A Meditation on the Soundscapes of Black Boyhood and Disruptive Imaginations

Abstract

In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood. While both forms of intervention are guided by good intentions, they nonetheless stymie research and critical engagement with how black boys experience boyhood. This article considers how a speech by President Barack Obama functioning as a precursor to formal announcement of the My Brothers Keeper initiative demonstrates the difficulty with distinguishing black boys from black men and, therefore, from developing interventions and research, in general, that attends to the needs, interests, and ways of being of black boys. I propose that in the absence of discursively focused research and empirical data, the inner thoughts and lives of black boys can be located in culture, specifically soundscapes created by black male recording artists that offer disruptive imaginations.

Keywords::

• black boyhood
• discourses of crisis
• imagination
• music
• politics of respectability

Notes

See Simone Drake, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), x.

I am indebted to Israel Durham’s intellectual generosity in helping me to identify songs that fit this project.

Tamir Rice was a twelve-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer on November 22, 2014, when Rice was reported to be brandishing a gun in a local park. He was not a 20-year-old man as reported by the responding officers and he had a toy gun, which is what the 911 caller proposed was likely the case.

A study published by the American Psychological Association found linkages between police officers’ dehumanizing stereotypes of black children with racial disparities in use of force. The study also found that a sample of 264 mostly white undergraduate females consistently identified black children as less innocent as children of other races beginning at age 10. Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526–45. http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0035663.pdf (accessed August 29, 2016).

Wendy Luttrell, “Making Boys’ Care Worlds Visible,” THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies 6, no. 2 (2012): 186–202.

Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 16. Italics in original.

See Marlon Riggs’s classic documentary Ethnic Notions. San Francisco: California Newsreel ([1987] 2004).

Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Simon & Schuster, ([1925] 1992).

In one of Washington’s most popular speeches, the 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, he famously urged black people to “cast down your buckets where you are.”.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 187.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 50.

Fredrick C. Harris, “The Rise of Respectability Politics,” Dissent 16, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 33–37, at 35.

Michael J. Dumas and Joseph Derrick Nelson, “(Re)Imagining Black Boyhood: Toward a Critical Framework for Educational Research,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 27–47, at 28.

Ibid., 40. Italics in original.

Drake, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making, x.

See Simone Drake, “Making Sense of Respectability Politics and Their Relationship to Black Boyhood,” Flipping the Script: New Frontiers for Imagining Black Men and Masculinity. A publication of the Ford Foundation Scholars Network on Black Masculinity, edited by Alford Young. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.

Gloria Ladson Billings, “Boyz to Men?: Teaching to Restore Black Boys’ Childhood,” Race Ethnicity and Education 14, no. 1 (2011), 7–15, at 10.

Dumas and Nelson, “(Re)Imagining Black Boyhood,” 37.

Ibid., 37.

This story first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in January 1940 and was later re-published in 1961 in Wright’s posthumous collection Eight Men as “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.”

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 185.

Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 45.

Stevie Wonder. Innervision. Motown/Universal Records, 1973.

Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 180.

Junior Giscombe. “Mama Used to Say.” Mercury, 1982.

Leslie Odom, Jr., Leslie Odom Jr. S-Curve Records, 2014.

The O’Jays, “Loves Me Like a Rock” The Fighting Temptations soundtrack, Columbia Records, 2003.

This version is a cover of Paul Simon from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.

Wendy Luttrell’s study on the adaptive uses of “photovoice” to allow elementary school children to document their lives at home and school found low-income boys of color were attuned to “their mother’s public and private labor, including its costs” (194). Furthermore, she found that the boys used their photographs and videos to feature “topics of love, care, solidarity, and emotional intelligence that are rarely seen as noteworthy” (199).

Houston Baker, Jr., Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T. (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), 17–18.

Jacob Anderson, You’re a Man Now, Boy, Columbia Records, 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simone C. Drake

Simone C. Drake is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Louisiana State University Press, 2014).