Beyond the Problematique: Reimagining Black Men and Boys in Urban Education

Enduring Discourse on Black Men and Boys

During the 15th century, Western Europe underwent an epochal shift from a feudal-Christian episteme to a distinctly secular form of subjective understanding in the wake of a humanist revolution (Wynter, 1492). The introduction of studia humanitatis during the Renaissance ushered in the concept of nonhomogeniety (i.e., the color line) and invented Black ¹ people as nonhuman subpersons through scientific reason. Through these new fields of study, researchers, academics, scientists, and scholarly institutions have produced racial knowledge (Goldberg, 2020) about the invention of the “Black male” from 15th-century humanism to mid-20th-century social science (Jordan, 2013; Kendi, 2016). Despite several centuries of poking, prodding, and examining Black males, this demographic has continued to be studied across an array of academic disciplines since the late 20th century.

Studies by social scientists have attributed deficiencies among Black males to substantiate critiques of Black family structures in urban contexts as pathologically dysfunctional (Moynihan, 1997). While some have also privileged white middle-class cultural norms and biological determinism in their analysis (Pettigrew, 1964), a growing contingency in this field has challenged social science's deficit-oriented portrayals of Black males in urban contexts (Gordon et al., 1994; Kelley, 1998) and examined systemic challenges at the intersection of race and gender (Ferguson, 2020; Kunjufu, 1985).

Sociologists engaging with Black males in urban contexts (Dance, 2012; Young, 2004) have utilized ethnographies to nuance how they make sense of life chances despite systemic barriers. This work lends to an intentional focus on strategies of persistence and liberatory dreaming. Within the field of psychology, scholarship has focused on how Black males’ psychological well-being has been shaped by racial and environmental factors in addition to approaches to coping (McClain et al., 2016; Thomas et al., 2016). Social scientists with expertise in media studies have also tended to the dimensions of Black males’ experiences. This work has focused on both the cultural production of Blackness (Gray, 1986; Guerrero, 1993) and Black masculinity (Gray, 1995), while others have advanced theoretical frameworks to analyze the latter phenomenon (Hall, 1993; Jackson, 2006). The discourse on Black males within the field of education has been particularly robust.

Concerning Black male teachers, scholarship has pointed to how their varied ideologies (Brown, 2012) generate vast forms of relevant pedagogical approaches (Lynn, 2006) and intellectual stewardship (Thomas, 2025) within urban schools. However, scholars have cautioned the field to critically examine expectations and assumptions hoisted upon Black male teachers that have negative implications on their school-based experiences (Bristol, 2018; Brockenbrough, 2015).

Recent research on Black boys has offered conceptual (Bryan, 2020) and empirical (Johnson, 2019) analyses to trouble normative constructs such as play and citizenship, respectively, about their lived experiences. Consequently, leading scholars have advanced humanizing frameworks that move beyond the “at-risk” or “problem” tropes (Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Noguera, 2009). Given the salience of athletics in the racial identity development of Black boys and young men (Harrison et al., 2002), sports education scholars have also pointed to frameworks in support of the holistic development of Black male student-athletes (Bimper et al., 2013; Cooper, 2016).

To address the specificity of Black men and boys within education, several special issues have been published with an explicit focus on their experiences. Urban Education's (38:4) special issue addressed factors within and outside of school that could support the educational achievement of Black males. Given the colorblind rhetoric following the election of President Barack Obama, scholars published a special issue in Race Ethnicity and Education (14:1) called Education of Black Males in a “Post-Racial” World. This collection of scholars pushed the field to recognize and de-essentialize Black males’ existence and pursue research that recognizes their range of complexities and assets. Most recently, Urban Education (52:9) released a special issue on Black males within colleges and universities, and these researchers pointed to the role that supportive faculty and campus environments have on Black young men's retention, well-being, and graduation rates.

Framing this Project

The intention of this special issue is twofold. We are first seeking to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the journal Urban Education. Our attention to the anniversary is not simply an acknowledgment of the time the journal has dedicated to urban education research and theory. We approach this work with a specific examination of how context and space matter in questions about the social and educational realities of African American males. What Daniel Thomas III, Marcus Johnson, and John Williams III illustrate through their exhaustive review of the literature (featured in this issue) on Black males in the journal Urban Education is the kind of questions we tend to ask about Black males. What they find is that Urban Education has always implicitly and explicitly given attention to the conditions of African American male education.

The implicit part of Urban Education's dedication is that since 1965, there has been a subtle yet initially muted conversation about Black males that is subsumed within the larger notions of “Black education.” This is a point that Anthony Brown (2011) makes, noting that the earliest discussions about Black males were often embedded in broader concerns about the Black family. However, by the 1990s, numerous books, journals, editorials, conferences, and congressional proceedings had been dedicated exclusively to Black males. Edmund Gordon (1996) characterized this coalescing as the “African Male Problematique.” Gordon defined this as the looming public construction of Black males as generalized distortions that only seek to manufacture the problem. In fact, in the introduction to the 2003 special issue on Black males in Urban Education, he uses this term to contextualize how Black males are understood in schools and society.

This leads to the second purpose of this special issue. We approach this work in the tradition of scholars, such as James Earl Davis and the late luminary Vernon Polite, who each sought to curate the existing literature on Black males. This approach has remained a staple of understanding the experiences of Black males, with Urban Education publishing two dedicated volumes (2003 & 2017) on the topic. Therefore, we approach this work as a glimpse into how scholars conceptualize the experiences of Black males. We observe how the curation of ideas about Black males in this project highlights the types of assemblages of knowledge that persist, as well as new conceptualizations of Black males in schools.

Taken together, we approached this work intending to provide a new theoretical perspective on the concept of Black males, one different from other curations of African-American male research that often seek to lay out a catalog of problems related to Black males’ suspensions, expulsions, and educational inequality. This special issue aims to expand and extend our theoretical notions related to Black males by explicitly examining how Black males’ questions, pedagogies, curriculum, and theorizations have been understood and interpreted. This project aims to introduce a novel and innovative approach to reconsidering assumptions about African-American male research. In the following section, we outlined each of the projects and how they align with the idea of advancing new questions and conceptualizations.

A Word on the Papers

The articles in this special issue challenge long-held questions and categories that have traditionally limited the study, representation, and engagement of Black males in urban educational research. Each contribution intentionally shifts away from deficit-based paradigms by prioritizing existence, expression, and epistemology.

James Earl-Davis’ Preface establishes the foundation of the special issue in the evolving yet vital legacy of Black male education research. Davis advocates for a renewed dedication to interdisciplinary and developmentally attuned scholarship that challenges simplistic representations of Black boys and men, drawing from his intellectual foundations and personal experiences. He emphasizes that addressing the adultification and erasure of Black boyhood, while also elevating the nuance of Black male humanity, is an essential endeavor in a sociopolitical climate that favors silence over truth-telling. His call to contest both external narratives and internal complacency anchors this special issue in a heritage of critical disruption and scholarly diligence.

Thomas III, Johnson, and Williams III's literature review interrogates 60 years of scholarship in Urban Education regarding Black men and boys, revealing the dominant questions and epistemological assumptions that have endured over time. The authors highlight a persistent theme wherein Black males are framed as unfinished, imperfect, or continually requiring fixing—rooted in historically racialized and pathologizing inquiries about their educability, morality, and value. They contend that these questions are not neutral but rather influenced by the epistemes of their respective eras, formed by pivotal national policy moments ranging from the Moynihan Report to My Brother's Keeper and George Floyd's murder. The authors employed Goldberg's theory of racial knowledge and Wynter's theory of subjective understanding to critique how questions have served as tools of containment. As such, they reject these restrictive measures and resulting classifications by emphasizing the risks of expedient, policy-driven questions, and cautioning against policy conformity and citation counts without challenging fundamental racial logics. Their call is not merely to alter what we ask about Black males in urban education but to closely examine the rationale and methodology behind our questioning.

J. Howard, McAdoo, and T. Howard examine the social and educational positioning of Black males in schools while contextualizing the historical and current application of the term “at-risk” and being “a risk.” They contend this unique situation orients Black boys to not simply be misunderstood or underserved but actively hated in this institutional context. Drawing on a distinct form of racial hostility, the authors utilize antiblack hate as a theory to highlight phases of (1) dehumanization; (2) indifference; (3) failure to protect; and (4) violence enacted on Black male students. To turn away from the embedded “at-risk” framing, the authors offer three key recommendations: coconstructing Black educational space with Black students; reconsidering deficit-laden questions and assumptions; and implementing policies that elevate the disruption of antiblack hate in schools.

Children's books are not impartial—they serve as mechanisms of influence, capable of molding children's self-perception and perceptions others hold of them. A. Brown, K. Brown, Bryan, and Vlach analyzed 18 children's picture books that center Black boys, challenging recycled narratives and normalized tropes. Too often, Black boys are rendered invisible—either excluded from children's literature or perceived solely through a skewed lens of deficiency and danger. The authors reject both forms of invisibility and instead amplify literature that portrays Black boys as fully human—curious, joyous, vulnerable, and whole. The authors examine how the conceptions of play, boyhood, and childhood in these texts encourage readers to understand Black boys beyond reductive stereotypes. Grounded in Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge (HCSK) and Black playcrit, they conduct an analysis that reveals three themes: the affirming power and possibility of Black boyhood; Black boys in culture, community, and legacy, and Black play as spiritual, imaginative, and liberatory.

Hodge, Howe, and Bennett assert that we should concentrate on Black male athletes as complex, spiritual, and intelligent individuals in college athletics, which, as an institution, tends to commodify Black athletic labor while disregarding their lived experiences. Many historical assumptions reduce Black male athletes to “bodies,” yet the authors utilize critical orientations to unearth Black male college athletes as epistemic agents who negotiate and make meaning of self, sport, and higher education in distinctive ways. Collectively, these articles confront reductive logics and framings to provide novel pathways for understanding Black males in urban education not as problems to be solved but as beings to be explored in their full humanity.

The Afterword, written by E. W. Gordon, Gordon-Nembhard, and E. T. Gordon, provides a generational and conceptual analysis of the shifting paradigms employed to understand Black men and boys in U.S. scholarship. The authors assert that past theories, such as historical materialist, culturalist-social disorganization, and rational choice, are inadequate for contemporary circumstances. As such, they promote conceptual frameworks—rooted in Black feminist theory, intersectionality, and queer theory to interrogate heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and anti-Blackness as interconnected systems influencing Black male experiences. This family's contribution serves as both a reflection and an invitation, calling for scholars to refresh our frameworks or face the risk of perpetuating the same pathologizing narratives we aim to dismantle.

This special issue advances a necessary shift in urban education scholarship beyond problem-saturated framings of Black men and boys. By centering their humanity, intellectual traditions, and possibilities, it offers a renewed vision that affirms their perspectives, pedagogies, and personhood as foundational to the past and present, as well as vital to the future of education.