and the strain between being cool and academically successful. These concerns demonstrate the importance of understanding how black families, and boys in particular, wrestle with the racialized and gendered power structures even in well-resourced settings. This paper adds to the emerging body on suburbia by highlighting the continued significance of race and gender for black residential families sending their children to suburban schools.

Notes

In this text I use African-American and black interchangeably. Although the former denotes an ethnicity and the latter a race, within the context of Rolling Acres and for the purposes of this discussion, there is little distinction in social meaning.

Pseudonym for the city of study.

Across class and race categories, respondents tended to conflate low(er) income with African Americans. The coupling of low(er) income with blackness often meant respondents would toggle between discussing race and class, which is consistent with the above quote from Mr. Downing. This is in part an artifact of the distribution of poverty in Rolling Acres being skewed with black families being, on average, poorer than whites.

I found no evidence that black families believed Rolling Acres was color-blind. However, black families routinely raised the point that white families emphasized their color blindness and valuation of diversity, without addressing their role in re-creating racial inequalities in the town.