‘O brotha where art thou?’ Examining the ideological discourses of African American male teachers working with African American male students

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, several researchers have found that African American teachers who are successful with African American students hold deep philosophical commitments to the concept of ‘social justice’. While these scholars have convincingly articulated how ‘social justice’ is a central feature of African American teachers’ success with African American students, little attention has been given to whether African American teachers draw from diverse and/or competing ideological discourses to address the collective goal of achieving ‘social justice’. Employing the theoretical framework of nation language, the findings from this study illustrate how seven African American male teachers who worked with African American male students within a local educational context drew from multiple and sometimes contested conceptions of ‘social justice’. The findings from this study demonstrate that while the teachers held a ‘shared concern’ to radically alter the educational and social conditions of African American males, they each employed different and competing discourses of ‘social justice’. Thus, in the context of this study, the idea of ‘social justice’ was individually rendered, historically contingent and multifaceted.

Keywords:

• African American male teachers
• African American males
• social justice
• nation language

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Carl A. Grant, Gloria Ladson Billings and Tom Popkewitz for providing the theoretical and intellectual support to this paper. I also would like to thank Herman Brown, Tony Castro, Allison Skerrett, Luis Urrietta and Deb Palmer for their assistance at various stages of this project. I am also thankful for the support provided by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Minority Fellowship and the Tashia F. Morgridge Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Finally, a very special thanks to Keffrelyn D. Brown for providing her continuous intellectual feedback and personal support.

Notes

1. I use ‘African American’ and ‘Black’ interchangeably throughout the manuscript.

2. African American immersion schools opened in urban districts throughout the early 1990s to address the specific cultural and historical needs of African American students. See Leake and Leake (1992) for a more substantive history of African American immersion schools in Milwaukee, WI.

3. It should be noted that while I understand that there are numerous theoretical conceptions of ‘social justice’ within modern European and North American philosophical thought, this study draws from the notion of ‘social justice’ as it has been conceptualized within the scholarly discourses of African American political and educational thought (Broderick and Meier 1965; Cruse 1967; Dawson 2001; Watkins 1993). Political scientist Michael Dawson (2001) argues that the contours of African American political thought has taken shape through their varied socio‐historical experiences in the US.

4. These ideological categories were developed from the scholarly discourse of African American political and educational thought. These categories are seen as the common approaches that African Americans have taken to conceptualize various historically‐situated race problems as well as to explore solutions. I used these categories as a heuristic method to analyze the discourses that surfaced throughout the study.

5. Rather than being called ‘Mister’, African American male teachers were referred to in the school as ‘Baba’ which means ‘father’ or ‘holy man’ in different spiritual contexts. The names after ‘Baba’ are pseudonyms.