be used to better understand and enhance their own lives and the lives of the Black community. Morial (2007) wrote that empowering Black males to reach their full potential is an economic and civil rights challenge that must be solved to ensure the well-being of the African American community and the nation.
To ensure the future of Black men, researchers should engage in self-reflection and question their own motivations for conducting research (Hsin-hsin & Coker, 2010; Nápoles-Springer et al., 2000; Parrill & Kennedy, 2011; Strauss et al., 2001). Researchers should (1) be prepared to explain how their research might benefit Black males and the Black community; (2) examine whether or not they are conducting research for money, status, or privilege, and how that might affect the validity of their research; (3) be aware of the interacting roles that race, class, sex, and gender oppression play in their research; and (4) be aware of the history of research with African American men and African Americans ←xvii | xviii→in general and their legitimate concerns, and; (5) identify their own preconceptions about Black males, how they acquired these ideas, their validity, and how they might affect the quality of their research.
Seeing Black Men and Boys’ Experiences as Unique and Multidimensional
This book’s focus is on investigating what is unique about being male and of African descent. This focus is necessary, in part, because research that compares Black males’ experiences with those of White people and Black women sometimes misses the unique experiences of Black maleness (Strayhorn & DeVita, 2010). Moreover, researchers risk reaching false conclusions that what benefits or harms Black women also harms or benefits Black men. Not all Black men share the same experiences, or at the same levels, and all have unique intersections of factors in play, different than for non-Black males. Littles, Bowers, and Gilmer (2007) explain:
A concrete example of this dilemma is the initiative, Moving to Opportunity, which gave mothers vouchers to move from areas where the poverty rate was 40 percent to areas where it was 20 percent. The moms did better, the girls did better, but the boys did worse. Moving to opportunity and countless similar efforts demonstrate the need to develop research specifically targeted to the unique situations of Black men and boys in the United States. (p. 14)
Although there is a significant body of historical research on Black men, it has seldom been studied from a clearly defined sex/gender perspective (Clarke-Hine & Jenkins, 1999). The sex/gender perspective is key because sex and gender are fundamental parts of how human beings organize and make meaning of their social realities (Hoppe, 2002). Building on the work of Dancy (2012), this chapter explores the interactive experience of being Black and male at the intersection of history, culture, family, sexuality, politics, economics, education, health, and justice.
Black men’s studies is the systematic, culturally and historically grounded study of the lives of Black men and boys for exploring, describing, explaining and advancing Black communities. It includes the study of Black manhood and masculinities. Some use the terms Black manhood and Black masculinity interchangeably. Recognizing that there are numerous definitions of each, there is a generally qualitative distinction between the two (Dancy, 2012). In this text, manhood refers to the principles, values, and beliefs that men develop or accept, while masculinity refers to the observable actions that men use to express or manifest manhood. Therefore, Black masculinity lends itself more easily to the study of performances or behaviors and other material manifestations of manhood. According to Williams (2014), Black manhood is related to Black masculinity studies but goes beyond fixating on outward behavioral expressions, enactments, and performances (Williams, 2014). Instead, Black men’s studies makes Black males’ humanity and personhood the point of departure for scholarly investigation. Its objectives are:
• To guide the development of holistic and balanced information for a better understanding of the diversity and multidimensionality of men and boys’ humanity
• To humanize men and boys through approaches to studying their lives that provide context to their thought and action
• To offer an approach to studying their lives that affirms the self-conscious ways of addressing and creating their owned realities
• To offer a supplementary lens of analysis to further enrich the critical study of Black women, families, and communities
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• To inform the development of thought, practice, and institutions to help males protect themselves against anti-Black male forces in all forms
• Ultimately, to guide the development of knowledge that advances men and boys, their families, their communities, and peoples of African descent in general
A holistic framework for studying Black males (and Black life in general) recognizes the intersection of multiple and varied aspects of their identities and experiences. This intersectional framework includes the interactive effects of multiple forms of identity and oppression—people of multiple identities experience oppression differently because racism, sexism, and classism do not operate in isolation. However, the intersectional framework is rarely applied to study the lives of Black men. The consequence of the selective suspension of intersectionality is that much of the breadth and depth of male experiences is missed (Howard, 2014). Lacy’s (2008) critique of the use of the intersectional framework lies in the fact that it is used to examine the lives of some subordinated groups, such as Black women, while Black men are often excluded from intersectional analysis despite the fact that they suffer the interactive effects of race, sex, and gender in unique ways. For example, in some school districts, the dropout rate for boys is twice that of girls. Race alone doesn’t explain this and other Black male realities; the combination of race and gender must be accounted for. Intersectional approaches could provide context and challenge crude generalizations about Black male attitudes and behaviors. Applying this approach requires seeing the unique intersection of different aspects of the identities of Black men and boys. Failure to recognize the roles that class plays can lead to too much focus on low-income Black men or heterosexual Black men, leaving middle and upper-income Black men, and gay, bisexual, or transgender Black men, under-researched (Dancy, 2012).
What some see as the selective suspension (or the strategic choice) to drop intersectionality in the analysis of Black men leads to an approach to studying Black males in gender as participants in a standardized project of universal male domination. Failure to see Black male uniqueness leaves one blind to how being Black can undermine privilege and change the experience and expression of patriarchal oppression. Ignoring this reality makes overgeneralizing about Black male patriarchal oppression easy, or at least more likely. It facilitates polarized images of Black men in America, and Africa, as dominant actors who collude with sexist racism against Black women (Cornwall & IAI, 2005). Failure to see Black male uniqueness supports the notion of universal patriarchal oppression, and projects the idea that Black men who are not patriarchal subjugators of Black women are mere exceptions to the rule. Without an intersectional analysis of Black males, Black women are positioned as without agency and as passive victims of Black male oppression. This logic is easy but it sacrifices nuance and accuracy. Such an analysis makes it impossible to imagine instances of Black women participating in patriarchy, much less any involvement in the oppression of Black men.
At the core of intersectional analysis of Black males is the idea that they are privileged by their sex (male) while being disadvantaged by their race (African American) (Dancy, 2012). However, real life contradicts this binary logic. For example, one might struggle to understand how being Black and male makes Black males privileged in the criminal justice system relative to women. Criminal justice statistics tell a vastly different story. One might find it bizarre to read any privilege onto the dead bodies of Black male victims of police violence. Indeed, racial profiling happens because Black men are both Black and male (Mutua, 2006b), privileged by neither in the events leading to their killings. However, intersectional approaches often ignore the situationality of advantage and disadvantage based on race, sex, or gender, and other aspects of
