Men of Color and Masculinities: Researching the Postsecondary Education and Identity Development Nexus

Abstract

BACKWARD GLANCES: A NATION SPEAKS, A BLACK BOY HEARS, AND A BLACK MAN RESPONDSI primarily come to research on men of color and masculinities through a human experience as a Black boy who became a Black man in the Arkansas Delta region of the United States of America. During my development, I began to understand the ways in which educational settings are both makers and markers of societal norms, values, and ills. Educated in moderately resourced public schools, I learned to view these spaces as protected but struggled to view them as equally protective of all children. Schooling not only introduced academic content but exposed a hidden curriculum that narrowly defined and violently enforced codes of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Hence, school became one of the first sites to test my internalization of the Audre Lorde (2015) warning to define oneself for oneself or be eaten alive. I would carry my memories into adulthood, and they would provide foundation for a research agenda.Some of my recent publications consider Black boys' and men's parallel experiences in educational and other social institutions (Dancy, 2014a, 2014b). These comparisons locate relevance within national discourse about race and Black masculinity following police and vigilante shootings of unarmed boys and men of color. According to Gabrielson, Jones, and Sagara (2014), young Black males are 21 more times likely to be shot dead by police than their White counterparts. In 2014, one of these individuals was Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man who was shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. In addition, police shot dead 12-year-old Tamir Rice following police beliefs that an adult Black man was harassing the neighborhood with a gun that was later revealed to be a toy. Finally, the nation debated the jury's verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman was acquitted for shooting and killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin who was walking home from a neighborhood convenience store. While society has evolved in some ways, Black bodies remain disproportionately brutalized, bear the brunt of selective law enforcement and subsequently inhabit a psychic uneasiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety (Alexander, 2012). Oppression affects Black male educational outcomes including masculine identity development.Higher education research on men of color and masculinities has slowly emerged while research in other disciplines has long articulated the significance of this scholarship to institutional policy and practice. In the early 1970s and 1980s, the first wave of Black manhood scholarship considered Black men in their roles as fathers and/or economic providers. This research emerged at least a decade behind Black feminist scholarship which centered analysis of Black women's lived experiences in a White supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal world (Dancy, 2012). The second wave emerged in the 1990s following movements like the Million Man March, highly publicized trials of Black men, and infusion of the hip-hop era. The transition between the first and second research waves was marked by greater attention to interactions between race and gender, or, Black male embodiments of oppressor and oppressed identities (Dancy, 2012). The discourse continued at the beginning of the 21st century with research focused on the relationship between sexuality and manhood as well as seminal historical texts on Black men and masculinities. It is also during the second wave that scholars finally began to consistently study Black male college students as gendered beings (Dancy, 2012). The proliferation of this research followed other education fields in which researchers investigated school settings as sites of Black male boyhood construction. Hence, the relationship among men, masculinities, and postsecondary education remains a relatively new and ripe research domain.As a scholar and education sociologist, I have spent the past decade studying the role of manhood in the Black male college experience. …