Understanding Young Black Males: Notes on Education , Hope, and A Search Past Silence

Understanding Young Black Males:

Notes on Education, Hope, and A Search Past Silence

David E. Kirkland, PhD

AUTHOR ACTIVIST EDUCATOR CULTURAL CRITIC THINKER

Executive Director, Center for Applied & Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Arts and Humanities

Associate Professor of English & Urban Education Core Faculty, African American & African Studies

Michigan State UniversityEmail: [email protected]

Twitter: @davidekirklandBlog: davidekirkland.wordpress.com

To raise awareness of the condition of young

Black men in contemporary society . . .

Objective #1

To provide a humanizing narrative of young

Black men that illustrates the sensitivities and intimacies that shape his ways with words . . .

Objective #2

To provide suggestions for effectively engaging

young Black men in the transformative project of education on his terms for social healing and for

social justice . . .

Objective #3

I am a young Black man . . .

Searching Past Silence Deals with the Ability to Tell Your Story on Your Terms

I am from Detroit!

What is Silence?

“Now silence is the taming of voice, the erasure of sound. . . there are many versions of silence that underwrite Black male language . . . There is the act of being silenced, which splinters into two categories—forced silence (being made to

shut up) and unforced silence (never being heard). There is also the silent dialect of Black men, the choice not speak, a language of calm and quiet against the loud breezes of inequity.”

Why did I write a book about it in relation to

Black males?

Language can be used (and is used) as a

social/cultural/political currency for the exchange of values, beliefs, dispositions, etc. It is also an essential part of who we are.

Some languages are valued more than others; therefore, certain individuals are perceived to have greater worth in society than others.

The value of language is constantly shifting, amended by the elite to reflect them (their languages, interests, etc).

Language and Power“Linguistic Capital”

Hegemony

The success of the dominant group in projecting their values, dispositions, interests, etc. whereby the masses consent to multiple forms of their oppression

Multiple Forms of Oppression Silencings, fears and hatreds of self/others, feelings of

inferiority/superiority and entitlement/disentitlement

Benign Ideologies Missionary Models/Deficit Theories

Key Issues/Concerns“The Consequences of Language Politics”

1. U turn2. left b Hind 3. Legs sprawl ing on top of Black

back4. Mountains5. Rivers that Run Deep6. Like Sheba’s Queens and she

Loves7. Open pours8. inside empty cups that run

over9. hope like Escalades

10. that phaint in Darkness11.that phreeze in Night12.that phick in morning, morning 13.Uprising 14.Lite skin white men15.Blues is my brothers 16.Black is my Berry17.Sweet is my juice18.So U turn back to me19.I re turn back to U 20.I die daily 4 U

Derrick’s Song“U Turn”

1. U turn2. left b Hind 3. Legs sprawl ing on top of

Black back (broken English; use correctly)

4. Mountains5. Rivers that Run Deep6. Like Sheba’s Queens and she

Loves7. Open pours (You mean pores)8. inside empty cups that run

over9. hope like Escalades

10. that phaint in Darkness11.that phreeze in Night12.that phick in morning, morning 13.Uprising 14.Lite skin white men (sp-light)15.Blues is my brothers 16.Black is my Berry17.Sweet is my juice18.So U turn back to me19.I re turn back to U 20.I die daily 4 U (lazy, you need

to spell out)

Derrick’s Song“U Turn”

The Chronic Decline of Black Males Literacy

Proficiency

The Statistical Narrative Nearly 70% of Black fourth grade boys read below grade level, compared with 27% of White

children (NAEP, 2011). Even Hispanic and Asian fourth graders fared better on reading exams than Black males, although

English is their second language. Black males are at the bottom or near the bottom of all academic achievement categories and are

grossly over-represented among school suspensions, dropouts, and special education tracks (Noguera, 2003).

Approximately12% of Black males test proficiently in reading compared to 40% of other American youth (NAEP, 2011).

Nearly 40% of Black males will be jobless, either unemployed or incarcerated, by 2020 (The Center for the Study of Social Policy, 1993).

Young Black men (ages 10-14) have shown the largest increase in suicide rates since 1980 compared to other youth groups by sex and ethnicity, increasing 180% (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2004). Among 15-19 year old Black males, suicide rates (since 1980) have increased by 80% (Poussaint &

Alexander, 2000). Black male are twice as likely to die before the age of 45 as a White male (Roper, 1991; Spivak,

Prothrow-Stith, & Hausman, 1988).

The Rich Life of Literacy Among Black

Males

The Interpretive Narrative Scholarship consistently points out that youth, regardless of race or gender, actively read

and write (e.g., reading magazines, writing blogs, performing raps and identities, and so forth) (Alvermann & Marshall, 2008; Mahiri, 2004).

Connor (1995) argues that Black males have long performed manhood symbolically. These symbols tend to gain meaning in Black male social circles,

particularly in the cultures of hip hop and sports (Cooks, 2004; Dimitriadis, 2001; Johnson & Roberts, 1999; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002).

The symbol systems sanction urban poetry and spoken word as well as tattoos and tags and raps, all of which are communicative genres “rooted in the Black Oral Tradition of tonal semantics, narrativizing, signification/signifyin, the Dozens/playin the Dozens, Africanized syntax, and other communicative practices” (Smitherman, 1997/1998, p. 269).

Because of what she sees as the “teeming life of literacy” among Black males, Dyson (2003) suggests that the literacy gap is an aberration that reflects more accurately cultural derisions in our society than achievement ones

Silence for Shawn, unlike the “freedom” of speech, was not optional; it was unwritten racial

law—mandated, a privilege unearned.

Silenced

Can we listen to Black males beyond the silence?

What would we hear?

1. U turn2. left b Hind 3. Legs sprawl ing on top of Black

back4. Mountains5. Rivers that Run Deep6. Like Sheba’s Queens and she

Loves7. Open pours8. inside empty cups that run

over9. hope like Escalades

10. that phaint in Darkness11.that phreeze in Night12.that phick in morning, morning 13.Uprising 14.Lite skin white men15.Blues is my brothers 16.Black is my Berry17.Sweet is my juice18.So U turn back to me19.I re turn back to U 20.I die daily 4 U

Derrick’s Song“U Turn”

“The more we know about who we serve the more we’ll know how to serve them.”—Pedro

Noguera

The needs of your students are, in effect, the needs of your teachers.

The Literacy of Black Males

An ontological complexity tied to both his

being and his becoming

The potential of his possibilities anchored to his past, tied and frozen to his soul, yet ever-seeking to escape the limits of his defi(n)ed being

Not just they ways he reads and writes, but they hows and whys he reads and writes . . .

What is the Literacy of Black Males?

“These were all versions of masculinity . . . They

were all images of God in his continuous creation. Yet all did not point to Adam or the

thunders of Ares. Some . . . followed the morning breeze, floated like clouds against the easy

wind,  and read books because young Black men read books too.”

“Another Kind of Masculine”: More than a Dick Thang

“It is important to understand race as an

element of history not to be separated from the bound compartments of time to which it is

forever tied.”

RACE

We would hear everything he is because his voice, his

literacy is tied to his identity as a Black males.

“The study of literacy is incomplete until it folds together the doing and the being, the struggle and the sacrifice—unless the story of literacy

becomes the story of us, the literate. How does she or he come to be whoever she or he is?

What stories are invented in the life of being that finds their way through the pen and through the

creases of words practiced?”

What does this notion of literacy mean in terms of

transforming education for Black males?

Don’t Limit Our Students to the Stories of Now . . .

Recommendation #1

Rethink the Basics . . .(They are NOT reading, writing, and arithmetic.)

Recommendation #2

Pleasure

Play

Curiosity

Creativity

Rethink the Classroom . . .

Recommendation #3

Dime Piece=

Objectifying Women

Cheapening Women

Putting Women on the Auction Block

Interrogate Assumptions about the Status Quo . . .

(Instead of failing students, let’s think about how we are failing students.)

Recommendation #4

Teach Like Your Life Depends on It . . .

Because theirs too often do!

Recommendation #5

THANK YOU

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