‘I didn’t want to be a statistic’: Black males, urban schooling, and educational urgency

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon resilience and educational urgency, this longitudinal study explores the narratives of 20 college-aged Black males as they make sense of their secondary school experiences at Marcus Garvey Academy (pseudonym), an all-boys public school in a large urban city in the U.S. In paying particular attention to some of the challenges they faced, findings indicate that a complex set of personal, family, peer, and school factors affect these students’ lives during their secondary school years. In their efforts to overcome these difficulties, students scripted resistance into their self-concept, identified ways that they benefitted from a supportive schooling environment, and translated some of their self-learning into educational urgency. These students’ experiences and meaning making serve as a critical counternarrative to how they are stereotyped and limited by deficit framing and lowered expectations and speak powerfully to ways to better theorize, understand, and appreciate Black males’ schooling experiences, resistance efforts, and aspirations.

KEYWORDS:

• Black male students
• educational urgency
• resistance
• secondary school
• aspirations

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. ‘Young hood’ is a colloquial term sometimes used to describe adolescents and young adults who are residents of or connected to communities that are economically deprived and face a variety of structural inequities. Importantly, the ‘hood’ (or ‘ghetto’) often is invoked to symbolize or imagined as ‘impoverished, chaotic, drug-infested, and ruled by violence’ area of the city (e.g., see Anderson 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Midwest Sociological Society.