Revolutionary STEM Education

Chapter Two

Cutting straight the truth

Interrogating White supremacist-based racism’s role in perceptions of Black maleness
Racism, which is predicated on a delusional and perverse notion of white supremacy (Roberts, 2011; Roediger, 1991), rests upon a pernicious, manufactured and patently false dialectical relationship with whiteness positioned as the thesis, and, blackness, seemingly forever positioned as its antithesis. This dialectical relationship was overt, violent, and ubiquitous and accepted—both socially and juridically—for much of American history. However, more recently whiteness has transmogrified. The overt hatred characterized by the peculiar institution of American Chattel Slavery, the three-fifths compromise, lynching, Jim Crow Laws, Separate But Equal Laws, segregation, and personified by the KKK, are no longer palatable for the general populace. So, racism has become less overt, in many respects (Leonardo, 2010). Groups of whites with impunity can no longer lynch young black men; unless, of course, in place of a noose, there is a gun, and in the place of angry white mobs, there are uniformed law enforcement officers or overzealous pseudo-peace officers like George Zimmerman. As is always the case, white supremacy is going through yet another pernicious iteration due to the white fragility that resulted in the election on Donald Trump and his band of white Nationalists. What has not changed, however, is that black youth culture has been forcibly and dangerously conflated with macro-level societal ills like violence and crime (Mahiri & Conner, 2003). This recriminatory strategy, which blames those victimized by white supremacy for their injurious relationship to it, employs ideological state apparatuses (e.g., schools, media, etc.) in the place of the more expensive and resource-intensive repressive state apparatuses (e.g., KKK, militia groups, police, military, etc.) it once relied heavily upon to ensure the continued promulgation of the white supremacist agenda (Althusser, 1971; Leonardo, 2010).

Media is one of the most affective and, therefore, effective ideological state apparatuses. Ultra-conservative voices like DiIulio (1995) and Bennett (2005) along with a host of other conservative “pundits” have vilified black boys born to single mothers in impoverished communities for decades. This ethos is captured in DiIulio’s (1995) “Superpredator” theory. Scholarship in the vein of DiIulio’s tenuous theory serve to promulgate fear, racial profiling, and a deadly reification of negative, Black male stereotypes. This is why purported claims of fear for one’s life, when face to face with an unarmed Black man in the minds of people who accept these problematic stereotypes, somehow, allows for juridically sanctioned murder of unarmed Black boys and men. This negative reification of Blackness is convenient for white supremacists capitalistic endeavors as well: Black males are sadistically over-represented in the multi-billion dollar prison industrial complex (Alexander, 2010). This is Chattel Slavery, reformulated. According to Sabol, West, and Cooper (2010), the Bureau of Justice statistics data showed “an estimated 4.8% of Black men were in prison or jail, compared to 1.9% of Hispanic men and .7% white men.” In reality, the incarceration rates of Black people have been on the decline from 41.3% in 2000 to 38.6% in 2006 (Sabol et al., 2010); however, this is not the popular narrative because this narrative has the potential to begin unraveling the web of inconsistencies that white supremacy necessitates for its continued existence and prominence. Still, Black males are more than six times as likely as White males to be incarcerated in this country (Alexander, 2010).

Behind the Mask: Uncovering Whiteness
What is whiteness? Whiteness is, first and foremost, the power to control language. Moreover, it is the power to define, to classify, to categorize, to shun, to eschew, etc. Whiteness validates the standard and derisively invalidates any and everything it considers non-standard. It is interpellational and accusatory, yet malleable. Moreover, whiteness positions itself as the "universal equivalent"(per Marxist terminology); that is, it is positioned as the determiner of both use and exchange value, and thus, value and, ultimately, worth. Whiteness determines the value of other commodities, in this case of other cultural commodities; it is also able to determine what qualifies as valuable and invaluable; that is, it has the power to determine what does and what does not count as currency, as capital. This power of valuation is not limited to material goods. Actually, it has been extended to encompass cultural value as well. Cultures that are commensurate with Europocentric values of “democracy”, meritocracy, free trade, often Judeo-Christian and or Protestant aesthetics are of much more value than cultures that are incommensurate from these ideals.

One would be hard pressed to say, with a straight face, that the racist depictions of African Americans—that have been reified and commodified through mass media vehicles like black face minstrelsy, and concretized through various conscious and unconscious racist institutions and practices—have simply disappeared. Imagery that depicts African Americans as unintelligent, bestial sub-humans, who speak a vulgar, corrupt form of English are still pervasive (though more subtle), and are deeply ingrained in the collective American psyche (Lott, 1993). Even our Nation’s former leader, and arguably the most powerful man in the world, President Barack Obama, was not exempt. Despite his academic pedigree, Obama, a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review and where he received a doctorate in law, was still fodder for the New York Post editor who in 2010 ran a cartoon likening the author of the stimulus bill in question (presumably President Obama) to a dead ape. Still, overt racist attacks like this one are much less prevalent than they once were, though, following the election of the 45th President of the United Sates, there has been an uptick in hate crimes. Nevertheless, they are just as powerful. These types of attacks have transmogrified and are now recapitulated through deficit model thinking and the policy that it catalyzes. No longer is it explicitly stated (and widely accepted) that African Americans have intrinsic, biological deficiencies; now, the deficiencies are attributed to more abstract conceptions like culture.

To this point Foucault (1984) writes: the second mode for turning human beings into objectified subjects [i.e., “others”] is related to, but independent from, the first. Let us call it ‘scientific classification’. It arises from the modes of inquiry which give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics…(Foucault, 1984:78)”.

The classificatory nature of our society, though problematic in my opinion, is not what I am addressing per se; rather, I am addressing for the sake of analysis the way/s that ideological predispositions inform the classificatory process. This is important because these classifications determine the ways in which people are perceived in racialized and gendered terms, among others. These perceptions, then, inform the opportunities that different people are afforded. This, in large part, the impetus for much of the struggles that Black boys, the focal group of this book, face in STEM in particular and in school more generally (Mahiri & Sims, 2016). As I mentioned before, though a lack of opportunity is perhaps the most reliable determinant of Black male success in STEM (Darling-Hammond, 2010), Blacks boys and their families and even their culture is often blamed for their struggles in STEM. According to Steele (2010), Black boys then begin to internalize the negative stereotypes that have been made to seem endemic, intrinsic, and innate. To this point Fanon writes:

Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local and cultural originality— finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is…The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the [colonial] mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes Whiter as he renounces his Blackness, his jungle (Fanon, 1968, p.14).

The promulgation of anti-Black rhetoric, policies, and laws via both ideological and juridical sanctions, is, in large part to blame for the cultural misidentification that many Black boys are forced to confront. According to Gramsci (1971), this type of self-devaluation is the result of a deeply embedded (cultural) hegemony: Over time, the oppressed are repeatedly indoctrinated and, consequently, they are “duped” into becoming complicit in their oppression (Marx, 1976; Gramsci, 1971; Hall, 1996). Poor marginalized students who come from under-resourced, underfunded schools—children who are tracked into classes with low expectations—become resistant to and alienated from school culture (Kozol, 1991; Delpit, 2012). Black students are far less likely to go to graduate high school and/or go to college than their white or Asian counterparts (Steele, 2010). It cannot simply be because they are inherently less capable—this assumption often couched in colloquial language is racist and erroneous, yet it is in circulation. Therefore, the more likely explanation for the continued underrepresentation of Black students in STEM is not aptitude or interest. On the contrary, it is the lack of equitable educational opportunities that this Nation’s White supremacist based educational ideology and practice engenders (Foucault 1964; Althusser 1971). then, resultantly, they are recriminated and, subsequently, blamed for their own academic struggles. All the while, the structural-institutionalized inequity that delimits their success is tacitly exculpated.

Althusser (1971) names two discrete State deployed controlling mechanisms, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA’s) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA’s), respectively. For Althusser, RSA’s ensure domination by force whereas ISA’s are employed in order to coerce complicity even to one’s own detriment. This is hegemony. More precisely, whereas issues of domination operate from the outside, e.g., direct threat of force by police, militia, posse, etcetera— hegemony, on the other hand, operates from within. More often than not the dominant group employs ISA’s in order to indoctrinate and condition the oppressed; for Althusser, ISA’s are “certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct specialized institutions (143).” Any number of ISA’s can be made to work in concert in order to produce and preserve a distinctly Westernized White reality. Schooling is a normalizing enterprise. In Althusser’s terms, schools are Ideological State Apparatuses that work to normalizes or in more specific terms, standardize, the values, encoded language, aesthetics, and sensibilities of students of color so that if even if students of colors’ ideologies are not in lockstep with White supremacy, at the very least they are not a threat to it.

Playing with house money: Whiteness commoditized
Whiteness is pervasive: it is licentious and seductive; it cruelly beckons non-whites because it becomes the ultimate instantiation of capital “C” culture and high class. It is excess, success. However, it is a tease, a ruse. That is to say, it seduces, but in truth has not the slightest inkling to widen its aperture to allow for the inclusion of people bereft of the most necessary commodity in this toxic relationship, whiteness. This fact, though, it hides well. Therefore, racial minorities still, perhaps unwittingly, measure their success by their proximity to this elusive whiteness (Fanon, 1964). Hence, it is a fetishization of privilege akin to a fetishism of commodities, because it is precisely that: a commodity. Whiteness, the universal equivalent, is imbued with mystical, god-like powers of creation. Therefore, it cannot be pinned down because it, unlike, say, Blackness or Mexican-ness cannot or more specifically will not be reduced to simple physiognomy. Whiteness is the default nationality: it is just “American” here in the states. Whiteness carries with it the power to delimit levels or degrees of specificity; whiteness can compartmentalize and marginalize. Because it is ubiquitous, it seems almost phantasmal or in the least nebulous and unidentifiable. However, it is pervasive and suffocating. It is purposely opaque.

According to Roediger it is “nothing but false and oppressive”; yet, it is “constructed from real, predictable, repeated patterns of life (Roediger, 1994).”(In the preceding quote Roediger is speaking of race in general, but his analysis extends to whiteness proper as well.) Thus, Roediger argues that only the abolition of whiteness will begin to remedy the injustices and inequalities that it foments. This view though desirable, is possibly too expansive to ever become realizable. More specifically, whether whiteness is abolished, committed educators that work alongside students marginalized, persecuted, and oppressed by white supremacy must continue to press forward even if white supremacy is not yet eradicated. We must conduct guerrilla warfare—that is, we must fight the injustice catalyzed and ensured by white supremacy wherever we are whether it be in our classroom, at the organizing level, in the policy sphere; it must be in whatever sphere of service we occupy. That is to say, we must continue to call out and address the wages of white supremacy that we see as well as the wages that our students identify, even if we do not see because whiteness has historically and frustratingly dodged blame for the injustices that it catalyzes and later institutionalizes. Instead of whiteness being put on trial, marginalized oppressed people’s moral compass, language, even their culture writ large is tried (and more often than not, convicted) for their own precarious lived realities. This dissimulation affords a space for whiteness to function in the interest of whiteness, albeit, without making whiteness manifest. This has much to do with whiteness’ control of language, which is why whiteness does and must continue to repudiate and or castigate any and all languages it deems non-standard, i.e., non-white. Attitudinally, whiteness is utopist and dismissive: that is, it envisions a world where whiteness is the standard; where whiteness is privileged; where whiteness is the goal (much like the one we currently inhabit) to perpetuity.
So, then, in order to disallow whiteness from exculpating itself yet again, we must say, rightly, that it is the root cause of the nihilistic threat discussed on preceding sections is whiteness. Whiteness would have it that the inequalities and injustices that marginalized groups are confronted with seem natural, even ordered. Whiteness is renowned (by itself) for its work ethic, which allows for arguments regarding structural injustices to be reducible to an insignificant and patently false discourse on meritocracy. The main tenets of this argument go something like this: non-whites, that is those who do not enjoy/experience whiteness, are deficient in some way, whether it is morally, culturally, linguistically, educationally, etc. Therefore, they are unable to secure for themselves the tools, the capital, to earn/purchase merit. Whiteness prefers to speak in individual generalities, which also serve, paradoxically, as essentialisms. In this way, whiteness makes a habit of accusing the accuser: if some claim that structural and/or institutional racism is to blame for her or his condition, whiteness points an accusatory finger right back at the accuser. The accuser’s class, culture, language or even their race comes under fire. It is in this way that whiteness extricates itself from lame. It becomes the accuser’s own “deficiencies” that best describe her or his oppressed condition, not white supremacy. (In truth, the term deficiency is just a colloquialism that describes ones’ distances from or to whiteness.) Because whiteness controls the legitimation of language and therefore the legitimation of thought, it can determine who is and who is not deficient. For much of our history here in the United States, whiteness has defined itself vis-à-vis another abstraction: Blackness.

The Construction of “Whiteness” vis-à-vis “Blackness”
Whiteness is an assumed patriarchal positionality: the founding fathers are just that, fathers; they are men. Consequently, they are the exemplars of whiteness. Every non-white, then, is an infant of sorts. More precisely, every non-white is infantilized by whiteness in order to maintain whiteness’ requisite patriarchal structure. What is more, whiteness is married to the fantasy of the American past. This is problematic because the good ole’ days involve, inextricably, the institution of slavery. Plantation nostalgia relies on these images—the two, slavery and plantation lore are inseparable (Sharpe, 2016). Depictions of the contented black slave, a perpetual infant, and the benevolent white slave owner/patriarch are mainstays of the “good old days” myth. For this reason, the notion of “whiteness” in the United States is forever tethered to the notion of “blackness”; the first form of mass entertainment, Blackface Minstrelsy was a vehicle that promulgated and later reified notions of difference. Whites’ recognize themselves as well as other whites through, firstly, differentiation (e.g., that they are white and not black) and later through identification, either knowingly or unknowingly, with the privilege that accompanies their “whiteness.” (Whiteness here is meant to be analogous to superiority; this whiteness is predicated, by and large, on the conformity of non-whites to the role of the subservient “other” in order to complete these unequal dyads.)

Psychological Consequences of Othering, Ideological Inculcation and Cultural Misidentification
The Eurocentric domination of reality and therefore of history has left the African American relatively devoid of historicity (Mphahlele, 1974). This lack comports them in a very peculiar way; that is, in a Hegelian sense, they are always in the stage of being-for-others, as opposed to the more agential stage of a being in-itself-and-for-itself. As far as this, Fanon (1968) writes:

As long as he [the Black male] has not been effectively recognized by the other [the White Patriarch], that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed (Fanon, 1968, p.217).

Further, Fanon argues that it is this type of reality that leads the oppressed to adopt (condescending) “White masks”. That is to say, the oppressed begin to see themselves and their culture, including if not especially their language, through the eyes of the oppressor. Fanon goes on to write: “There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to Black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to White men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect (Fanon, 1968).” (Fanon speaks almost exclusively of the black male experience partially because as a wartime psychologist, the vast majority of his patients, both black and white, were male.) According to Fanon and his contemporary Sartre (1984), it is this type of neurosis that causes the Black man to abdicate, even deride, his own mother tongue in favor of one that is more palatable and thereby more acceptable to Whites. This is seemingly a stipulation in a racist, psychological contract (Mills, 1997), a contract which is based on an empty promise: “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the [colonial] mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes Whiter as he renounces his Blackness, his jungle (Fanon 1968: 84).” Furthermore, Fanon, elucidating what he later re-terms as a phobogenic neurosis (which he argues is deeply embedded within the Negro psyche), writes:

When the Negro makes contact with the White world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one observers the collapse of the ego…The goal of his behavior will be the Other (in the guise of the White man), for the Other alone can give him worth (Fanon, 1968, p.17).

Next, Fanon discusses what he diagnoses as a phobogenic neurosis, which haunts, conditions, and configures all current and formerly colonized peoples. Fanon’s framework is especially enlightening because of his work as a clinical psychiatrist; his observations are based on more than 400 case studies. Furthermore, Fanon is widely regarded as one of the foremost third world, anti-colonial thinkers of our time. Beyond that, while others have hinted at the psychological phenomenon that is present within the African American, Fanon names it (see above). His particular psychoanalytic framework affords us a clearer view into the conflicted psyche, the double-consciousness (Dubois, 1903) that Black people, including middle school Black boys, must wrestle with. We saw this firsthand when we asked each new cohort of MAN UP Scholars to draw a STEM professional.

It’s not just about White privilege: Whiteness should be abolished?
The term, white privilege (McIntosh, 1989), describes the phenomena of unearned benefits being conferred on people of European ancestry simply by virtue of their pigmentation. This term seems to be more popular than ever in today’s political climate. However, for me, this term is insufficient precisely because it does not account for the genesis of the benefits unduly conferred on “ White” people. In its current conception, it is as though these benefits, the benefits conferred on White people without merit, are simply pulled from some unknown storehouse of benefits. But, of course, this is not the case. The benefits of white privilege are created by the appropriation and exploitation of non-whites. More simply put, the benefits of white privilege are built on the backs of people of color (Leonardo, 2011). What is more, the notion of privilege suggests that were it not for these privileges, the playing field would be otherwise equal. This is simply not the case. This is precisely why I do not spend a great deal of time deconstructing white privilege; for me, white privilege should not be the focus of critical, emancipatory work because it is but a mere symptom of a much larger, much more deleterious disease: white supremacy.

Roediger (1994) argues that whites dis-identify with whiteness so that whiteness can be abolished. He postulates that rejection of whiteness, by whites, will catalyze a “process that gives rise to…attacks on racism… (Roediger, 1994:13).” He argues that the dissolution of whiteness will not only free oppressed racial minorities but whites as well—whites who are “burdened by whiteness (Roediger, 1994: 17).” Likewise, we know that repeated inculcation at the hands of whiteness’ Ideological State Apparatuses in particular (e.g., schools, media, church, etc.) results in coercion; however, oftentimes this coercion is packaged as complicity. And, arguably, later it does indeed cause a kind of “real” complicity for non-whites. All the while, whiteness positions itself as a kind of non-entity; that is, it makes believe that it does not exist. More precisely, it exculpates itself from blame by relying on a rhetoric of cultural deficiency, linguistic deprivation, etc. So, my answer to the above question would be a resounding “YES”—whiteness should be abolished. To be clear, there is a distinction between Whiteness, which the systemic progeny of white supremacy and people from Scandinavian, European, and Nordic descent/ancestry, among others. I am in no way arguing for the abolition of people that consider themselves to be white. What I am arguing for, however, is the abolition of the system of whiteness that pays for and confers unearned benefit to “white” people on the backs of people of color (Leonardo, 2010).

Though differentiating between the abolition of whiteness and the abolition of white people is complicated, it must take place in order to move this exigent conversation forward. Roediger’s plan necessitates a realization of Marxist universal consciousness to be achieved for the oppressor and oppressed, in order for real change to take place. Obviously, this is something of an oversimplification of Roediger’s argument; however, the fact remains that he is calling for white people to renounce and reject the privilege that their whiteness ensures them. To be clear, this means that they would, in effect, be acting against their own best interest, at least materially. If our Nation’s history is any indication, this is a hard sell.

Ultimately, I agree with Roediger that there must be a thorough uncovering of whiteness before any talk of abolition is to progress—the "enemy" and its many manifestations must be identified. Moreover, there must be a rubric, a legend or key that helps whites to recognize the machinations of whiteness, which is the intent of Whiteness Studies. Whiteness must not be allowed to remain hidden, to maintain its position as the secret puppeteer that animates society for its own interest and advancement, just beyond consciousness or sight. Whiteness must be taken to task. In order to do that, there must be more theory, more discourse, and more discussion that aid in the identification of whiteness, not only for people of color but for whites as well. Whiteness is a disease, a cancer, but before we can talk of curing it, that is abolishing it, we must understand what triggers it, where it thrives; we have to uncover and ultimately disrupt its teleology.
Admittedly, this approach is somewhat defanged; it does not exude radicalism. However, in my humble estimation, efficacious and radical are not mutually exclusive. I am arguing for a tactical, precise albeit continued progress toward the eradication of white supremacy by calling out and deconstructing the pernicious effects of whiteness on people of color. One of the most dangerous effects of white supremacy on Black boys is that it has cast them as threats.

The transmogrification of Black Males: Thugs and threats
The word “thug” has become synonymous with African-American male. There is no discernible difference in either word's usage by many of the people who report on the murders of unarmed Black Males. For them, the two words seem to be interchangeable. This, of course, is an issue of framing. During slavery, the Negro was depicted as a happy-go-lucky pickaninny, who was wholly reliant on the slave master to provide for him; this was a justification for the peculiar institution of American chattel slavery (Fanon, 1968). This image changed during Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010): the happy-go-lucky Negro was transmogrified into the Black brute (as a new justification for the abject violence that was visited upon African-Americans by whites, and a justification for segregation). This is illustrated by the willful discursive shift from the term Negro to that of the dreaded nigger. No longer was the Negro a peaceful, God-fearing oaf akin to of a farm animal; instead, he became a rapacious, licentious nigger who was only interested in defiling the “virginal” white woman (Lott, 1993).

This is the imagery, with the requisite caricatures, that has won the day now. And, because of this, Black males have been permanently positioned threats. And, violent (over)reactions to them are based on this positioning. Homicide becomes “justifiable” when one feels as though their life is in danger and that there is no way to avoid bodily injury. Based on the deaths of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, to name two, clearly, the notion of justifiable homicide, when exercised on a Black male—armed or not, requires decidedly less justification. Sharpe (2016) describes this as an aspect of (anti)Blackness in the wake of the peculiar institution of American Chattel Slavery. In this paradigm, theoretically, and in practice, as evidenced, microcosmically, but the abovementioned murders of Blackness, the wake of Slavery has positioned Blackness as an irredeemable threat worthy only of violent death.

So, then, it follows that if society has been duped into becoming complicit in imagining all Black males as threats, irrespective of who they are individually, then, the rationale for justifiable homicide and the burden of proof for justifiable homicide is much lower (or nonexistent). This is the result of the masses having been coerced into believing that all African-American males represent a real and present danger—a threat. This is not only true of police officers, but this is also true of the people who would serve as jurors on a potential grand jury or any case that brings charges against an officer who has been charged with violating an African-American male’s civil rights.

And, the sad reality is for many Americans is that this makes perfect sense. These travesties of justice, when unarmed Black men, women, and children are gunned down in interactions with law enforcement, are viewed as instances of justifiable homicide precisely because Black people have been positioned as the instantiation of terror, though we have been terrorized ever since the first African forcibly set emaciated, shackled foot in the new world (Sharpe, 2016). Now to be clear, this is not a recrimination of police. The clear majority of police officers, White police officers, do not kill unarmed Black males. That is not something to be applauded, mind you—but it is true. The fact that that this statement needs to be uttered, or in this case written down, speaks volumes. But, I believe instances of police shooting unarmed Black males like Michael Brown and Tamir Rice (a twelve-year-old child, playing with a toy gun in an open-carry state) is informed by both the non-conscious and conscious (erroneous) conflation of Black male and threat. What is more, undercover Black male police officers are more than twice as likely to be gunned down by their fellow officers in cases of “friendly fire” than their European American counterparts. This problematic (and patently false) association, on the one hand, informs police officers' interactions with Black males and, simultaneously, supersedes any one interaction between white police officers and Black males. The idea that all Black males are threats and must be subdued is present whether a particular Black male is, in fact, a threat (Miller, 2011). This is true in our school system as well (Ferguson, 2001).

The 21st Century Urban Colonized
There have been many permutations of popular Black male imagery. Early on characters created and popularized by Blackface Minstrelsy cast the negro as a buffoon only interested in maintaining his obsequiousness while indulging, ad nausea, in licentious behavior and watermelon. Eventually, the antebellum Negro became—in the midst of Jim Crow—the dreaded nigger (Lott, 1992). The main character from Wright’s (1940) novel, Native Son, Bigger Thomas was the epitome of this newly concocted caricature. Another shift, in the 1990’s, was arguably catalyzed by a tragic event in Chicago, Illinois. A shocking murder took place in the Ida B. Wells housing projects: a five-year-old boy was thrown to his death, from a fourteenth story window. The age of the victim as well as the ages of the accused murders, both 10 years old, sent shock-waves reverberating throughout Chicago. This tragedy made national headlines. The public outcry, once the news broke, prompted then-President Bill Clinton to openly address the rampant violence that plagued Chicago’s south side. News of this type of depraved, genocidal violence took many Americans by surprise. It seemed as though as a country we were taken aback by the accounts of the abject violence featured in our America. However, for poor people living in places like Chicago’s south side, this kind of violence did not invoke disbelief.

We already knew stuff was bad. I remember that when I was in the first-grade body parts of a third-grader week found in the elementary school directly across the street from my house. Police had been looking for a missing young man for a few days. They were alerted to his dismembered corpse because another elementary school student found an ear. Purportedly, this 9-year-old was the casualty of a drug deal gone bad.
Nevertheless, according to Jones (1998), acceptance of the abject conditions of life in the Ida B. Wells Projects in Southside Chicago was met with obdurate disbelief. They could not accept that living conditions, here in the Land of Promise, could be so deleterious, so utterly hopeless. West, commenting on the ubiquity of disenfranchisement, low expectations, and violence that pervades inner-city (urban) neighborhoods, argues that a “nihilistic threat” has “infected” the black community. This ominous threat serves as an explanation, though not exculpation, of many of the social ills (i.e., symptoms) that plague urban ghettos throughout America, e.g., wanton fratricide, misogyny, patriarchal absenteeism; and, disproportionately high rates of crime, under-education, incarceration, out of wedlock births, etc. West defines the nihilistic treat as a severe apathy that disenfranchises and incarcerates an individual until said individual repudiates the reality of existence, the reality of life, to the point where life itself no longer has value. As I recounted in chapter 1, this was my reality, too. Fanon (1964) in his illuminating anti-colonial treatise, "The Wretched of the Earth" describes behavior by that of the colonized people throughout the Third World that is indecipherable from that of the perceived lumpenproletariat that inhabits the poor, substandard, inequitable living conditions here in the United States. The commonalities that exist in both of these contexts, colonized and ghettoized, respectively, are too numerous and too persistent to ignore. For example, both groups have become, in essence, domestic expatriates; that is to say, they are ostracized and separated; consequently, they are made to live on the outside, as the “other” even though they are within their own country. This is because they, colonies and urban ghettos, respectively, are one and the same to the racist white apparatus that instituted both slavery and colonization.

These urban-colonies constitute what Harrington (1962) refers to as the “Other America”. Harrington argues that there may be up to 50 million people who are impoverished physically and spiritually. According to Harrington, these people are part of the “other” America. Harrington’s work sought to reveal this population, which was either naively overlooked, or purposely ignored. The aforementioned nihilistic threat is the byproduct of this very same racist, purposeful non-recognition. This problem is widespread, which is why educators, especially urban educators, must be trained to account for the post and persistent-traumatic stress that racism, via new-colonization, exacts on the urban-colonized; however, this must not be done in an infantilizing way, but in a way that is compassionate, efficacious, and genuine. I am confident that most if not all prior successful teaching of the urban-colonized has, at some point, accounted for these psychosocial, psychosomatic injuries.

The archenemy of hope: The Nihilistic Threat
Jacobi (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-jacobi/) introduced the concept of nihilism into philosophical discourse. Jacobi was skeptical of rationalism, especially the form of rationalism proffered by Immanuel Kant, which states that, in the end, all rationalism is reducible to nihilism, i.e., to nothingness. For Jacobi, Kant’s view is too pessimistic; therefore, he felt that it should be circumvented in favor of a doctrine that, unlike Kant’s offering, does not obviate a higher power (God). Nietzsche, who himself was disenchanted and disenfranchised with the overarching absolutist, religious hyper-morality that characterized his time, redefined nihilism yet again: for him, it was as emptying of the world where values, meanings, purposes, and truth were nonexistent. It is Nietzsche’s definition that West (1994) builds on. For West, a person that is tormented by a pervasive nihilism feels as though life is not worth living; what is more, the life that he or she does live is at best illusionary. Nihilism oftentimes results in the creation of psychopathic behavior. For West, it is the hopelessness that this nihilistic threat produces that is most damaging; to this point he writes, “…the major enemy of Black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat—that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning (West, 1994:15).” This is precisely because, “…as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive (West 1994: 15).” However, without hope and meaning, West like Noguera’s quote early on in Chapter 1, warns that the future of black America is in grave peril. This is due to a near-total disregard of life that characterizes this threat; moreover, a person who is trapped in this kind of snare has a certain predisposition toward suicidal and or homicidal behavior (West, 1994).

Evidence of these violent tendencies is provided by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in an article entitled “Black-on-Black Violence”: “In the 25 years of homicide records from 1976 to 2002 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks are six times more likely to be murdered than whites, and seven times more likely to kill than whites.” This type of destructive behavior is not a new phenomenon: under Imperialistic rule, colonized (black) African people have historically exhibited eerily similar behavior. Fanon (1968) attributes this type of behavior to a neurosis: “With the exception of a few misfits within a closed environment, we can say that every neurosis, every abnormal manifestation, every affective erythrism in an Antillean is the product of his cultural situation (Fanon, 1968:152).” Fanon, throughout his work, makes no special distinction between the Antillean and all other subjugated colonized people; that is to say, in this quote the Antillean is representative of all who share their struggle, be it American blacks, Africans, Native Americans or “brothers and sisters in Latin America.”
This “neurosis” is not happenstance, nor is it the result of faulty intrinsic wiring or a lack of non-Christian morality (as has been argued). Rather, it is a result of the forced exteriority (“otherness”) via the White-supremacist conception of race (in the guise of Western tradition), that blacks—irrespective of physical locale—through slavery, colonization, and other such atrocities have been made to symbolize. It is the compulsory designation (and subsequently lived reality) as the “other” that creates the nihilistic threat that West described. Consequently, I feel that it is necessary to provide an overview of the (oppressive) progression from slavery to the present, which has created and subsequently reified the notion of blackness in order to cast it, forever, in the role of the “other”.

The Other and “Otherness”
Sartre (1984) argues that we perceive ourselves being perceived and subsequently, we come to objectify ourselves in the same way we are being objectified. This is what he terms the look (and later, the gaze). This process exacerbates the urban-colonized’s suffering; that is, the oppressor’s gaze objectifies the oppressed to the point where the objectified begins to view him or herself in the same way. In this context, regarding the black man, the objectifying gaze is a Eurocentric; it is imbued with the omnipotent power to grant or deny agency at its capricious whim. This was present in our MAN UP scholars. During our first session together, we asked the MAN UP scholars to draw a scientist, technologist, engineer, or mathematician—nearly all of the scholars drew pictures that were hetero and Anglo-normative, i.e., all but one drew a picture of a white male. (A more detailed description of this exercise can be found in Chapter 3.)

To this point, Fanon writes: “For the Negro there is a myth to be faced. A solidly established myth. The Negro is unaware of it as long as his existence is limited to his own environment; but the first encounter with a white man oppresses him with the whole weight of his blackness (Fanon 1968: 150).” With slavery and colonization especially, white-supremacists exert dominance through violence; their dogma is one that calls for unquestioned adherence to their dictates through the all-too-real threat of death, (both social and actual/physical). Domination differs from the hegemony, which now characterizes present-day colonies/ghettos. Hegemony is every bit as coercive as domination, albeit sans the explicit threat of force: it functions on both the subconscious and non-conscious level. It forces pseudo-identification with the oppressors through inculcation and indoctrination. This point is crystallized in a pellucid quote by French social theorist, Alexander de Tocqueville, in his groundbreaking report on America’s embryonic democracy, Democracy in America:
The Negro, plunged in this abyss of suffering, scarcely feels his ill-fortune; violence had enslaved him, habituation to slavery has given him a slaves thoughts and ambitions; his admiration for his tyrannical masters is even greater than his hatred and his joy and pride reside in his imitation of those who oppress him… for the Negro, slavery coincides with birth… so to speak before he is born (Tocqueville, 2000: 372).
Fanon, to this point, goes on to say, regarding the propagandistic conditioning that has become an effective weapon in the colonizer’s war chest:
In other words, there is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly—with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio—work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs. In the Antilles that view of the world is white because no black voice exists (Fanon, 1968:152).

In these contexts, domination and hegemony, respectively, blacks have been cruelly denied any claims of agency or personhood. This is because slavery and colonization necessitate the dehumanizing denial of blacks’ agency; they have to be essentialized and viewed as subhuman, non-agents in order for their maltreatment to be justifiable. According to Sartre, racist institutions like slavery and colonialism, require “…the Other to be falsely seen as an object (Sartre, 1984: 76).” Regarding the isolation and subsequent objectification that produces (forced) “otherness”, Nast (2000) posits the notion that “… ‘black’ housing projects were erected across the country [during the 1960’s] to resettle impoverished [and displaced] black folks out of [white] middle-class view (Nast, 2000:232).” The same argument can be made of the Imperial colonies in the French Antilles, Senegal, and in Kenya. To be colonized is to be forced to the periphery, to be forced to the exterior; what makes the exile so surreal, so psychologically damaging is that the Africans and African Americans that are excluded from the mainstream (through slavery and colonization, respectively) are not entirely limited spatially. That is, they are still within the world that they are excluded from. This is also true of the multitude of housing projects that house much of America’s poor urban Black population: they too are forced to come to terms with their forced separation, their relegation to the exterior. Nast says of her essay: “This paper explores how the black son [in the Oedipal family dynamic] has historically been made to carry the symbolic burden of incest for the white oedipal family, a racialization in keeping with the encoding of incest itself as blackness—a moral abyss (Nast 2000:216).”

The repudiation of Black agency, by the white racist apparatus, according to Nast allows whites to subjectify Black people on the one hand, and to assuage their own fears of interracial penetration (pun intended), on the other—especially a fear of miscegenation. Nast extends Freudian psychoanalysis and his conception of the oedipal triad in her work. While Freud’s research is limited to the individual, Nast, on the other hand, sets out to diagnose an entire (racist) ideology. She argues that on a subconscious level, racist whites have inserted blacks as the permanent figure of incestuous desire. (Incest in most societies is so serious, so proscribed, that is thought to have the ability to bring down an entire civilization.) Nasts writes, “…black men structurally assumed the place of the evil son [in the oedipal triangle] who cannot help his natural inclinations and involution, for he embodies incestuous desire itself (Nast 217).” Precisely because, as Nast puts it: ‘Blackness’ figured as the negation of the (white) family, white supremacy in the U.S. spoken anxiously through a contrapuntal rhetoric of black danger and white maternal safety (Nast 216).” This arrangement promulgated via mass media and made manifest materially through racist education, housing, and penal policies have conspired to transmogrify us into a group of walking dead. The argument that follows is that poor Black males are desensitized because they have been condition to view themselves through the eyes of the oppressor, as less than human. Specifically, it is their dehumanization, their otherness, which results in the violent inward (psychological), and outward (physical), manifestations of violence that characterizes people under West’s conception of the nihilistic threat. Of course, the argument is more nuanced. According to Alexander (2010), joblessness is the primary determinate for future violent behavior, irrespective of ethnicity. This reality, though, is not a departure from West’s conception of the pernicious effects of the nihilistic threat; instead, it supports it.

Black ghettoes: Our “Other” America
Not only are Black people othered psychologically and socio-emotionally, we are also othered spatially as well, which then contributes to a vicious cycle wherein our symbolic othering is legitimized by are spatial othering and vice versa. Harrington’s (1962) work was different from other works on poverty in that it addressed the psyche of ostracized poor people. He illuminated the concentricity that exists between poverty and hopelessness, and hopelessness and a defeatist attitude. He wrote, “…poverty twists and deforms the spirit. The American poor are pessimistic and defeated, and they are victimized by mental suffering to a degree unknown in Suburbia (Harrington 1962:3).” This suffering, a suffering that is firmly tethered to, even to the point of forming a symbiosis with poverty, leads to, in mild cases, a static ambivalence, and in more
serious cases, sheer crippling hopelessness. (This is not to say that rich people are forever excluded from the ranks of the hopeless, or that poor people are evermore relegated to said ranks.) Admittedly, there are no absolutes in this situation; poverty and happiness are no more mutually exclusive than are wealth and sadness. Still, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the pervasive nihilism, which is indicative of these areas, is purely imaginary, or worse, non-existent. The effects of the fiscal penury as well as the poverty of spirit that are indicative of these urban-colonies are, at the core, unhealthy and acrimonious. According to Harrington, “… poverty is constructed so as to destroy aspiration; it is a system that is designed to be impervious to hope (Harrington, 1962:10).”

Harrington’s work served to illuminate the cyclical nature of poverty, not in hopes of immediate redress per se—(Harrington himself is not prescriptive); rather, he is calling for immediate acknowledgment. He says, “We must perceive passionately if this blindness is to be lifted from us (Harrington. 1962: 17).” To a degree, his book achieved its goal: it helped to bring new attention to the plight of and, simultaneously, open new discourse regarding the long-forgotten others that inhabit the other America. Harrington’s book, in no small measure, opened up an atmosphere, though still virulent in large part that was, nonetheless, relatively speaking, more accepting of cries for social change. However, the interest and attention that his book garnered for the urban-colonized during the 1960s, was replaced in the ensuing decades by the get-tough, conservative rhetoric of the Regan administration. During this time Black people became the face of poverty, welfare, and the mounting crack epidemic. Again, via mass media, blacks were recast as the other.

Still, the question must be asked: How is it that this “otherness” was engendered? During slavery, there was neither film nor radio; moreover, newspapers were not widespread. So, how was this insidious “otherness” promulgated in the first place? How was it so pervasive? It was through America’s very first form of mass media/mass entertainment: Blackface Minstrelsy.

Going viral in the 19th Century: The Minstrel Show
Blackface minstrelsy allowed the New World American white man to exculpate himself, in a sense, from the condescending gaze that he felt the Europeans constantly had fixed upon him. They used black mask to eschew the behavior thought of as normative or proper by Europeans and higher-class whites as well. The images of these pseudo-black characters, through misdirection and purposeful misidentification, allowed the white actors, on a conscious level, and native white society, perhaps on a more subconscious level, to throw off the proverbial shackles of propriety, of dignified decorum. In effect, they were no longer themselves while in blackface; rather, they voluntarily transformed into the uncivilized, American anathema—the Negro. As for the show’s format, misunderstanding and confusion constituted much of the humor associated with these sketches; although, this was only a superficial manifestation. Actually, these works served as a social commentary of sorts; minstrels functioned as a place outside of reality that still, somehow paradoxically, represented reality. It was a place where patrons could have their socio-political views and values affirmed or substantiated through fantasy. Another reason for the euphoric spell that minstrelsy cast over its audiences was, in essence, that it provided an unmistakable contrast, which allowed the perceived glory of whiteness to shine all the more radiantly vis-à-vis a the black backdrop that the Negro unwittingly and unintentionally provided (Lott, 1992).

The actors in these (mis)portrayals wore grotesque smiles on their painted faces; they, in an attempt to further dehumanize Africans, made them appear to be non-human creatures, as buffoonish caricatures. These smiles were very significant; the notion that slaves were happy in and with their lot in life, with their forced obsequiousness, early on, was part of white slave-owner doctrine. It served as simultaneously, a defense and justification—consciously and unconsciously—for both slavery and the minstrel shows that espoused the dogma of this institution. This absurd belief later became a key component in the plantation lore that fueled the American psyche as well as the minstrel show for decades to come. The white actors who put on these black faces were not after accuracy in their costumes or face paint, though they often tried to make claims of authenticity; on the contrary, they sought only to create or derive comedy from the African American condition. And, more importantly, they sought to cast blacks as the permanent backdrop for and negation of whiteness.

The Construction of “Blackness” vis-à-vis “Whiteness”
The primary reason that blacks must be made to occupy the space of the other is so that whiteness can be defined, through differentiation, as that which is not black, and therefore, that which is not heathen, licentious, and animalistic. The notion of “whiteness” in the United States is forever tethered to the notion of “blackness”; the burnt cork masks of minstrelsy is simultaneously a non-recognition of blacks’ agency, a recognition of whites’ agency and perceived superiority, (though only one can be seen as positive, “whiteness,” because it is at the expense of blackness). Whites’ recognition of themselves as superior in virtue, intellect, character, and etcetera, is predicated on the conformity of blacks to the role of the subservient “other”. John Ernest illuminates the egocentric and ethnocentric racist motivation behind the forced capitulation of black males, by that of white males in the face of slavery, in his essay, “The Reconstruction of Whiteness: Will Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, a Leap of Freedom.”
He writes:

In this complex and tenuous performance of social identity, the security of selfhood is a challenge constantly by the presence of others who, either overtly or implicitly, remind one than one is, in fact, playing a role. One’s self-consciousness about the artifice of one’s identity […] leads one to force others into roles that complete one’s own identity (Ernest, 19—: 1111).

The sentiment of this unequal black and white juxtaposition is the impetus for a quote that Alexander Saxton included in his book, “The Indispensable Enemy”; “No inferior race can exist in these United States with becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-Americans… (Saxton, 199-: 19).” Whiteness is altogether undecipherable, even indefinable without blackness and vice versa, although the relationship is, at its core one of hegemony. Further, Eric Lott, in an essay, “The Seeming Counterfeit”: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy”, strengthens this view; he writes, “In antebellum America, minstrelsy performed a crucial hegemonic function (Lott, 1992: 232).”
The hopelessness that is part and parcel of the nihilistic threat haunts the colonized-urban black; it controls his actions, his comportment. He is always on the ready, muscles coiled, thusly, any misunderstood, misperceived action can be view as an act of aggression (that is to say, when one is looking for a problem, they can usually find one). This kind of behavior is the result of an ever-present, seemingly inescapable threat. Sartre (1984), commensurate with Sharpe’s work on wake work, writes of the recoiled black man: “this…man knows that his life starts with death he considers himself a potential candidate for death. He will be killed; it is not just that he accepts the risk of being killed, he is certain of it (Sartre 1vii).” Fanon (1968), commenting on the bellicosity that results in the fratricidal violence that characterizes the urban-colonized writes, “The colonized subject will first train this aggressiveness sediment in his muscles against his own people. This is the period when black turns on black… (Fanon’ 1968: 15).” (As evidenced by the aforementioned statistics provided by the piece by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, we are still very much entrenched in this “period”.)

Nihilistic Threat Illustrated in Black Literature
To further illustrate the omnipresence of this nihilistic threat, I will turn to popular black literature to delineate the violent transformations of Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, and Sethe, from Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. Bigger Thomas, throughout his entire mercurial life, Bigger seeks the acknowledgement of his agency by white America, which is a necessary precondition for him to be exculpated from the death sentence that his black skin inevitably guarantees him. Accordingly, Bigger wrestles with two pivotal issues within his consciousness, both of which are derivatives of the continuous torture, at the hands of racist colonization, that Bigger is forced to endure. The two issues are his desire for individual recognition and the fear of death on two distinct levels, psychological, i.e., social death, and physical death. This fear, this nihilistic threat transmogrifies Bigger, he becomes a murderous sociopath: he commits two murders, the first of which is (ostensibly) accidental. He suffocates, in an attempt to avoid the perception of her mother, Mary Dalton, the daughter of his white employer. The second, however, of Bessie, his girlfriend, who is black is intentional, and it is preceded by a violent rape, which is consistent with Fanon’s quote. Prior to these murders, Bigger accosts and subsequently emasculates his friend Gus, who is also black. This is especially telling, Bigger attacks Gus because of Gus’ accuses Bigger of being afraid to strike out at his true oppressor, the colonizer. Bigger lashes out because he knows, in his heart, that the charge that Gus levels against him are true. Because Bigger is powerless to emasculate his emasculator, he turns inward and attacks Gus, who, like him, is also a colonized victim.

The murders of Mary and Bessie are symptomatic of the coercive force of unmitigated racism which serves to erode Bigger both physically, and psychologically. The weight of this oppressive force is what instigates the turn in Bigger’s consciousness. This is evinced by Bigger’s declaration, “They wouldn’t let me live and I killed (Wright 428).” Subconsciously, Bigger is fixated by the death drive; early in the novel, he says, “I feel like something awful is going to happen to me (Wright 21).” As a poor, young black male—the archetypical “other”—Bigger feels insignificant and hated in the eyes of the dominant class: He is trapped in his black body, which scripts him towards death. Consequently, he becomes a volatile mixture of fear and hatred; he fears death and hates all who he feels seek to kill him. This flammable amalgam—fomented by his psychological erosion at the hands of racism—eventually explodes. “He felt he had no physical existence at all… he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he
knew was attached to a black skin (Wright 67).” This is the direct result of the otherness that the nihilistic threat ushers in. Bigger feels that he is entombed within a sarcophagus of anonymity; he feels naked and invisible. These visceral feelings are due to Bigger’s realization that no matter how hard he strives, he will never be recognized as an individual. There is no way for him to go, his situation is hopeless. Bigger Thomas is representative of the “underprivileged and starving peasant” that Fanon writes about in “The Wretched of the Earth”. These peasants, according to Fanon are the “exploited who very soon discovers that only violence pays. For him, there is no compromise, no possibility of concession (Fanon 1965, p.23).”

I have paid special attention to the black male predicament because it is the black male who is more likely to be in jail than in college, it is the black male that is most likely to die a premature violent death; moreover, it is the black male that has been called, on numerous occasions, an endangered species. However, I will now shift, in hopes of providing a comprehensive view, to the issue of the black female via the lens provided by the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. The most pervasive theme throughout this book is the use of death as the only viable way to resist slavery. Accordingly, death is portrayed as the ultimate act of defiance as well as the only real escape. It represents the only sure way out of the atrocities and injustices suffered by slaves at the hands of their masters locally, and the institution of slavery universally.
The protagonist in Morrison’s novel, Sethe, is a former slave who has, with some help, escaped the plantation—ironically named Sweet Home—where she was kept. She, along with her other compatriots, male slaves: Paul D., Paul A., Paul F., Sixo, and Halle who becomes Sethe’s husband, suffered mightily at the hands of slavery. In this novel, racism is symbolized on two speciously disparate levels. Firstly, there is a subversive, almost benevolent type of racism exemplified by the Garners, the plantation owners. They are, ostensibly, kind slave owners; they, especially Mr. Garner, pride themselves on this. This, of course, is a false identity; the words “kind” and “slave owner” are incongruous. The second type of racism is exemplified by the character Schoolteacher, who unlike his brother Mr. Garner is not one to dissemble. He is overtly, maliciously racist; he views black slaves as subhuman farm equipment akin to cattle. He takes over Sweet Home following Mr. Garner’s death and subjects the slaves to sadistic dehumanizing experiments of his own design, all with an aim to constantly remind them of their inherent inferiority.

Their castigation, however, is not limited to the psychological realm; on the contrary, upon his arrival, for the first time, the slaves at Sweet Home are abused physically as well. They yearn for their freedom (for decolonization), a freedom that the institutions of slavery and colonization stand in obstinate opposition to. Sethe, against all odds, escapes the plantation. There, she enjoys freedom for the first time in her life. That is to say, she is free physically, however, emotionally and psychologically she is still very much in bondage. The suffering that she endured still torments her; she cannot forget, though she tries. She was cognizant of the fact that: "Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forget who you were and couldn’t think it up (Morrison 251)". This reality, the reality that a slave was not their own person, that a slave could be raped, sold, beaten or killed by seemingly any and every white person was a fate that Sethe was not willing to subject her children to.

She wanted them to be free, free of the torture and anguish that unrelentingly gripped her and others like her. The psychological strain that slavery, which like colonization requires blacks to be view as the other, causes her to snap, to become a murder. Like Bigger Thomas, and consistent with Fanon’s earlier quote, her aggression is aimed at other blacks, in this case, her children. She tries to destroy what has come to symbolize her badge of shame, the same badge of shame that follows Bigger: black skin.
Slavery, like colonization, presupposes racism and racism presupposes “otherness”; that is, it is the cornerstone of any justification for either. The simple truth is: If Black people were considered equal, they would not have been made into slaves. The idea that one could enslave their equal, their neighbor, their brother, et cetera, is preposterous. Furthermore, the institutions of slavery, just like colonization is a calculated endeavor—both attack the site of connection: they function to disallow black men to be men; therefore, they are unable to be fathers, to be husbands, to be caretakers. Racism seeks to castrate the black male symbolically, physically, and emotionally. Black women, of course, also suffer mightily at the hands of racism: everything that they care for can be taken away from them in an instant; their husbands, their children, and their lives can all be wiped away without any recourse.

The sad reality is that racism is so pervasive, so omnipresent that physical death, oftentimes, is the only way to be freed from its suffocating grip. Both Wright and Morrison employ this theme— death as, simultaneously, resistance and freedom— to decry the hopelessness and self-hatred that racism engenders, no doubt, in hopes of attenuating the oppressive power that it wields over the urban-colonized.
The physical and psychological atrocities that are continually exacted upon the urban-colonized force them to assume the role of the “other”; it is either that role or no role at all. This why a new purview must be first developed and later promulgated if we hope to help the poor, marginalized black youth that inhabits these modern-day urban colonies. In order to expand our purview, we must first recognize and admit that these inner city, urban, primarily ethnic minority ghettos are in fact modern-day colonies. If we as educators hope to help these young people thrive, we must view them as such, constantly taking into account the injurious conditions in which they live. Furthermore, if we hope to ameliorate their sufferings, and to stem and ultimately reverse the tide of underachievement, hopelessness, and worse, violent death, that runs rampant in America’s inner-city urban colonies, we must study them through an anti-colonial lens. By borrowing from and applying the work of previous anti-colonial thinkers like Fanon and Paulo Freire, we have to acknowledge and account for the damage caused by this nihilistic threat. For, to discount the psychological trauma of colonization, which results in the preponderance and proliferation of the aforementioned nihilistic threat is, in essence, to deny these young people any modicum of personhood, one the one hand, and, in so doing, deny that they are indeed suffering, on the other. That being said, my intention is not merely to point an accusatory finger; rather, my hope is that by retracing the ontology and subsequently deconstructing it, piecemeal, the otherness which engenders the disastrous nihilism that inundates many poor, urban black communities (colonies), can one day, very soon, be eradicated.

I am my brother’s keeper: Fratricidal violence in the Black Community
Oftentimes conversations around the killing of unarmed African-American males by people by white men especially by white male police officers comes up, questions around fratricidal violence within the Black community, i.e., Black on Black violence, are brought to the fore. This is, undoubtedly, an exigent matter. Rates of Black on Black violence are heartbreakingly high (Miller, 2011). This is not due to some intrinsic criminality or an innate disregard for lawfulness by African-American males. Rather, it has much more to do with structural and institutionalized inequity that is made manifest by the lack of opportunity for well-paying jobs, academic success, access to health and wellness resources, and the negative effects of pernicious stereotyping (Alexander, 2010). Moreover, what is routinely left out of these conversations is that fratricidal violence is not the exclusive domain of African-American males. The greatest threat to White males, as far as murder is concerned, is other White males; this is also true of Brown (i.e., Latino/Chicano/Hispanic) males.

I am not dismissive when it comes to conversations around fratricidal violence within the Black community. A loss of life is tragic no matter who the perpetrator is. This is especially true when the lives that are prematurely snuffed out are of preteens and teenagers who irrespective of whatever mistakes they may or may not have made are disallowed the opportunity to learn from them and move on to become more reflective and more thoughtful people.

The conversation around the purported criminality and lack of educational success for Black males is decontextualized. It has become common practice to turn a blind eye to the macro-level problems that catalyze the disproportionate rates of crime in predominately Black communities (Alexander, 2010; Miller, 2011). Instead, conversations about the innate, intrinsic pathology of poor, urban Black communities seems to be the narrative that informs much of the conversations, specifically in mass media (Alexander, 2010), around what happens in predominately Black enclaves throughout this country. Fox News, the number one news outlet in the United States, speaks about the deaths of unarmed Black men as though they happen in an atemporal vacuum. This purposeful framing elides potentially transformative conversations that may serve to demystify the outrage of the Black community when one of its members is murdered, in cold blood, by real or pseudo-agents of law and order (Fanon & Sartre, 1965).

Innocence lost: The adultification of Black males
Black males irrespective of their age are not allowed to make mistakes in the same way that non-Black adolescent males do. I have been alive long enough to know that young people make mistakes. Much of my professional life has been spent working with young people (specifically, Black males), and, sometimes preteens and teenagers do things without weighing the implications or possible consequences of their actions. And while many people know that young people sometimes act on impulse, rather than forethought and planning, Black males are not afforded the same presumption of innocence (Goff, DiTammaso, et al., 2014) that non-Black males are, especially vis-à-vis interactions with law enforcement. The abovementioned police interaction that led to the death of Tamir Rice is an instantiation of this. Rice, only 12 years old, was described as a man (waving a gun, which turned out to be a toy gun). This is in no way an exculpation of the officer that took Tamir’s life within 3 seconds of finding him, but the officer was told there was a man waving a gun. We can only wonder if his reaction might have been different had he known that the child he was to encounter was a middle schooler—not an adult. This fatal reaction represents a stark contrast when juxtaposed with a widely-circulated (viral) video of a young man in a police station seen wrestling with several police officers.

This video was brought to the fore during the news coverage of the indignation and unrest that the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice (among others). The young (European American) male in this video can be seen fighting with police officers for a few minutes, and at one point he was able to grab a police officer’s holstered weapon and fire off a shot in the police station, thereby qualifying him as armed and dangerous, i.e., as a real threat. However, this young man, this European American young man, was not shot. When this story broke, this young man was never described as a thug. Instead, it was made very clear that this young man was on drugs and was “not himself.” We were led to believe that he simply made a mistake, an egregious and dangerously illegal mistake; however, he is still very much alive. The officers involved were lauded for their restraint. As evidenced by Chisulo’s story, Black males are much less likely to receive the protections afforded to people who are perceived as inherently innocent (Goff, DiTammaso, et al., 2014).

Unlike the European male described above, both Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, who were gunned down by a pseudo-law keeper, neighborhood watchmen, and an actual law-keeper, respectively, were not characterized as misguided young people possibly making mistakes commensurate with their age. Instead, their respective characters were put on trial to exculpate the men that gunned them down. For all intents and purposes, these two beautiful young men were put on trial for their own murders. Both of their characters were impugned. They were not afforded the benefit of the doubt. But, instead, were depicted as Bigger Thomas-esque (Wright, 1940) thugs who were potential threats that needed to be neutralized, permanently. (Obviously, these two cases are not identical. George Zimmerman, to the credit of police forces everywhere, was never allowed to wear a police badge.)

This is the reality that many Black males face; and, instead of providing safe haven from these exigent and dangerous realities, schools that are made up of predominately low-income Black students often reproduce these macro and micro-level aggressions (Sue, 2010). This should come as no surprise according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008): they argue that our national education system was designed to underserve (or in their words, fail) hyper-marginalized students. Racism is far from dead in this country (Leonardo, 2010). If there is doubt, one need look no further than the ever-increasing achievement gap, which is due in large part to racist educational policies (Kozol, 2005; Giroux, 2011; Leonardo, 2010), poorly-prepared urban teachers (Delpit, 2012), and the prevalence and over-determination of deficit-model thinking (Valencia, 1997). The achievement gap is the progeny of the opportunity gap, the opportunity gap is informed by notions of deservedness. Black boys (and men) as evidenced by the preceding review of literature have been deemed unworthy of access to social, legal, educational, and material justice.

However, in spite of the seemingly immovable obstacles placed in our way, we still succeed. Because even though there is a popular refrain that claims that there are more Black men in jail than in college, this is simply not true. There are nearly twice as many Black men in college than there are in jails (http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/By-the-Numbers-More-Black-Men-in-Prison-Than-in-College-Think-Again-.aspx). That said, we are still grossly overrepresented in jails, which speaks to the abject failure of our educational, juridical, and civil systems to provide viable educational and employment opportunities for the marginalized of the marginalized. Again, this points back to the aforementioned opportunity gap. In the following chapter, I will discuss the opportunity gap regarding access to rigorous STEM instruction, which is, perhaps, the most pronounced and easily most obdurate gap in the education of Black boys.