My Weary Query

[This post revised 11/07/07]

Back in June I ordered the texts for this class, and although I had intentions of reading some of them in advance, my busy summer ensured that the books remained neatly stacked. But by July I was drawn to this book specifically. I was TAing a course called Literacy Acquisition. Eleven of the 25 students were Black and members of the UT football team. Their admission to the university was made possible by a generous academic scholarship in exchange for their prowess on the field. While their performance on the field was amazing, their performance in class was poor, and their resistant attitude and speech made me feel uncomfortable because it deviated so far from the identity of “good student” so typical of most students here at UT.

Several of the Black students in this class displayed all the characteristics of the “cool pose” that Tatum describes on page 29:

This pose, a ritualized form of masculinity, uses certain behavior, scripts, physical posturing, and carefully crafted performance to convey a strong impression of pride, strength, and control. The cool pose is a coping mechanism to hide self-doubt, insecurity, and inner turmoil, and can be observed in such things as dress (for example, beltless pants hanging below the waist), manner of talk (signifying, rapping), and behavior (high fives, special handshakes, forms of greeting).

The pose these students enacted was so far removed from an academic stance that it seemed a deliberate attempt to undermine the very institution that offered them a “free” education. These students were resisting schooling and the academic discourse college requires, perhaps because adopting it would cast them White and undermine the (dis)position of being “Othered”.

My efforts to interact among many of these students during small group activities was met with varying reactions. Some appeared surprised that a TA would attempt to engage them in a conversation around course concepts during small group activities. Others refused to talk. Some were clearly annoyed that I even attempted a conversation. Frequently, the banter within these groups was street talk, a clear disregard for academic discourse, and most remained silent during whole group discussion. Why? What was behind this resistance? Would participating in a more scholarly way align them with Whiteness? Or if someone secretly wanted to perform an academic discourse, would doing so threaten his in-group status?

It was a challenge and always uncomfortable. There were small breakthroughs, though, especially when we used a Ruby Payne quote that perpetuated a stereotype of people in poverty we knew to be inaccurate, but thought might be useful for provoking discussion. The quote said something to the effect that people in poverty do not know that they have the choice to overcome it—-they need only know the “hidden rules” for escaping poverty’s devastating grip. Since some of these football players came from low SES communities, they took offense to Payne’s (lack of) analysis and spoke of the ways in which economic, transportation, and educational constraints kept their hard working loved ones in poverty. Essentially they expressed that even when people in poverty know the “hidden rules” of the middle and upper class, that knowledge does little for helping people overcome generational poverty and does nothing to fix a social system that perpetrates it.

I was struck how this quote provoked heated discussion among those students who’d previously been so aloof and resistant. It was (perhaps not surprisingly) a White woman who couldn’t speak accurately about an issue deeply embedded in their life experience that made them speak-up.

We needed literature that would help us talk about the underlying institutional and social structures that have oppressed certain groups and use it to reflect upon and name the situations some of these students faced. While I think English classes should use literature to address the issues important to particular populations, educators in other disciplines are somewhat constrained unless they re-conceptualize a course for the particular students who enter it. Should we do so at the undergrad level? If so, how?

My limited knowledge of the experiences of these Black students prevents me from understanding the resistant behavior I witnessed. I simply felt it was inappropriate, and shouldn’t be passed of as, “Oh, that is just their culture” (as if that makes all actions permissible in a classroom). But still I felt that these students needed experiences that could help them critique the structures that may have oppressed them, and help them envision themselves in a profession other than professional sports. These narrow depictions that the media feeds of Black adolescent males as mostly athletes are problematic since most will not obtain stardom in that capacity. More depictions of Black men as working professionals in medicine, engineering, law, and education are needed to offset the current overemphasis on sports as the most viable way to make something of oneself.

Soon after the course was finished, one of football players in the class was arrested. He wasn’t the first. There had already been a long list of felonies committed by members of the UT football team. This, too, was a topic of angry conversation I overheard in and outside of class since, apparently, many of their peers were hung-up in court proceedings. Attitudes toward law enforcement among these football players was overwhelmingly negative.

[Footnote: While the actions of some players have, indeed, been illegal and warrant prosecution, recent and unconfirmed accounts of racial profiling and the knee-jerk reactions among policemen in the APD should certainly be cause for alarm among all local citizens. This was, in fact, part of the conversation I overheard among some athletes -- it was a conversation that might have been more productive if we had dared help them connect it to the course content].

If we are to create conditions that may facilitate a change in attitude and identity among resistant students among all ethnicities, educators need to know more about the social ills that underlie so much of the anger and resistance among particular populations. Tatum’s book is an important beginning for thinking about how this might happen, and how we might (as Randy mentioned in class) make our classrooms centers for the study of the students who occupy them.

Unless we work to address address behavior that is anti-schooling, many Black adolescent males will continue to be constructed in statistics and other media as delinquent.