Scholarship on Black Men: A Conceptual Review

Abstract

An overview of the scholarship on Black men and boys reveals a complex evolution of conceptual frameworks addressing their social, cultural, and economic experiences within the United States. This overview identifies key conceptual paradigms and shifts in this literature over the course of the last six decades. While it does not pretend to a comparative analysis of these paradigms, it suggests that Black Feminist Theory, with its focus on patriarchy as a structure of power, provides a way forward in the ongoing effort to understand the “Africa male problematique.”

Thirty plus years ago, the three of us (father, daughter, and son) published in the Journal of Negro Education (Gordon et al., 1994) an overview and assessment of the extant literature on what Edmund W. Gordon would later refer to as “the African American male problematique” (Gordon, 1996). One of us began writing this essay rethinking this literature during the week of June 13, 2025—our father's 104^th birthday. Amid the celebrations, moments of reminiscence arose. During such moments, our father and mother's time living in Harlem during the early 1950s is often recalled, including our father's gofer /mentor intellectual relationship with WEB Du Bois. Within these memories lies much of the long durée of the conceptual development of scholarship on the Black experience in this country – an intellectual journey that all three of us have been engaged in throughout our adult lives.

It was Du Bois who was among the first to conceptually differentiate between racial Blackness as biology and Blackness as culture—learned social practice and thought. He also conceptualized “double consciousness” and the possibility of Black cultural difference from cultural Whiteness, as well as the cultural connections between Black Americans and those of us in Africa and its Diaspora. And of course, his life's work was focused on understanding and combating the structuring effects of racism on Black communities. These conceptual tools have become basic to the understanding of Black people in general and Black men and boys in particular in the US.

The intellectual creativity of Du Bois and the many other Black Scholars, including Edmund W Gordon (who produced much of the early work on race, class, and educational disadvantage), over the course of these two men's remarkable lifetimes is extraordinary. As a contribution to this collection of scholarship on Black men and boys, we offer a brief overview of the development of key conceptual frameworks in the literature along with suggestions for future directions. As educators we are particularly interested in sharpening our conceptual tools in this manner as a contribution to ensuring that Black men and boys are provide with equitable educational outcomes in our schools through an adequate understanding of their circumstances.

Through the mid twentieth century, Black social scientists such as DuBois (1899), Frazier (1948), and St Clair Drake (Drake & Cayton, 1946) produced historical materialist-based scholarship on U.S. Black communities. They concluded that, due to their socio-economic position, the bulk of African Americans practiced what amounted to a fractured and pre-modern folk or sub-culture that varied in important ways from the “respectable” practices of middle-class Whites and Blacks. The extremely influential Frazier was a product of the Chicago School of Sociology that promulgated Social Disorganization Theory, which attributed social problems to the breakdown of social institutions and community relations caused by socio-economic stresses. For all these scholars, the solution to these problems would come from an end to the exclusion of Blacks from full participation in society and economy and expansion of the Black professional and cultural middle class.

For most social science scholarship during this era, men were the universal subjects of research. Accordingly, work by scholars of the Black community focused on Black men as proxies for studies of Black populations. Correspondingly, conceptual frames utilizing processes of power and sociality such as gender, masculinity, and patriarchy, as well as culture as an independent variable, were relatively absent in these early works. Conceptually, capitalism and its racial effects were the basis for Black men's social problems.

By the 1960s, social scientists of race and Blackness in this country had become interested in both gender and culture binaries, and particularly with the ways in which Black difference was expressed in departures from the cultural and gender norms of white middle-class society. This work depended heavily on new notions of Black culture, which were dependent on ideas of cultural relativism and historical particularism associated with American Anthropology, and whose conceptualization Du Bois had played a fundamental role. The Black nationalist politics of the Black Power and associated Black Arts and Black Studies movements, building on the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance and the Du Boisian concepts of double consciousness and Pan African cultures, contributed to the conceptualization of these binaries in two important ways.

First, Black nationalism and Black Studies established the legitimacy of a Black culture, categorically equal to but different from that of other peoples, as the basis for Black identity (e.g., Diop, 1962). This insistence on Black cultural difference sought space in global modernity in which legitimate empowered identities are national identities. Second, Black nationalism placed emphasis on the need for Black men to play the role of patriarchs. Important sectors of the Black Power movement accepted the notion that slavery and Jim Crow had prevented Black men from playing their natural heteropatriarchic role as leaders, providers, and protectors in Black families and society. A key aspect of liberation, then, was for Black men to begin to play the kinds of roles in Black culture distinct from those of women and “normal” in heteropatriarchic societies (e.g., Cleaver, 1968).

Some mainstream academics, cherry-picking ideas from early Black scholars and from the emerging Black Studies, emphasized these ideas of cultural and gender binaries. They posited the emergence of a Black subculture, categorically different from White culture, within which many Black men abandoned or were unable to enact “normal” heteropatriarchic roles to provide for, protect, and lead middle-class nuclear families. Exemplary of this culture of poverty/cultural pathology scholarship was the work of Lewis (1963) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (USDL, 1965). It shifted the scholarly conceptual focus from the racial political economic analysis of the early Black social scientists to a culturalism based on the idea of an immutable Black culture/subculture dysfunctional in its mis-formed and/or broken institutions and absolute difference from that of middle-class culture and American values (e.g., Clark, 1965). This notion of a different and dysfunctional culture, and particularly Black men's dysfunctional cultural practices within it, has become hegemonic within popular understandings of the social ills of the Black community and continuing racial disparity in US society. Conceptually, the notion that pathological Black culture and Black men's and women's improper performance of gender roles was a convincingly unique combination of Historical Particularist Cultural theory from Cultural Anthropology (minus the companion concept of cultural relativism), combined with Sociology's Social Disorganization Theory.

This cultural-disorganization approach, based on the assumption that what is distinct about Black people in US society is our cultural differences from the dominant population and that this culture is dysfunctional, has come to dominate subsequent scholarship on Black men. In response to this cultural-disorganization formulation of the “Black male problematique,” which blamed the victim for their plight, scholars led by Wilson (1987 35-36) reintroduced a historical materialist take on the circumstances of Black men. Wilson, and others following his lead, placed emphasis on contemporary economic disparities rather than historic ones, considered cultural adaptations to economic stress to be reversible, and differentiated middle class Blacks from the increasingly socially and economically isolated and problematic Black “underclass” where he considered the problem to reside (e.g., Auletta, 1982; Glasgow, 1980). Conceptually, the inequities of late capitalism, not racism, determined problematic social responses, and only for the economically underprivileged portion of the Black population. This extremely influential work is a modified form of the historical materialist plus social disorganization models, in which economic determinism is the motive force for pathological social disorganization. The notion of a Black underclass culture created by the immediate conditions of economic disparity and secondarily anti-black racism conceptually underpinned the explosion of scholarly work on Black men over the last 40 years. Using this conceptual frame, the literature on underclass Black men proliferated and became increasingly strident with declarations of crisis and pending extinction (e.g., Gibbs, 1988; Majors & Billson, 1992).

The insistence on the fact of ongoing structural oppression permitted the theorization of Black men's cultural practices as agentive, albeit problematic, responses to ongoing conditions of racism and economic inequality. This opened conceptual space for scholarship that focused on Black men's cultural agency, their understandings of themselves, and the development of distinctive Black masculinities (e.g., Anderson, 1978). However, despite its discourse of creative adaptation, during the 1990s most of this literature retained a social problems-disintegration approach to Black men consisting of descriptive cultural and psychological analysis of counterproductive behaviors and psychoses (e.g. Anderson 1990, 1999; Sullivan 1989). Conceptually, this work, perhaps unwittingly, owes much to Gramscian analysis in which racial and economic structural oppression is understood to lead to cultural resistance, which often problematically serves to preserve the hegemon (e.g., West, 1993). Contradictorily, some of this work seems to be guided by Rational Choice Theory with little or no emphasis on the structural power relations in which Black men are emmeshed and with a singular focus on the decisions made by individual Black men faced with their perceived choices (e.g., Duneier, 1992).

Recognizing the pitfalls of cultural deficiency formulations, during the 1990s and early 2000s some researchers emphasized the way structural forces of racism and class oppression negatively affected the lives of Black men without recourse to the positing of a problematic Black male culture (e.g., Ferguson, 2000; Noguera, 2008). The crisis of the mass incarceration of Black men also led to considerable scholarship relevant to the scholarship on Black men (e.g., Gilmore, 2007; Hinton, 2016). Conceptually, this work marks the emergence of Critical Race Theory with its emphasis on institutionalized racism, racial privilege, and the intersection of structures of racial and economic oppressions in their impacts on Black men. More recently, what has been loosely referred to as “Afro-Pessimism” with its focus on the ontological centrality of anti-Blackness to modernity, has brought a perspective closely related to the Critical Race conceptual frame to our understandings of Black men's social position (e.g., Vargas, 2008, Marable 2014).

More than two decades ago, the late bell hooks published two books (2004a, 2004b) on Black men. In her work, hooks adopts an Intersectional approach to understanding Black men and their situation. In the books, hooks covers familiar ground in attributing many of the issues faced by Black men and aspects of their behavior to racism and class oppression. However, hooks crucially adds structural heteropatriarchy into her analysis, articulating it with the other two processes of unequal power, explaining how they have marginalized Black men, creating cycles of poverty, incarceration, and violence. She also analyzes the role of these intersecting modes of systemic oppression in forcing the internalization of heteropatriarchy among Black men. She contends that adopting patriarchal values as a form of empowerment undermines the possibility of authentic relationships, sociality and communality within Black communities, and creates crippling psychological issues for Black men. A central argument of hook's work is the urgent need for alternative models of Black masculinity—ones that reject patriarchal domination and embrace vulnerability, emotional expression, and mutual respect. Both books advocate for a reimagining of a Black male identity that prioritizes healing and connection over dominance.

Black Feminist Theory, with its contestation of men as universal subjects and focus on gender, is understood by many scholars to be exclusively about and therefore only useful for intellectual work on Black women. However, central to the Black feminist conceptual project is an appreciation for the ways in which heteropatriarchic power operates in relation to Black women, men, and otherly gendered and sexed subjects and objects. A key aspect of feminist approaches is the idea that heteropatriarchy concerns power relationships between cis men. Patriarchy establishes relationships grounded in dominant power over others that include competition and social control as well as social and economic status. It centers men's privilege by being men-dominated, men-identified, and men-centered. Accordingly, men are affirmed for what they accomplish in relation to dominance of others in the public and domestic spheres. It involves the oppression and control of women as well as non cis men as a defining feature of the contest for dominance between cis men. Cis men then must relate to women and children from a position of dominance as an element of masculinity in a patriarchy. Cis men feel and are judged to be inadequate when they are unable to dominate for whatever reason. Patriarchy then is a process of socially constructed dominant power that articulates well with the other structures of dominant power in modernity—anti-blackness and capital accumulation. Taken together, these three structures of dominance underpin the will to power and mastery. Understanding, how this structure of power effects the lives of Black men and boys in our heteropatriarchic society, who are both racially stigmatized and disproportionately economically disadvantaged is fundamental to our efforts to positively impact their lives through the production of knowledge about them. In heteropatriarchic societies, understanding gender and gendered relations is critical. After all we have a vast literature on Black men and boys because the empirical evidence points, among the similarities, to deep and important differences in the experiences of Black men and boys and Black women and girls and Black queer folk in our society. In a heteropatriarchy, these gendered differences are important and must be understood.

In the conclusion to our 1994 literature review, we state “Generally, research on African American males has been too limited in its scope. It is primarily a literature of the failures and dysfunctional behavior of Black males, and it is greatly over-representative of Black males in the inner cities. This focus neglects the majority of the Black male population and fails to more fully address age, class, gender, and geographical issues” (Gordon et al., 1994, p. 522). In his incisive 2011 review of the educational literature on Black men and boys, Same Old Stories, Anthony Brown similarly found the conceptual scope of educational research on Black men and boys to be too limited. He urged “educational theorists and practitioners to ask new questions beyond the populational reasoning that has consumed educational discourse about Black males” (Brown, 2011, p. 2071).

In the humanities and social sciences and particularly Black Studies, Black Feminist and related Queer theories are ascendent, with intersectional analysis increasingly central to critical analyses of the Black experience in the U.S. and the Black Diaspora. Work utilizing this conceptual paradigm with an emphasis on heteropatriarchic power in Black Studies has productively broadened sectors of the scholarly literature on Black men and boys (e.g., Gordon, 1997). It is the conceptual basis for the proliferation of work on Black Queer men's positions, experiences, struggles, and importance within Black communities and larger societies, which has broadened our understandings of Black men's and boy's experiences (e.g., Allen, 2001). Why are Black feminist approaches such as those initiated by bell hooks focused on heteropatriarchy as an important structural force not more widely deployed in our thinking about the education of Black men and boys?

Following Brown, we urge the deployment of new conceptual frames in our quest to better understand Black men and boys. The Historical Materialist, and Culturalist-Social Disorganization, and Rational Choice, etc. paradigms taken by themselves are no longer adequate. New conceptual approaches and analytical studies allow us to weigh the complex inter-relations of the varying structures of power on the experiences of Black men and boys; and to better understand them. Black feminist theories particularly Intersectionality and Queer theory have the potential to be tremendously productive as well a broadening the scope of our inquiries when deployed in our research on Black men and boys.