less advantaged or disadvantaged depending on the situation, position in society, and identities, and other theoretical frameworks such as multidimensionality theory acknowledge this. Black males are unique compared to other males. Seeing this allows one to appreciate the nuance and complexity of their lives.
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Seeing Black Men and Boys’ Lives as Worthy of Systematic Investigation: More than Impressionism and Anecdotal Approaches
Some who write about Black males lean heavily on impressionistic and anecdotal approaches: largely unsystematic, relying heavily on authors’ personal opinions, casual observations, and autobiographical experiences with Black males (Sommers, 2013). These approaches lead the researcher to psychoanalyze Black males’ thinking and behavior, typically based on personal ideology. While impressionistic and anecdotal accounts can have their place in research, their prevalence can devalue systematic approaches that center on allowing Black males to interpret their reality on their own terms.
Seeing Black Males as Possessing Voice
Deeper insight into Black males’ lives not only humanizes them but provides critical insight into how to offer them more opportunities and disrupt the processes that may lead to social problems (Spates, 2014). Black males themselves are the best prepared to do this by describing and explaining their lives. However, Spates (2014) asks the question, “are we more comfortable constructing meanings for Black men’s behavior from within the racialized and gendered frameworks given to us?” (p. 137) In other words, do researchers recognize Black male voices, diverse and multilayered, as a necessary part of research about Black males? Spates poses this question because much of what is written generally lacks firsthand accounts from Black males about their own lives (Howard, 2014; Oware, 2011). Allowing Black males to be the authors of their own experiences is the only way this centering on a personal, self-interpreted reality can be accomplished (Howard, 2014). For example, presumptions about Black male criminality have resulted in research that is unreceptive to the voices of men who commit crimes (Spates, 2014). Neglect of their voices can lead to surface-level descriptions of their behavior, reinforcing assumptions of innate criminality. However, listening to firsthand accounts from Black males can provide more insight into why some may engage in criminal behaviors and the factors that may lead to criminality. Methods of gaining these firsthand accounts might include interviews, autobiographies, and narrative analyses, ultimately resulting in a more humanizing understanding.
Hearing Black Males
Even when Black males are allowed voice, that doesn’t mean they are being heard. Mainstream definitions of hearing refer to the ability to perceive sound. In Ebonics or Black English Vernacular (BEV), the meaning of hearing involves more depth; to hear also means to understand. This is important because even when Black males are heard in the most basic sense, i.e., the sound of their voices is perceived by listening ears, they may still go unheard.
For example, research that includes interviews with Black men should be a way for male voices to be heard. But, researchers can frame and interpret Black men’s words based on assumptions of their hypermasculinity, patriarchy, and presumptions of dishonesty. In a casual sense, Black male speakers are not heard because their words are easily preempted—intended meanings and messages are distorted by biases and assumptions of the listener. This is because some listeners are coached by the anti-Black maleness of mainstream society to interpret those messages in ways that confirm their stereotypes. In Ebonics or BEV, hearing is inseparable from feeling. Feeling means understanding and relating to or empathizing as in the response, “I feel you.” Empathy is a part of the human experience. But culture shapes not only how people express empathy but what or who they express empathy for. Anti-Black maleness not only distorts sight and hearing by preventing the understanding of Black male lives, it also blocks people from expressing the human act of empathizing with Black males. What are the consequences? Black males are ill-positioned to experience humane treatment casually or professionally as long as they are unseen and unheard.
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Seeing the Agency, Self-Definition, and Determination in Black Males
Africana Studies involves investigating the self-consciousness of African people, or how they go about shaping and protecting their own lives, interests, and destinies. As an extension of Africana Studies, Black men’s studies looks at both agency and experience. According to Karenga (2010a), agency refers to African peoples’ initiative or what they have done and do, while experience is more about what has been done to them, what they undergo and live through. In the following chapters, there will be an emphasis—beyond relaying experiences—on how Black men and boys have used their thought, action, and creation to engage in problem-solving, generate change, and generally leave their marks on the world.
Counternarratives and Beyond
One of the responses to the deficit approach is the counternarrative approach. This approach focuses on the factors that lead to Black male success and resilience instead of failures. Spates (2014) points out the importance of counternarratives that oppose anti-Black male depictions of Black men and boys in the media, because racism shapes dominant narratives. Dominant narratives are the perspectives of those who hold disproportionate shares of power and privilege. They typically involve biased, yet institutionalized perspectives about those with less power and privilege. Stanley (2007) defines counternarratives as the:
deliberate, yet meaningful, intent to position the voices of marginalized groups as ones of authority and privilege and give them an opportunity to resist dominant academic discursive practices. It is an opportunity for individuals to contribute with dignity to theorizing about the world in which they live. (p. 23)
Counternarratives are intended to restore voice and dignity to subjugated people in dialog and scholarship about their lives. According to Akbar (1991), in an environment where Black male humanity and manhood is under constant attack, Black male self-definition is automatically oppositional. Many researchers of Black masculinity have characterized Black male culture as something formed out of opposition to or rebellion against society’s norms and customs because social policies and norms are in many cases detrimental to them (Grier & Cobbs, 1968; Majors & Billson, 1992). According to the oppositionist lens, inner-city males form their own norms and values because of an alienation from mainstream society (Anderson, 2000; White & Cones, 1999). As the theory of oppression goes, society has little investment in them as evidenced by institutional race/gender-based discrimination and lack of economic opportunity (i.e., police brutality). Black males in turn have little investment in conventional norms and social institutions (i.e., lack of faith in police).
However, from a different perspective, the oppositionist/counternarrative approach can be troublesome. When researchers become fixated on countering dominant narratives, writing about Black males can become caught in a cycle of reacting. Black males’ voices can be misclassified as mere reactions to the experience of oppression. Black men have always countered dominant narratives, yet their manhood and masculinities should not be limited to the quality of only being counternarratives to something else. Critics of the oppositionist perspective, like Kambon (1985), point out that African American culture is distinct and affirmative, yet also oppositional. African American culture, for example, doesn’t only differ from Euro-American culture because of racism, it is also different because it is an extension of African culture and unique African American cultural forms in the American context. To reduce it to a reaction to racism is a reduction of African American culture.
According to Lipsitz (1997), the oppositional character of Black culture makes it a source of education and inspiration to other populations who feel alienated from mainstream society. But the reactionary posture of oppositionist writers can be quite limiting. This aspect of the counternarrative approach is noticeably similar to the hundreds-of-years-old racist notion that Blackness was fashioned ←xxi | xxii→negatively in opposition to the positive qualities of Whiteness. This paradigm
