Under the `hood': Poor and Working Class Black and Latino Boys in the Age of Obamerica

When educators, administrators and researchers discuss issues like academic underachievement, school discipline or culturally relevant teaching, they often focus on poor and working class "urban" Black and Latino boys. Nonetheless, generalizations regarding "racialized masculinity" writ large may contain essentialist understandings of Black and Latino boys as a population. To do so, the dissertation examines the lived realities of race and young manhood by looking at the lives of two groups of "gifted and talented" Black and Latino boys attending a single-sex and a co-educational independent school in the Northeast U.S. This study asks: What do the experiences of poor and working class Black and Latino boys, making their transition into young manhood reveal about the nature of race, class and gender power relations in in the twenty-first century U.S.? The ethnographic data utilized in this study is derived from a year of participant observation and 33 semi-structured face-to-face interviews. These methods revealed patterns of meaning that constantly summoned the language and feelings of contradiction and liminality. In order to understand these results I utilized Black and Latino "theories of existence," which argue for understanding race as a dynamic and ongoing site of contestation over what it means to be human./nAs evidenced by a year of field notes and interviews, I found that these young men often experience existential dissonance-moments when they experienced a gap between their lived realities of race, class and gender, and the colorblind ideology of twenty-first century U.S. society - that cause feelings of contradiction and confusion. Furthermore, this study finds that along their journeys, Black and Latino boys look to a range of institutions, spaces and relationships, or what I call existential resources, to process the often conflicted meanings, feelings and experiences they encounter as they begin their search for manhood. The need for and existence of these resources elucidate the juggling of competing racial, class and gender ideologies that these boys must navigate to take advantage of the educational opportunities that await them in high school and beyond. Ultimately, however, even among "gifted and talented" poor and working class Black and Latino boys, the usefulness, effectiveness and availability of these existential resources are varied and often times are impacted by poverty, mass incarceration, deportations, poor housing and violence./nThese results suggest a need to move our understanding of race beyond the racial conscious/colorblind dichotomy. Instead this study invites us to engage the simultaneity of the competing meanings and practices of race in the age of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Dietrich call "Obamerica;" an era of political and social governance that often settles for narratives of racial harmony. Nonetheless, we cannot lose sight of the larger institutions, laws, policies and structures that continue to produce inequality, injustice and trauma in our students and their communities. Mass incarceration, poor public schooling, unaffordable and segregated housing, health care, poverty wages are all issues that influence these young men and must be struggled over if their conditions are to be truly transformed. More concretely, this dissertation suggests that schools explicitly deal with race, class and gender in their curriculum while also providing students with the cultural, spiritual and emotional infrastructures to heal and renew relationships and friendships that can help youth deal with the trauma and pain cause by the existential dissonance of this era.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel H