04: The problem with the Black family

Welcome to The American Ingredient, a podcast that examines grace in American society from
an academic perspective, focusing on the work from social scientists and legal scholars. The
American regent demonstrates that race is not the only ingredient in making America. But in order
to make America, you need to heaping spoonfuls.
Numerous scholars have highlighted that the way we frame problems shapes how we attempt to solve them. This is crucial.
Understanding what the government chooses one solution over another regarding the problem of black male achievement.
One particular frame that is consistent is the belief that the black family’s dysfunctional and a black
men have failed in the world as leaders of their households and its 2017 bid for the Alabama
Senate seat. Roy Moore insinuated that black families were reck and were better under slavery.
Others, such as Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and President Donald Trump have also made similar
assertions that black families are poorly structured and are failing black children. However,
they are not alone. Democrats have also made similar statements on two occasions.
President Obama has chastised black men for contributing to the dysfunction of black families.
More recently, the organization Color Change and Family Story released report finding
that media portrayals of black families encourage myths of black family dysfunction
and show white families as being the ideal type. These portrayals by politicians
and the media provide a frame for the problem of black male achievement that leads to specific policy
solutions that may actually be detrimental for black male achievement. In today’s
podcast interview, Anthony Brown, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in
the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Brown’s work examines
how this interpretation the black family came about persisted and influenced policymaking.
We begin the interview with Professor Brown, detailing the purpose of his latest project.
Well, one of the things that I try and do is locate like contemporary issues related to African-American
males within historical spaces. It’s fascinating even to just ask a layperson,
what do you see as the most pressing issues related to African-American males? They think about it for a moment.
I mean, talking a person has no interest in this area. They’re not studying it. They’re not in the social sciences.
And they think for about two minutes and they say, well, I think there might be some issues of fathers who don’t have fathers.
And I have found that the next question I ask is, where did you learn that? And they can’t think of where
they learned that. They can’t say, well, I read it in Time magazine. I remember reading report or course
I took it. University of Texas. It’s just the way they think about and say, well, what do you think? Secondly,
are the policy recommendations attached to that particular issue? They think for a moment they
ponder and then they say, I think they need more mentors and role models.
And then I follow with the question. I said, well, where did you learn then and say, well, it just seems like it’s just out there. I just kind
of know. And I say, well, why do they need more role models and mentors and say,
well, because they don’t have fathers in their lives. So they have this very linear argument. It’s Ari to
anchored. So if I ask a layperson, a principal. Other parents,
we had that particular narrative. And that narrative frames the creation of schools,
the necessity to hire more black male teachers. Well, what it does is it delimit any other kind
of question that we can ask. I’m talking about a complex problem. I’ll turn to people
in different professions like in the medical field. And so when you’re making a decision, when someone comes in with
a heart problem, you say, I’m having some issues that see symptoms. Well, what
do you think, Will? They’ll think of a multitude of things and list out all these variables that would if
you only had one or two things, so would have had a high likelihood of death. I mean, you just cannot
approach a medical condition with that nessel. One of the things I say is that we cannot think of educational
problems as complex and massive and historically entrenched and reduce it to this particular
sociological. And it was amazing to me the durability in the 60s, 70s, 80s changes.
But it always comes back to that because in some cases it’s it’s already in the lexicon.
It’s already way that we think about problems. And it probably provides some capital. I mean, you start saying
that black boys need particular things and you get people to pay attention. The problems have to be framed in the ways that we already
know them. And that’s the kind of crux of my work. And as it pertains to the social sciences,
there was some things I was noticing over the years is that the way we talk about educational discourse,
like the ways in which we reason about the experiences related to African-American males in particular
and African-American families was directly related to these kind of like old ways that we’ve
been thinking about sociology. I mean, you could take ideas from something. E. Franklin Frazier
wrote in the 1930s and literally cut and paste. There are several scholars that
Professor Branwell mentioned and I want to give a little bit of background about them. The first is E. Franklin
Frazier, and he was a black sociologist who studies on black life in the mid 20th century,
heavily influenced the field of sociology. And his book relate to the family,
the free Negro family. A study of family origins before the Civil War has been viewed by many
as being pivotal in the study of black family dynamics. And it’s important to note that he
was extremely influential, actually becoming the first African-American to serve as the president of the American Sociological
Association. In addition to Eve Franklin Frazier, you also have St. Clair Drake,
another sociologist that has apologist who is famous for his studies of black life in the Deep South
as well as the urban north. His book, Black Metropolis, which was coauthored with Horace,
are Kate Junior, chronicles the lives of blacks in Brownsville neighborhood on Chicago’s
South Side, along with his several other works. He is viewed as being
really one of the key figures in understanding urban sociology and how urban settings
influence social interactions with individuals. And finally, Charles Johnson, a
nother black sociologist who worked in the early part of the 20th century, chronicled the lives of blacks
in the urban north and Deep South. He’d become the first black president of Fisk University. Historically
black college in Nashville, Tennessee. But he would also serve on federal commissions
and White House advisory boards. All three of these men were senior p_h_d_ mediaworks, Chicago
in sociology. And in many ways the approaches from the Chicago school heavily
influenced how we understood the black family. With these three individuals being key figures and
accomplishing them. You could take ideas from something. E. Franklin Frazier wrote in the 1930s
and literally cut and paste them within a policy report in the present. And they’d be, you know, it
would fit the exact timing. So there was almost a durability of ideas and that we
hadn’t moved away from. So my first exploration and this was just to really ask the question, well,
how have people research African-American boys and African-American males over time?
You know, when you look across multiple disciplines, when the question pertaining to the experiences of
African-Americans, what topics come up most and what have been the implications of
that. So for me is trying to understand how those ideas
and how that narrative arc becomes almost implicitly visible in policy discourse
that no one’s citing. E. Franklin Frazier No one is citing any of the scholars of the
old sociological discourse from the Chicago school to the 30s and 40s. They’re not referencing it
becomes a meta narrative. So, Professor Brown, how did the scholars of the 1930s reframe the discussion
of the black family and how did their work contribute to our current understanding
of the black family? This is an interesting it was a conceptual shift because up to that point,
social sciences precede African-Americans is like biologically deficit. So
there was something wrong with our blood in our bones and our mass. So this is a huge shift to say that
African-Americans problems are ecological, not biological. So this ecological shift,
of course, led scholars to look and probe in to the experiences of African-Americans.
And at the time, with race riots all throughout the Northeast and in urban settings,
the African-Americans migrating there, they wanted to find ways to address this kind of racial problem.
So the impetus was centered on issues happening in St. Lewis in Chicago. And
one of the things they found is that they started studying the family. I mean, if it’s ecological,
it occurs within the ecology of the family. And that became the most prominent discourse
of its time. So I’d say about the 30s and 40s, a bulk of our discussion
was related directly to the family itself. Shifts
a little bit by the 50s and 60s with our attention almost to the sense that
what happens to African-Americans when they move within a different malu, when they’re now in urban
context as opposed to a rural context, what happens to the father? Where is he located? And in many cases,
he was perceived as absent, absent in at least one or two ways, absent from the micro context of
the black family. But absent from social science research like we can’t find him. I mean, you can
see in in the in the book in the 1960s Talley’s Corner,
this idea that African-Americans are not even been. There’s no empirical
longitudinal analysis of black men. So they’re seen as not only absent from the home,
but absent from research. But they kind of go two fold there because we don’t have access
to them and their families. And even when they are at have access to them, scholars would perceive them,
as they call them, peripheral dads, that they’re on the margins. They’re they’re
kind of not around. So this idea from the rural south to urban centers, black
men kind of lost their sense of self, no longer connected to communities and
became wandering absent in wandering. That was kind of the analogy attached to them.
It continued through the 60s, but less attention given to their inability,
but more that they have been in this situation for so long they can’t imagine a reality other than
this. So they can’t imagine being fathers and being stable and mothers can’t
proceed in this way as well. Fascinating thing. 1965 with the publication A Negro Family,
Monahan makes the policy recommendation that says, well, we can’t get these black
women husbands. We can’t. Moynihan That Professor Brown referring to is Daniel Patrick
Moynihan. He is famous for the Moynihan report, or more formally known as
the Negro Family, The Case for National Action. Dr. Moynihan,
as sociologists who would serve for President Johnson as the undersecretary of
labor when he wrote this, would also serve and work with President Nixon and serve in the Senate for
several terms. Wrote this report and the purpose of report was to help increase programs to address
the deep roots of black poverty. In this report, he concluded that the dysfunction of the black
family, specifically the high rate of female led families, greatly hindered black economic
and political progress. And this report is used classically as a way to talk
about how the dysfunction of the black family is the root cause of the failure for blacks to advance
politically and economically. But we have this masculine get our manhood gap
and the man who gap in a six in the 60s. One way to to compensate for
this gap was to put them on the front lines, put them in the military, a place where
they could get real manhood, which is I thought is this. I had to read that a few times to say that
the policy implication was called again back to absent fathers. So that
tangled in a pathology. Yet you put him at the front lines of policy recommendations have
always been. They always come back to them all. All roads lead back to
the sociology. The black family we’re talking about recruiting a black fathers. Getting more black fathers and involved
in schools is predicated on these deficits related to black families. Bringing more mentors if
it’s from fraternities or bring them in after school programs. Now, one of the things that I have to emphasize
and I will hope this is stated here in no way am I discouraging the implementation of role models
or having fraternities involved in schools. What is happening? Is it? You take a complex problem
and it’s reduced just to that. So the problems related in schools aren’t related to the structural
issues around housing and taxing that create schools. You know,
there’s a deficit in what the schools are able to offer them in terms of resources,
high attrition rates, all the things that make a school not function structurally are reduced
to a micro. The macro is never related in schools, it is purely the micro. And who can better
fix the micro is another individual. So all educational discourse in some
cases becomes a psychological issue and not a sociological issue or
a structural issue. A institutional issue. One first thing that stood out to me
is that many of these arguments came from black scholars. Think of E. Franklin
Frazier. And so there has been this contention between how white social
scientists have approached the study of African-Americans opposed to blacks. But we’re seeing that this narrative
actually started with black social scientists. Oh, yeah, that that’s fascinating. I mean,
much of the work that was cited by Moynihan was from from Kenneth Clarke,
even some of the work by Sinclair J. Clarke that Professor Brown is referring to was Ken
Clarke, who, along with his wife, maybe fips Clarke, were black psychologists whose research focused
on young children. They’re particularly famous for how their work on the damaging effects of racial segregation
on the psyche of black children help the NAACP secure the victory in the Brown v. Board case,
Kenneth and Mamie were the first two blacks to earn a p_h_d_ in psychology at Columbia University and
Furber. Kenneth Clark was the first black president of the American Psychological Association.
I think it’s a fascinating thing and I think there has been some work where Franklin Frazier had to kind
of backtrack on some of the things that he stated. I have a theory and I don’t know if this is purely
anecdotal. I mean, I think African-American men at the time, we know we were increasing numbers
going in higher education to increase numbers into certain fields. I would imagine
for people like Charles Johnson and he Franklin Frazier, this is a significant opportunity to
be able to get a p._h._d. And do this kind of research. What ends up happening is, you know, in our field,
the question of the day, you’re going to gain spoils. You’re gonna gain capital by the kinds of questions
you ask. So the Negro problem was already a problem that was framed in the early nineteen hundreds
and sociologists entered into an already existing discourse. You began to question like
the motives and intentions of researchers. I don’t think you you stand a chance.
We even look at their publication record. Most of them in journal, negro education,
journal, negro history is a very small pool of journal spaces
that their ideas can reside in. And even where they end up becoming academics, they were able to go to University of Chicago
and to Harvard. They mostly ended up at Howard giggy and many HBCU.
So I think there probably was a tendency to express a discourse
that was already there and it was certainly capital tied to that. And I think there was some dissent
when it came to those ideas, but there was no other way in which to imagine the world. I think the world was already organ
ized around that way of that kind of system of reasoning that reduced it to the black family, who is going
to provide the most precise analysis related to it. Another thing you pointed
out was this argument that moving from the rural south to the urban north led
to this breakdown in, I guess, how black men related to their families.
And this is kind of been a classic trope, even going back to slavery with ideas that as blacks moved
out of these rural southern areas and to the north, that this when problems occurred. Yeah. So
how does this does this regional argument kind of hearken
back to the days of slavery or is it? Where exactly is the root of this idea of moving
out of the south, moved to the north, leads to dysfunction? Yeah, I’ve been reading recently. I’ve
I’ve gone back to about the 15th century and even some stuff that Winthrop
Jordan wrote in the 60s about kind of early Enlightenment ideas around black men
or males of African descent. And one of the things that you see pervasive
over time is this idea that black men can’t function in places that have too much
stimulation, like this idea that black men aren’t naturally libidinous.
So I think some of these ideas are are packaged within different theories within
the social sciences, but the durability of them have a much longer duration
that can be traced back to the very beginnings of modernity. So when you’re beginning to conceptualize the citizen,
the antes citizen or the non-citizen is the Negro male in an agenda context, it’s the
female black female is almost like written out of it, but the kind of prototypical
the other the proverbial other becomes black male. It’s always rooted in his inability
to have impulse control. Rural is a simple system, simple social
system. The relationships are patriarchal. They’re defined in a
market economy in the north. In Chicago, life is far more complex
and they in many cases lose their minds. And I can quote things that are offered by even Frazier, who they
say they end up in this space. In this particular mulu. And they begin
to engage in kind of serial relationships they no longer roomates remain attached.
That’s why the idea of wandering becomes pervasive during that time. But I would argue that those ideas were
already anchored by kind of modernist philosophical thinkers of the time that
just played out in different ways. They played out in the context of slavery through black men being
almost viewed as. Acquiescing simpletons
their tacho to the simple economy. They need discipline in order to function in it. But
they’re are also implicit in that they were the brute, but they didn’t explicitly become analogous
to the brute until after emancipation, when the idea is that we can’t control them. So these ideas of
control and space. I think you could trace them to the eighth and ninth century. It just
happened to play out in different ways in the context of the illogical discourse in scientific
discourse, isn’t it? During the period to justify enslavement and then in the context of the Negro
problem of the twentieth century, it plays out in different ways, but it’s all the foundation of
it is the idea that Negro men have a kind of peculiar cardinality. You see it in
the inthere lot. Theologians talked about it in the nineteen hundreds, of course, scientists.
That’s the premise of the idea that something is peculiar about our bodies even see this
play out in a recent documentary I saw where Daryl Gates is justifying why
the time. You might correct me on this. It might have been between 9 to 12 men
had died of chokeholds within a year through the LAPD. And his justification
was that black men have kind of their bodies don’t operate normally
to the chokehold. And that’s why they’re dying. So, again, these kind of scientific
arguments, this is the chief of police giving a press conference and arguing that there
is something about the biological composition of black men that makes them die, that other people have. I chokehold
them. They would not die. So I think it’s reduced to the body. It’s also reduced
to the soul in some say sense. And I don’t mean just the soul like the actual the makeup
of black men. The essence of them that makes them not able to function in a complex setting,
whether in the end we see those discourses in schools in one context,
white males in private schools, they’re sitting on couches, reading books.
But when you look at a school based on a particular reform for black males in Chicago, they need blue
blazers, they need the white shirt and the tie and the body needs to be erect.
There has to be a certain disciplining. And that disciplining is going to come largely from black men of size,
of stature. So this there’s a governing that is attached to black males. And this is controversial
stuff because most of you know, I have to almost qualify. Yes, we need more black male teachers.
They make up less than 1 percent of the population. But I think what we have to trouble when it gets
privileged in this particular way, what undergirds the arguments for needing
a particular kind of black man in schools and even the study I did a death nogami on 10 black male
teachers to work with black male students. And what happened is that these black male teachers didn’t even realize that they
were enveloped within this discourse. They didn’t even realize they in fact, they it almost
through the study came to the realization is that is that all I am is all I’m a disciplinarian.
Am I? I’m not a thinker, a scientist, a mathematician, a history teacher.
The utility of me as a teacher is only to function to to govern black boys. And
that was troubling to many of them because they spent many years learning about reading and literacy, how to teach
in pedagogy. All those things were kind of their pride of their work, but they realized that most of
the world around them even promotion. How do you get out of the classroom? Become a principal?
Your ability to manage other black boys? You do that well. You get a raise. In many
ways, black men have been champion for years. So if you think of the movie Lean on Me,
I think there were guess black educators almost come off as drill sergeants and they’re seen as the
heroes. Yes, we have a strong black male comes in and kind of gets in office. A sudden everybody
magically learns. Yeah. I mean, that one of the things that gets missing
from that, again, going back to the men in this study is there may be a certain
sternness, but when you when you study the men, there’s a whole bunch of thought
that goes into it. And what’s fascinating, too, is that the the different ideological
stances that the men I mean, some are very strong nationalist and some of them are cultural nationalists.
Some of them believe in assimilation, but they all kind of
adhere tacitly to the belief that black men have to be physically present
when interacting with black boys in urban settings, particularly the place where I did my study.
But I think one of the things that the pervasive of this is that, again, the whole world
reduces all problems to black boys, to their inability to control their bodies.
So what better body to control? Another body is one that looks like a sort it kind of has this rolemodel
thesis. You know, the idea that I’m going to be informed by certain behaviors
and dispositions, I’ll see those behaviors and dispositions. And I want to mimic those behaviors and dispositions
and I can achieve at the same love in a certain some truth to that. But if we see that in a linear sense,
you reduce all of the pedagogical processing that these men put into the work that they do, they’re not
just in any moment rolling up on a black boy in a hallway.
They know that’s that. They know where he can take. They know when to do it. When you begin to
lay out the nuance is pedagogically what they do. It’s quite amazing. But yeah, there’s certainly
a discourse that says manhood and masculinity are attached
to the black nation. The black nation cannot heal. It plays out in micro context.
So the kind of political discourse of the Million Man March and other institutional things that like if the health
of the community can only function the body, the black body politic, we think of this in
an analogous sense can only function of the black male body is healthy and strong and standing out in front
of the issues related to it. And it was you know, feminists have had major issues of that with over the time, but it is
certainly a prominent discourse in many of us here, too. And in many cases, when they hear me talk to
them, they go, I never thought about it that way. They never really think that there are other ways to imagine it. Maybe
it’s because there’s a skepticism that no one will address our problems. And I
recall sitting in a an open session, a panel session here in the city
around what to do for African-American males. And a professor and I were sitting in
the audience. And then we noticed that only the questions they were asking were about ties
and and how black boys pulled their pozible, all these things related to it. And
we said, well, there’s some major structural issues like how schools are represented, what where they can go
to school, decisions families can make. We need to ask those questions as well. Quickly responded.
We know that structural and institutional issues exist, but we can’t control that readily. But
we can control what a black boy brings into the schools. And it’s
just the way we think about it. We’ve not. That’s why I call it a master narrative is no theory attached to
it. It just becomes the reason why we approach the work. We’re doing this probably some capital
that comes from it, funding of a school. More resources come. And so if you present the problem
in the typical sociological way, again, it’s going to give you a promotion. It’s going to give you a grant.
It’s going to give you opportunities. If you begin to question in a way, I think it creates a little bit of dissonance where,
well, let’s go study high achieving African-American males in Middle-Class settings or a private elite
schools. Maybe, maybe not. If I could frame it within
a trope of getting out of the hood and then study it that way, I think it would have
appeal. But just a study for its own purposes. I think people would be less.
They’d be there wouldn’t be less of an impetus to study that particular work. I recall years
ago going giving a presentation in a district to 300 teachers and I said imagine for
a moment if Banana Republic, the Fisher Foundation, does Banana Republic, Old Navy
and Gap. They did give money. Major philanthropies and philanthropists for education.
And so what if they said they were gonna hire us 10, 15 tailors and they’re
gonna give all of your boys three or four presto, tailors
are gonna come out, they’re going to fit the boys pants are going to give them a belt for different colors, patterns. You start kind of clapping
like that, be fantastic. And I said, if you were able to pull that off, do you believe
you’d be able to change the achievement gap in this particular district? Dead silence in the room.
You know why? Because they know it’s not possible. They know that fitted pants won’t. Give
you a fix, an achievement gap. But why do we pay attention to it? Because we believe
that telling a black boy to pull up his pants can fix the problem. We
have this idea of the deterioration of black man in the black family.
What exactly are facts? I mean, I think one of things you pointed out is but the way we think about black
families is factually incorrect. Yeah, well, what exactly are the facts?
Well, the CDC came out with a study and they actually argue the argument that most people
will throw just I mean, they’ll throw out 90 percent, 80 percent. Again, there’s an
appealing discourse. Who says so? If you want to appeal to the needs of black males. You have to present their problems
attached to the father. The most common one is it 80 percent of all black boys live
without a father. Now, what they’re looking at is the data that actually
says that black females are not married.
So when you look at black boys, it’s something like one point three million fathers
are involved in their fathers lives. So, for example, my take me, for example, if I
if I was not married to my wife as much time as
I spend with my son and daughter, violin lessons, all the things
canin would be living in a home in what was be defined as a fatherless
home because he’s not married, even though my involvement. So the measurement wasn’t that there’s
is there’s a continuum around these and fathers have different degrees of involvement. And sometimes
it has to do with the changing relationship between marriage. People are having children not getting married at higher
rates. In fact, the numbers are changing dramatically. So our reporting of black father
involvement is usually attached, that number. But when you look at the number of black males that are involved,
there are far greater in the same study. They studied something like 250 to
maybe three hundred men, white, Latino, male. And I think they were looking at indicators
of like how many males bay their fallen sons and read
to them involvement in black men outperformed them. And every single kind
of micro measure of what we define is involved with what their children and their sons.
So some of the things as has we have to change the way we report the data.
And that that muddies up the water. I mean, how am I now going to say, well, black males are
they actually are involved? Where do we go from there? That’s because
we have a can’t the way we think about it. We already echo certain ideas to get people
in public policy to pay attention. This muddies the water up a little bit. And it says, well, where where
do the problems reside if their fathers are in their lives? So when you create a school egg recall this even in
my study where black boys would, they would the teachers would say something to the boys in the study
and the black boy returns. I have a father. The presumption was I’m here to be
a surrogate father, for example. Arnie Duncan, in 2010/11,
his big kind of policy pitch to the world was something called five. By 2015,
he says, by 2015, on 5 percent of the teaching population to be black males.
And his argument for why he said they most black boys don’t
have fathers. So these men could serve as surrogate fathers. No argument about
what they can offer pedagogically in the classroom. What they could do in terms of instruction, even relationships
and friendships that could occur in the context of schooling or what they can offer by way of mentorship.
But they could serve as surrogate fathers. So even the discourse within wider public policy
and Nike was involved in Spike Lee was involved. John Legend was involved. It just
becomes the way we think about it’s the default discourse to understand what I see as very complicated
issues related to black males. We know that this is much more complicated issue.
And you mentioned earlier that a lot of discussion is what can we do to change black boys?
So will we be addressing of an entrepreneur? You actually say it shouldn’t be. What should we do to change them? It should what we should do to change
us, to work with them. So what are some the things that you believe schools need to do
in order to accommodate the needs of black men? Teacher training is vital.
I mean, I think one of the things that teachers aren’t giving opportunity is to like really spend
some time thinking about this. This one shot professional development were Anthony Brown
comes out and gives you 20 slides about the most pressing issues related to African-American males.
And then you go away. There’s different degrees of development. So you need spaces where there’s large percentages
of African-American males, maybe in Detroit and even certain districts where they represent a small percentage
where there’s little interaction with African-Americans. We respond to black boys
in a way that requires some unpacking and teachers just there’s a gut
response to things that don’t require that attention. We’re talking more classrooms. It’s in the context,
these issues, suspensions, expulsions, we look at the data, but they happen in the micro context.
And it is an individual that is asserting meaning and. Point those meanings and those meanings have
huge implications. I’ll share a study that A recently was done, they
gave a picture, they gave 300 early child educators. Guy’s name is Gilliam.
There’s a study that was done at Princeton and they gave them a clicker and they said every time you
see a challenging behavior in the classroom. So there’s an image of a white girl, white, male,
black or a black male. So every time you see a challenging behavior in this classroom, once you click your clicker,
every time you see it and say the black boys and quadrant A. Now, there are no definitive definition
challenged behavior there, Berardi, definitions that exist. But many people point to the definition
provided by Powell and colleagues in their 2007 article in the Journal of Early Intervention.
They state that a challenge of behavior is any repeated pattern of behavior or perception of behavior
that interferes with or is at risk of interfering with optimal learning or engagement with pro-social
interactions with peers or adults. This concern about challenging behavior is important
because children who repeatedly show challenging behavior are more likely to suffer
from learning disabilities as well as face suspensions and expulsions.
And so because of this, how we deal with challenging behaviors and who we isolate as having challenging behaviors
dictates a great deal of what teachers do day to day, as well as how
school districts develop policies to address learning. So the data was overwhelming.
They click black boys more than any other group. Here’s the irony. There were no challenging
behaviors. So they saw challenging behaviors when there were no challenging behaviors and they saw them more
with the group that gets identified in those particular wayso. Certainly we have an implicit bias.
It’s happening in schools and the researchers that have done implicit implies if it’s if it’s if it was biased
from the beginning, it could be undone and it can only be undone by giving teachers opportunities to
really think about the kinds of things that are swimming in their heads about the students they serve.
Whether they and I think a pervasive one is the sociological stories we tell about black
families. I used to tell my my brother in law he would send
my mother in law and father in law to the school. And I’d say because it’s work and school,
he couldn’t get there, no meetings. I said, you got to get out there because there’s being a story is being informed
about your daughter that you don’t know. And he’s kind of frowning and going, well, what do you mean, Anthony? I sat there
thinking that did Jaylen is being raised by her grandparents.
So there’s there’s no father. There’s no mother, said you. And in Cheree, which is why I need to
go out to that school and shift that. And he never thought about it. You know, just
his his set of circumstances. I realize that the world will actually frame it in that particular way.
So I think we need a lot of time. As much as I critique like our impulses
around hiring black men or black teachers with the assumption that this linear relationship,
the problem I have with is that we don’t ask any other question. We only see that. And then if you’re able to achieve
that, the hiring more black male teachers or get a mentor program involved in the show. Black men
shaking the black boys hands and they’re giving them high fives and you’re working. So you begin to kind of these
these moments where you capture institutionally what you’re doing with it doesn’t anchor
or change it because it has no connection to the classroom. Curricular practices, pedagogical practices, the
classroom teachers need a lot of time thinking about what they think when
they make decisions in classrooms. And so what are some of the major challenges you faced
in, I guess, getting your message out? How kind of pushback are you receiving?
The biggest one early on is people assuming that I’m saying we don’t need to hire more black male teachers.
That was the number one response. The second response is that my work is too historical
and too theoretical in the sense that. Schools
have. They want a utility. They want ideas to immediately respond to literacy. Immediately
respond to math problems. And I say you ask bigger questions that will allow you to understand
why black boys are not getting into the trigonometry, which I just recently saw some data.
This is in central Texas. Black boys are the lowest, whether in
the low S.I.S. Or in middle class. Every other group outperforms black girls,
white girls, white males, Asian males, every group, black males
are at the very bottom in terms of getting to at least algebra to trig
and beyond. So one of the things I want them to understand is, is that just a math problem?
No. That is a bigger socio historical issue. So my
task is to help people understand and trouble the way they think about. And I just have to come sometimes
help districts, you know, understand that I can’t. And why I do that. So
it’s like this immediate, you know, I want something where they’re gonna want to
read immediately. And as I. The problem isn’t whether they want to read.
It’s it’s the fact that you don’t even have books that represent them in the classroom. And that
that is a structural issue, because the decision for a teacher today, even if they had the desire
to add books, you couldn’t go to Barnes and Noble and find those books.
You have to be really clever. You have to find bookstores and and places you have to go online.
This is very kind of archeological thing when you bring knowledge and whether teachers are willing or capable
doing this, a whole nother issue. But no, we’re not just talking about math.
We’re talking about problems with knowledge. And how do we make that? How do we even make math relevant?
Is it just about math or is it something bigger and deeper about the actual black culture
of this school is what I try and do. I mean, surprisingly, people
have began to listen to what I have to say related to these issues. But the biggest challenge
I’ve had is that they want solutions immediately.
How are you able to get them to stop looking for this?
Stop looking for just on a very real quick solution and to actually start to look at
themselves and how they need to adjust? Well, one of the things I try and do is I take
something that teachers already do. So I’ll say something along the lines. How do you teach
a child to read? And we’ll put on poster paper and teachers will lay out all of these
things that they do and so on. So I think if we put a picture of the child in the middle middle
of like thousands of arrows going at what they do to scaffold and build a
child to eventually become a reader and the same things, I want them to think
I want them to think about multiple things that make possible. Why black boys
are being expelled, suspended to greater rates. What do you think they could be? And once you get to thinking about
the things that they are already doing that require complexity and layers of complexity. They
realize that they’ve they’ve seen a process. A if you just had one solution to fix literacy.
We’d have a literacy problem because you do so many things to help a child learn
how to do literacy. And most teachers will engage those questions. Most police officers
will begin. We begin to think about like Woody before. What is it about this particular group?
You have already set set of ideas and your response is directly tied to
those things. First of all, they’re black or male. The time of day, the type of car. And there’s this reaction
to that. The question is why? And I think that’s the kinds of questions that we have to ask teachers
about. They’re already doing complex things. You could ask any math teacher, science teacher,
English teacher. There are many different things we begin to ask them about, like why are black males failing?
Again, we have this we have a problem with thinking we’re so deeply
entrenched in bias. It’s very difficult for them to even imagine that there
is a space where black people achieve. I mean, even that in of itself,
the idea of showing pictures to my pre-service teachers
in the eighteen hundreds of African-American men. I showed them the picture of
Dubois’s Paris nineteen hundred. So I flipped through all three hundred and fifty pictures.
And so I don’t give them the time frame, I don’t give them the context. They just say I want you to write different things.
And they located they don’t know or even where to locate you. They don’t know if this is. They know. It looks so
all that is it slavery. But it can’t be slave because African-Americans are inside. So they’re perplexed historically.
They don’t know even where to locate African-American achievement. And what’s ironic
is it’s all over. Was that even a students that I grew up in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.,
and high performing African-Americans were all around me for some reason I couldn’t
see it. So even when it’s there, it’s right
there in her presence, she cannot realize maybe there could be
you disavow it as an outlier. So there’s this particular massive narrative
of underachievement that’s tied to us as a group, African-Americans as a group. And when you see
these moments, black doctor, black lawyer, president of a university or whatever
measurement of achievement we have, you disavowed significance because Bailey seen as some type of
outlier. It it colors even my approach as a parent
raising a now nine year old African-American male, for example, there the day he left
the house with. It was raining and he put on a raincoat and and
he didn’t have an umbrella and he put the hood on to cover him. So my immediate
reaction was to take the hood off. You know, I get put in this box, I’m f
I’m absent. I fit the narrative. But if I’m present, I’m overbearing. OK.
So it’s it’s it’s very interesting to being a parent in this
in and from a standpoint of a researcher. All I can continue to do is document
what I’m seeing. And I don’t see these narratives necessarily going away because so
many people are invested in them on many different levels at the level of the research or the
policymaker, the person wants to develop a school. If you want to write a book, the narrative
itself is appealing. And sometimes that appeal is even out to sometimes
hear people’s say, you know, I hear people say, you know, I come from the hood and I have no problem with the hood
story. But when you deconstruct it, you realize that particular person, that
you had a group in Brooklyn, but it was in like a two story brownstone. And there are tons of
African-Americans, including my family, that have two story brownstone, three story brownstone.
But it’s in the middle of what we conceptualize where although I know conceptually Brooklyn has changed, there’s
a different imaginary attached to Brooklyn now. But the 80s and 90s, Brooklyn already
had a fixed narrative. So to to tie your story to that and your journey.
It gives you capital. You could sell that. Or in a very appealing way, rather than no life
has been comfortable entire life, and I’ve. And here I am today in this particular way. There’s this.
You can’t write a book. There’s no memoir for that. And I think that is the crux of the problem that
the story itself has so many stakeholders invested in it. It’s very
hard to get out of this kind of cultural discourse. Well, Professor Brown,
thank you so much for joining us. This is fun. It’s been a delight to have you here. Yes. Thank you.
As Professor Brown points out, many of these beliefs we have about the black family, black men are so deeply
entrenched that we can not break away from them, even though we know how harmful they are.
In early April, the Government Accountability Office released report finding racial bias in school
discipline. They found that even in more affluent schools, black students
were punished more often and more severely for similar infractions as their white counterparts.
These findings come at a time when President Trump is calling for more punishment of students as a method
for improving school safety. As Professor Brown points out, this get tough response
does little to actually help student achievement and may even increase the achievement gap between
blacks and their counterparts. We must be aware of the narratives we use to explain
a problem because these narratives can divert our attention from a true causes and may lead to
making the problem worse.
Thank you for listening to the American ingredient. I’m Eric Daniel, a professor in the Department of Government at the University
of Texas. I would like to think Michael heidenreich and Jacob Weiss, their assistance, along
with the Department of Government, the University of Texas and the University of Texas, ELEI t-s
Development Studio.