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URBAN ADOLESCENT BLACK MALES

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THE BOYS IN THE HOOD:
EXPLORING LITERACY IN THE SOCIAL LIVES OF SIX URBAN ADOLESCENT
BLACK MALES
By

David E. Kirkland

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

2006

ABSTRACT
THE BOYS IN THE HOOD:
EXPLORING LITERACY IN THE SOCIAL LIVES OF SIX URBAN ADOLESCENT
BLACK MALES
By
David E. Kirkland

Achievement gaps in school literacy persist between whites and nonwhites,
between higher and lower socioeconomic groups, between individuals who live in cities
and those who reside elsewhere, and uniquely between girls and boys. One primary
reason why these gaps exist is that educational policies and literacy programs fail to
acknowledge the social dimensions of literacy learning and, by extension, Shape ofﬁcial
spaces in ways that, by situating literacy around unfamiliar social practices, exclude
many students—especially urban adolescent African American males.

This dissertation concerns these gaps, as it seeks to broaden our understanding of
literacy by better understanding literacy in the lives of urban adolescent Black males.
Speciﬁcally, the project seeks to answer the following research questions: How is literacy
deﬁned among urban adolescent Black males, and what purposes does it serve across
multiple social spaces in their lives? Hence, by analyzing discourse, the “socially
accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can
be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social
network” (Gee, 1991), this work proﬁles—both documents and describes—literacy
between the achievement gap as successfully practiced by Six urban adolescent Black
males.

The young men featured in this study consist of six friends, who live in a

moderate size city in Michigan. Data for this study consists of observations and

interviews that took place for over a year. Data has been analyzed by describing and
interpreting the young men’s literacy practices, as revealed in the multiple social contexts
they inhabit. This process has sought to make sense of and shed light on the alternative
deﬁnitions and uses of literacy, as made manifest in their daily lives of the young men. It
has also sought to understand in particular ways the relationship between discourses and
literacy use. In hopes of informing social and educational theory about how urban
adolescent Black males develop and make use of their literacies, this work ﬁnally seeks
to inform a kind of pedagogy that is not only respectful of the literate lives that urban
adolescent Black males but also provides pedagogical room to enlarge our understanding
of literacy so that alternative literacy practices can ﬁnd expression, relevance, and

acceptance in formal settings.

Cepyright by
DAVID E. KIRKLAND
2006

Dedicated to Keshava, Elie, Nyla, Cherished, and Adjoni.
I love you!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Anne Haas Dyson, Geneva Smitherman, Ernest Morrell,
Denise Troutman, Lynn Fendler, and Patricia Edwards, members (and former members)
of the faculty of Michigan State University, for their guidance, inspiration, and support
during the preparation of this work. I would also like to thank Kesha Kirkland, who
encouraged me to pursue my doctorate degree. I would like to acknowledge my mother,
whose great well of support seems endless. Sometimes hearing, “you can do it baby,”
becomes more enlightening than hearing a myriad of social theories.

I would like to extend a special thank you to the young men who agreed to
participate in this research. Without you guys, none of this would be possible. I like to
thank the many moms and family members who revealed personal information
(sometimes family secrets). I like to thank the teachers who allowed me to visit their
classrooms and take notes, the principal who allowed me to wonder through his school,
and the owner of the comer deli, who made our sandwiches “just like we like them.”

Finally, I would like to thank my God, who has carried me thus far and is

continuing to carry me along the way.

vi

PREFACE

I began my dissertation research searching for some ubiquitous yet unique form of
literacy, a racially afﬁxed masculine literacy practice, which belonged exclusively to
Black males. As I began reading through my data, I could not locate a literacy practice
that belonged to Black males exclusively. Literacy was tool that individuals used to
participate with others in valued group activities. It was a practice that no one owned, but
everyone, in some culturally/socially speciﬁc way, engaged.

The lack of evidence for a Black male literacy was to me evidence that literacy
could never be wholly possessed or owned by exclusive social groups. In keeping with
this idea, I begin to view literacy as a Shared practice (Miller & Goodnow, 1995) that all
people adopt, exercise, and, in the process of exercising, reinvent for their immediate
social needs. The young men that I had the privilege of studying have helped to reinforce
this perspective, as this dissertation shall illustrate.

If this work makes no other signiﬁcant contribution to the ﬁeld, I certainly makes
one. That is, literacy in the lives of urban adolescent Black males bears glaring
resemblances to literacy in the lives of other literate social groups. Like other literate
groups, Black men practice literacy to carry out various kinds of social work. But for
urban adolescent Black males, literacy is questioned. Hence, for them, the question of
literacy takes on new meaning, as being a Black male in contemporary society illicits
struggle, disdain, and discomfort. Rarely are Black males given permission in formal
settings to express literacy in ways that afﬁrm them and their identities as Black males.

For me, this resolve has been by far the most relevant aspect of this work. While

I did not ﬁnd a set of Black male literacies, I have been able to demonstrate the bountiful

vii

ways that Black males also employ literacy to lead socially successful lives, to respond to
the conditions of inequality surrounding them, and to gain ownership over their own
stories.

The critical theorists have indeed gotten this point right. Competing deﬁnitions of
literacy and, by association, questions about who can be labeled literate are at the
foreﬁont of current educational debates. The debate goes beyond issues of cultural
differences. That is, the educational plight that many young Black men face has very
little to do with their cultural backgrounds. The practicing of literacy is similar across
various cultural trajectories. The educational plight of young Black men, on the other
hand, deals with power (or the lack thereof) to deﬁne what counts as literacy and the
literate. Again, the issue, here, is not about cultural differences or cognitive deﬁcits. The
issue, here, is about young Black men’s failure to submit to cultural domination and
society’s viliﬁcation of them.

Indeed, many Black males practice literacy in ways that schools and society do
not accept, value, respect, or privilege. Many of them use literacy in ways that do not
always make sense to us. Regardless of our understanding, their use of literacy makes
sense to them. It is from their perspective, within the ways that literacy makes sense to
them, that this work begins. Unable to locate a literacy practice belonging to them,

locating what literacy means to them seems like the least I can do.

D. Kirkland (June 5, 2006)

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................ 2
A Long Way from Home: Literacy, Black Males, and Deshawn Stevens ...... 3
Literacies of Many Voices ..................................... 7

Literacies of the Self (in Conflict/Collaboration with the Other) ...... ll

Literacies of Labor .......................................... 17

An Outline of Chapters to Come ..................................... 20
Conclusion ...................................................... 25
Chapter 1: Literature Review .............................................. 29
Literacy as Social Practice .......................................... 30
Literacy and its Complexities as a Dialogic Practice ...................... 33

Race and Literacy .......................................... 33

Literacy and Gender ......................................... 35

Framing Black Males and the Complexities of Literacy ................... 37

The Statistics and the Problem of (Mis)representation .............. 39

The Problem of School ....................................... 43

The Problem of Media Discourses ............................. 47

Rethinking Black Males and Literacy ................................. 41
Chapter 2: Methodology ................................................. 55
Traditions in Literacy Research ...................................... 58
Theories of Discourse ....................................... 61
Theories of Cultural Production ............................... 65

Theories of Resistance ....................................... 67

Design and Methods .............................................. 69
Multiple Worlds ........................................... 70

The Guys ................................................. 72

Researcher’s Role .......................................... 78

Gaining Access ............................................ 81
Data Collection Procedures ................................... 82

Data Analysis Procedures .................................... 84

Conclusion ...................................................... 86

Chapter 3: “I Guess We Be Homies for Life”: (Per)Forming Literacy, (Re)Producing

Culture, and Appropriating Popular Media in Peer Play ............. 87

Pop Cultural Reproduction: Literacy, Peer Commitments, and the Making of the
Guys ........................................................... 89
An Expanding Universe: Literacy and Cultural Production ................ 101
Conclusion ..................................................... 108
Chapter 4: Literacy and Resistance in the Lives of the Guys .................. 11 1

ix

Realizing Resistance: Situating the Politics of Literacy Practice ........... 112

Two Types of Resistance .......................................... 114
Narratives of Resistance: Literacy as Social Critiques and Silent Struggles . . . 124 '
Conclusion ..................................................... 129

Chapter 5: Discourse & Literacy: (Re)Porming Identities & Re(Dis)covering Selves .

......................................................... 131
Authoring Selves: Forming “I”dentities in Texts and Personal Reﬂections on
Literacies ...................................................... 133

Writing Raps, Producing Selves .............................. 134

Body Language: Literacy, Identity Formation, and Flesh ........... 140
Personal Carnivals: Appropriating Race in Identity Formation ............ 147
Conclusion ..................................................... 154

Chapter 6: Implications for Future Research and Practice ................... 156
Summary of Findings ............................................ 157

Literacy at the Sociocultural Level ............................ 157

Literacy at the Socio-Political Level ............................ 158

Literacy at the Personal Level ............................... 158
Complex Literacy Studies: A Direction for Future Literacy Research ....... 159
Reforming Literacy Education: A Tale of Two Classrooms ............... 164

Ms. Crankshaw Classroom .................................. 164

Mr. Kegler Classroom ...................................... 166
Researcher-Teacher Collaboration: Toward A Collaborative Literacy Pedagogy .
............................................................... 168

The Comic Book Unit ....................................... 170

The CCW Unit ............................................ 175
Conclusion .................................................... 1 82

References ........................................................... 184

Until the lion learns to write history, the story of the jungle will always glorify the hunter.
—African Proverb

The telling of stories can be a profound form of scholarship moving serious study close to the frontiers of
art.
—Joseph Featherstone ( I 989, p. 3 77)

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child/ A long way ﬁom home/ Sometimes I wish I could ﬂy like a bird up
in the sky/ ‘Cause motherless children have a real hard time/ Sometimes I feel like the freedom is near/ But

we’re so far, so far from home. . .
—Harry Thacker Burleigh. I91 ? (1866-1949)

INTRODUCTION

Exploring the many ways in which literacy is practiced among urban adolescent
Black males extends Gee’s (1991, 2003) social literacies framework (see also New
London Group, 1996; Street, 1984, 1995). For urban adolescent Black males, literacy is
more than social practice. It is also dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Dyson, 2003), rooted
ﬁrmly in the cultural maelstrom of being, measured interestingly by the presence of
others, altered unfairly by racism and discriminations, and tangled complexly in self-
reﬂection.

At the heart of literacy, then, is action (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Shor, 1992),
which for Black males sometimes translates into reaction against social subordination,
including racism and social isolation (Wilson, 1987). According to Smitherman and van
Dijk (1988), much of modern social subordination (e.g., racism) is symbolic, rooted in
discourse. According to Gee (1991), “Discourse” is the foundation of identity and
literacy. Therefore, understanding the relationship between social subordination and
literacy in the lives of six young Black men is the main concern of this work.

While I seek to understand the ways that key elements of social subordination,
particularly racism, shape literacy and urban adolescent Black males, I also seek to
understand the ways that literacy is practiced among Black males. In doing so, I aim to
inform a kind of scholarship which not only respects the literate lives of Black males but
also seeks to encourage a more democratic philosophy (representing multiple voices) of
literacy and literacy learning. Such a perspective promises to provide intellectual space
and practical opportunities for multiple modes of literacy to ﬁnd expression, relevance,

and acceptance in formal settings.

Finally, in my search for understanding, I acknowledge that this work has been a
personal joumey. On this journey, I have stared long and hard into the lives of six young
men. While I can picture them perfectly as I write, I ﬁnd them in their activities and in
their words, some of which are written, others simply spoken. The volumes of voices
that contribute to their identities, including the perspectives of others, articulate, in part,
what it means to them to be literate, a distinction that yields greater importance especially
in a world that constructs them as the opposite.

Therefore, this work is very much their story. However, it does not feature them
alone. It is an educational drama that casts literacy events (Heath, 1983) as political ones.
At the heart of the story is conﬂict, compromise, and hopeful resolution. Yet, taken
together, the story is about young Black males who practice literacy decadently off the
national stage and often struggle to gain national spotlight. The work that follows is a
story about young Black males and their literacies, a story which moves "serious study
close to the ﬁ'ontiers of art” (Featherstone, 1989, p. 377), a story which begins in a car
headed south on interstate 127.

A Long Way from Home: Literacy, Black Males, and Deshawn Stevens

I am on the road to Mason, MI, which is about 15 miles south of East Lansing.
For me, Mason is a long way from home in more ways than one. It is a vast shiﬁ from
Lansing’s vibrantly diverse urban population. Not only is it almost exclusively White,
Mason is stubbornly rural and historically racist. In his autobiography, famed human
rights activist Malcohn X describes growing up in Mason like he describes living behind
bars. Malcolm’s description of Mason seems ﬁtting, as Mason is also the site of the

Ingham County Jail, a holding facility for suspected criminals awaiting trial and convicts,

most of whom are Black and male. As one of the inmates housed in the Ingham County
Jail, Deshawn (Shawn) Stevens was now “living” permanently in Mason for “allegedly”
selling drugs.

Because of Shawn’s situation, the trip to Mason becomes an unexpected detour on
my research journey. Shawn, a dark-skinned, lanky, and tall young man, along with ﬁve
ﬁiends—whom I have nicknamed “the Guys,” have agreed to meet with me periodically
to talk about life and literacy. Though Shawn is trapped behind bars, his literate life is
unique and intriguing, nonetheless. Through it, Shawn’s presence lingers with me. The
trip to Mason proves less than lonely.

While driving, an endless stream of thoughts surge through my ﬂooded mind.
While they do not drown me, thoughts about Shawn saturate me, allowing me to sink
deeper and deeper into inquiry. I am pondering the Black male prison crisis (Justice
Policy Institute, 2001) and its assumed relationship with literacy (hooks, 2004). Indeed,
Black men such as Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X relished literacy. For them, it was
a necessary weapon in their war to win freedom. However, for Shawn and his friends,
literacy is at best questionable. For them, it represents White America (e.g., “actin’
White” [Fordham & Ogbu, 1986]), and Black males who submit to the dominance of
White America commit racial treason. In sum, “academic” literacy—the modes of
literacy usually endorsed by schools and mainstream society—is not, to them, a tool for
freedom but acculturation.

In order to gain clarity, I raise two important questions: what does being a literate
Black male mean to the Guys, and what has literacy meant historically to other Black

males prior to the contemporary moment? The questions appear similar but are different

in important ways. They offer very different answers. As brieﬂy mentioned above,
“literacy” has historically been a symbol of emancipation and freedom for many Black
males (Perry et al., 2003). However, many “literate” Black males, in turn, have been
socially constructed as symbols of unfounded compromise, or cultural sellouts. Where
literacy was once regarded by Black males, like Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, as a
means toward freedom, it is now looked upon by many young urban Black men, like the
Guys, as a site of cultural conﬂict and social struggle.

In this way, literacy as practiced by many young Black men is sadly shaped in
tension, while literacy as practiced by many Whites is, more or less, openly endorsed by
schools and society (Heath, 1983). By contrast, literacy in the lives of many urban
adolescent Black males is often ignored or criticized in the American public. (Political
critiques of rap is a key example of this.) Given the only true difference between Black
males and their White counterparts (i.e., skin color), this criticism is most likely due to
the lingering presence of racism and the harmﬁil cadences of cultural discrimination alive
in American society.

Thus, the consortium among literacy, racism, and discrimination acts as an
ideological deterrent to social and educational progress (Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003;
Prendergast, 2003). The images of Black males projected in school and society, like
literacy, are often marred by a petulant ideology that swaps pity for disdain. This sad and
dangerous deviation in thought makes the situation of learning literacy for Black males
volatile, threatening, and uncomfortable.

Another way of viewing this conﬂict is through a historical assessment of literacy

in the US. Literacy in the US has been forged solidly within the dark furnace of injustice,

brewing fervently in the heat of racial prejudice (Smitherman & van Dijk, 1988;
Williams, 1991), social exclusion G’urcell-Gates, 1995), and educational neglect (M.
Rose, 1989). By association, current and historic deﬁnitions of literacy have been created
in the image of White elites (Heath, 1983). By contrast, literacy when practiced by
Aﬁican Americans rarely gets acknowledged in mainstream deﬁnitions (Dyson, 2003b;
Kirkland, 2006; Perry et al., 2001) or represented in public spaces (Richardson, 2004;
Woodson, 1933). Furthermore, access to a mainstream “literacy” practice (as deﬁned
through public literacy policies, literacy curricula, and classroom pedagogies) is unfairly
distributed to Blacks (Cornelius, 1991). And, during speciﬁc moments in our nation’s
history, “literacy” has been used to help enforce slavery and to deny Blacks access to
democracy (Prendergast, 2003).

While it has worked to reinforce the oppression of Blacks, narrow deﬁnitions of
literacy lend themselves to racism. Further, racist conceptions of literacy (i.e., Blacks are
not literate or, at least, not as literate as Whites) interact to inaccurately position Blacks
as non-literates, which reinforce notions of Black inferiority. As a result, Blacks,
particularly Black males, are understood in deﬁcit terms, outside the loci of textual
expression and verbal performance.

Literacy as a racist construct diminishes the humanity of Blacks. As “pre”-literate
“civilizations” have been viewed as primitive, uncivilized, or arcane (Ong, 1988). The
racist assumptions about people surrounding literacy, thus, mystiﬁes knowledge, truth,
and the potential human ability, especially of Black males, to make sense of experience
through spoken and written words and symbols. By Situating them in the margins of

literacy, society helps to shape Blacks, particularly Black males, as different, deﬁcient, or

de-human. Given this, questions persist as to what counts as literacy and what literacies
count as civilized. The road to Mason proves insightful.
Literacies of Many Voices

On the road to Mason, I listen carefully to one of my ﬁrst taped-recorded
conversations with Shawn. The recording allows me to resurrect, if not Shawn’s

presence, his voice. The audio begins with familiar greetings:

Me: How are things, Shawn?
Shawn: It’s real out here, Kirk. How [a]bout you?
Me: I’m ﬁne . . . just ﬁne.

The recording continues. As I listen, I make a list of possible questions that I

might ask Shawn about his writing.
Me: Shawn, are you writing still . . . didn’t you tell me about a rap?
Shawn: I done wrote a lot of stuff, Kirk. Man, check it. I got this new

rhyme that’s off the chain. [Pauses, ﬁdgeting over a few sheets of
crumbled paper tucked awkwardly in his pants. It takes him about
a minute to get settled before producing a folded sheet of paper,
which is accentuated by broken lines of scribbled texts]

Shawn and the rest of the guys take rap (and their writing of it) very seriously (see
also Morrell & Duncan-Adrade, 2002; T. Rose, 1994). Rap is the conversational
template, or genre, of their peer group. It allows them to compose, communicate, and
comment on lived experiences and shared ideas (Smitherman, 1999a). My conversation
with Shawn continues:

Shawn: Look, Kirk. I got this new piece [rap]. I’m telling you, it’s off the

chain.

He seems enthusiastic about sharing (almost determined to share) his rap with me.
He knows that I am visiting him to listen to his words. As such, he is more than eager to
share them with me. This is true, but he does not write for or to me but for himself to
share with me or anyone else who will listen. In this way, Shawn’s writing is dialogic
(Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Dyson, 2003a). I am an audience, perhaps the only audience he
has outside his peer circle. Yet through him, I gain valuable insight about what literacy,
for a young Black male, might mean.

While intensely personal, literacy, for Shawn, is never a lonely practice. As I
have mentioned, it is a dialogic one (Dyson, 1993; Freire, 1970; Newkirk, 2002). It is at
once the substance of Shawn’s character and the characters of many others, both known
and unknown. These characters are introduced to me in vibrant images brought alive in
Shawn’s writing.

Shawn’s writing says much about literacy in the lives of certain Black males.
While Shawn practices literacy on his own accord, he borrows-—like we all do—from the
world around him (Bakhtin, 1986). His recitation of personal experience in animated
lines of verse is, to use a metaphor, Lazareth awakened ﬁ'om the dead. His words keep
alive the historical hymn of others. Hence, history lives through him.

Impressed and somewhat enticed by his verbal ability, I anxiously invite Shawn to
“read” what he has written.

Shawn: Naw, man [scolding]. This ain’t like that. You can’t just read it.

It’s like poetry . . . you gotta say it.

So it seems, some of literacy, though written, is meant to be spoken after all.

I look at Shawn with a guilty grin that reveals my admiration for his knowledge
about language and literacy. I am also impressed that he could scold me. Thus, my
appreciation for him and his words encourage my desire to hear what he has to share. So,
I patiently reply, “Then say it.”

Shawn sinks his head into the folded paper. In unison are his rising hands, which
slowly ascend to his frail chest. Passionately, out of his mouth rushes a powerful noise,
melodious and surprising:

Shawn (rapping): Ain’t no room for the young, homie

gotta gun, don’t know me, homie, gittin it done
having fun on these streets, can’t see how I feel

on the run like these beats, just keeping it real

no sanctuary, they say it scary but I got a surprise
‘Cause it ain’t no scaring me, gotta git mine

been through it all, homie

I’m a ﬁghter, surviving like a real G

Brisk like gun; kind of wild yet young

ain’t got no daddy, he’s a burn

on my own, on the run

Shit is foul—sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Done walked a mile, sometimes I feel like a motherless
child

...alongwayfromhome...

Hearing this rap was my ﬁrst experience with Shawn’s writing. I was surprised

by his ability to roam space and time, to speak back freely to history and situate himself
and his experience in the past while ﬁrmly standing in the present. Shawn’s rap strikes
me as multivoiced composition in a ﬁne Bakhtinian (1986) sense, with voices past and
present giving meaning to one another. (His rap could not be read; “. . . you gotta say
it.”)

Shawn’s text is also open, or intertextual (see Derrida, 1967). It is rejoinder and
revoicing, an elaboration and appropriation of other texts and sounds. Like other literate
individuals, Shawn borrows words and phrases from the marketplace of ideas—from the
selves of time and space—to express a self which can be “traced” to another (Derrida,
1967).

This notion of borrowing (or, to use language taken from Shawn and his peers,
“sampling”) is demonstrated in the title of Shawn’s rap. Hence, the title of Shawn’s rap
is important because it is a visible link in a protracted linguistic chain of expressions.
While he connects to his cultural past through his words, Shawn is made literate through
his ability to name things (Freire, 1970).

Naming, nick-naming, and titling are fundamental aspects of African American
language, literacy, and culture (Smitherman, 1977, 1999a, 1999b). It gives writers, like
Shawn, creative authority and ownership over ideas. It also helps to situate the named
within a cultural heritage and textual tradition. While literacy for Black males is
personal, perhaps as important, it is a practice of borrowing both voice and identity,
inventing and reinventing language, and appropriating cultural “funds of knowledge”
(Moll, 2000; M011 et al., 1992). With this understanding, I asked Shawn for the title of

his rap.

10

Shawn: “Motherless Child”

While many voices are woven into Shawn’s writing, the distance between him
and us is ever-present. This idea is best demonstrated in Shawn’s rap's title, which
extends my thinking. While the purpose of this work is to examine literacy in the lives of
six urban adolescent Black males, based in part on Shawn’s rap’s title, I hope to uncover
the ways in which the Guys handle language and other textual resources to achieve
desired social goals as they participate in valued social activities. But, in our common
struggle to alleviate failure and “to leave no child behind,” even for those children we
ﬁnd motherless (or fatherless for that matter), crucial questions remain. How can this
work respond to the distance between urban adolescent Black males and schools, as
documented by national achievement data (N AEP, 2004)? In a phrase, how can this
work address inequities in how we perceive of literacy?

Literacies of the Self (in Conﬂict/Collaboration with the Other)

Presently, Shawn exists between places, unfortunately stalled in the dark
intersections of rejection and failed aspirations. While his youth revives in him some
idea of hope, Shawn’s shattering dreams of beating his prison bars and of telling his story
though words laced up to “tight beats” is a dream deferred. Because of this dilemma, it
behooves educators to understand how Shawn is literate. Understanding the ways that
Shawn is literate might enable educators to invent pedagogies that incorporate
marginalized understandings of language and literacy into classroom instruction, thereby
helping all students expand their literate repertoires.

Further, Shawn’s understanding of the power of language is declarative. It makes

a humanizing statement about literacy and relevance in the lives of young Black men.

11

His writing comments on society and the social life of words. In addition, it shed new
light on the condition of being Black and male in America. As such, Shawn’s writing is
very much personal, narrating himself; social, sharing with others; and political,
critiquing social inequities.

Personal introduction only reveals so much about a person. I met Shawn hanging
out with four of his ﬁiends in the hallway at their high school. However, I found him
hidden in a booklet of scribbles, in the violent litter of pen strokes scattered unevenly on
napkins and on the backs of unuseful documents.

‘6

As much as they are poetry to me, Shawn’s scribbles,” a term he used to refer to
his informal/in-process writings, are autobiographical. As I read them, I begin to
understand him and the literate stories of other urban adolescent Black males like him.
The following rap written by Shawn illustrates this point:
Shawn (rapping): This is my life, ﬁrll of blood and glory

It’s my story, so I gotta word for you, I will tell mine

I’ll pull a trigga at the drop of a dime ‘cause

A nigga doing time for a crime that ain’t even mine

The world came after me, ain’t got no daddy but

I gotta get ﬁxed in the penitentiary, somewhere lost and

confused

Been abused, still being used by the scum of the streets

No clever beats, just a sad song gone wrong

Can you hear me speak but nobody can hear ‘cause they

fear me

12

Whenaniggagotarnicinhishand. . .

While it is his “story,” Shawn’s rap also reﬂects other aspects of his life,
especially his experiences as a Black male. When he writes “nobody can hear ‘cause
they fear,” Shawn makes a personal statement. He is commenting on the way that society
silences the Black male voice and, more personally, his voice as a way of handling its
fear of him and Black males like him. His commentary is insightful because Shawn links
society’s viliﬁcation of Black males (see Chapter I) personally as society’s viliﬁcation of
him.

There are also larger-than-life qualities in Shawn’s rap. The line, “I’ll pull a
trigga at the drop of a dime,” is not consistent with Shawn’s character, who according to
friends “could not harm a ﬂy.” Hence, it is exaggeration disguised as intention and as
real story. While it is not meant literally, the verse is nonetheless part of his ﬁgurative
autobiography——a metaphorical statement used to narrate a loaded and explosive
presence lurking within him. While literally ﬁction, the statement is ﬁguratively true and
captures unarticulated dimensions of Shawn’s internal reality.

There are subtle differences between the second rap, which was composed while
Shawn was behind bars, and the ﬁrst rap, which was composed while Shawn was “free.”
Both raps “exaggerate” Shawn’s life story. However, Shawn’s rap loses innocence
behind bars. Shawn goes from writing about being “brisk like a gun” to being a “trigga”
pulling “nigga” with a gun. While both raps proclaim, “ain’t got no daddy,” the latter
exchanges the noun “homie” for the more distant pronoun “they.” In this way, the tone
of Shawn’s writing matures rapidly yet disturbingly. It moves ﬁ'om being situated to

isolated, as evidenced in the discursive trade-off between unlike terms, “homie” and

13

“they.” The latter rap boasts “no clever beats.” It is “just a sad song gone wrong.”

The different tones in the raps indicate differences in Shawn’s demeanor and
response to life. While he is hopeful in the ﬁrst rap, the bases of Shawn’s hopes in the
second rap are altered by the despair of being incarcerated and disrupted by the
discomfort of being alone. Between his raps, something happens to Shawn. Shawn
becomes a new person, situated in another, darker world, where he struggles with a new
set of issues. Shawn leaves a “foul” place and enters a threatening one, which he
documents as a “world coming after him.” This does not mean that he is no longer
Shawn. Rather, the shift in Shawn’s writing tells us that literacy has much to do with
where individuals are situated.

For Shawn, jail was a lonely place. He didn’t receive many visitors. Shawn’s
grandmother, Mrs. Ida, was the only other person besides me to visit him since he was
convicted in October 2004. Shortly after his conviction, I met with Mrs. Ida. The
encounter deserves mentioning.

During our brief encounter, Mrs. Ida expressed deep grief over her grandson’s
incarceration. She said that Shawn’s incarceration “hurt” her deeply. It made sense.
Shawn was more than a grandson to her. He was like a son. Mrs. Ida had raised Shawn
since he was ﬁve years old. As such, it broke Mrs. Ida’s heart to see her “grand baby
behind bars.” In addition, she did not want Shawn to “end up like his mother and father.”

In some strange way, she felt responsible for what was happening to Shawn. It
was like déja vu. She explained, “I didn’t do a good job raising his mother . . . I tried to
do a better job with him.” When I asked about Shawn’s mother, Mrs. Ida lamented,

“[Shawn’s mother] ain’t hittin on too much . . . seem like she don’t care [about Shawn]

l4

no mo’.” According to Mrs. Ida, Shawn’s mother was addicted to drugs and had been
since Shawn was three. This was ironic. The curse of drugs was heredity. Although
Shawn was not an addict, he was, along with his mother, among its victims.

Both Shawn and his mother were lost, or at least disregarded. For this reason,
they seemed to disregard one another. Shawn barely spoke of his parents. It would
surprise me if his parents ever spoke of him either.

I asked Mrs. Ida if Shawn’s mother knew about his incarceration. Mrs. Ida
somberly answered, “Naw, she somewhere strung out on that dope.” Her answer was
stern and poignant, as it gave the phrase “motherless child” new meaning.

The whereabouts of Shawn’s father were also inconclusive. According to his
uncle, Shawn’s father was in prison in the state of Washington for hijacking a bus.
Another family member joked that “he probably dead, got killed doing somebody wrong
or [overdosed] . . . .” Mrs. Ida’s account of Shawn’s father was perhaps more disturbing.
According to her, “[Shawn’s] daddy ain’t never been there [in Shawn’s life]. Don’t
nobody know where he [is] at.” She added, “That man ain’t been around since Shawn
momma was pregnant . . . [Shawn] seventeen now, and he ain’t even seen his daddy.”

Although they are absent to him, Shawn remembered candidly the struggles that
both he and his parents shared. While Shawn rarely talked about his parents, they always
found a way into his conversations. They were always in the room, musing in his
writing, in what he did and did not say. So I am not surprised that no one seems certain
about Shawn’s parents because they were lost, memorialized in Shawn’s thoughts,
mythologized in Shawn’s words. Shawn’s parents need not visit him, for they were

always with him, never in a good way. They were ghosts, ghosts of his remembered past.

15

They forever haunted him.

Shawn wrote, in part, to ﬂee himself of his social struggles, struggles he inherited
from his parents. His writing was social and political work intimately made personal. As
self-recovery, Shawn’s writing was also self-reﬂection, autobiographical in theme.

While it was real, his writing was also make-believe. Within it, Shawn constructed a
place where he could consistently and simultaneously dialogue with his struggles and
cope with his disappointments.

Shawn’s writing was a place where he comments on the cruelties of society and
society’s irreverence of him. It was a place where he confronts his parents. When he
wrote, they were in the room. I got to know them. Having been introduced to Shawn’s
parents through absent conversations with them, I clearly saw the resemblance. Shawn
seemed a bit like his parents. Together, they struggled for a place in a world that had
misplaced them.

It is important to reiterate that Shawn was writing solidly within the
rhetorical/autobiographical tradition of Hip Hop and Black culture. According to
Smitherman (1999a), rappers write about “their pain and the violence they live with” (p.
282). Working within this tradition, Shawn wrote autobiographically, what Smitherman
(1999a, p. 269) calls “a blend of reality and ﬁction.” Like rap in Hip Hop, Shawn’s
writings commented on “conditions of joblessness, poverty, and disempowerment”
(Smitherman, 1999a, p. 269)—conditions that Smitherman contends “continue to be the
norm for the Black unworking class” (p. 269; italics in the original). Thus, unlike the
“lads” in Paul Willis’s (1970) seminal work Learning to Labor, Shawn and the other

Guys were laboring to learn where they ﬁt into a literate world that did not acknowledge

16

the ways that they existed. This quest for meaning underpins the major points of this
dissertation (see Chapters 3-5).
Literacies of Labor

Perhaps the most important contribution that this work attempts to make is that
our social understandings of literacy require reﬁnement. That is, individuals practice
literacy to participate in valued group activities. In addition, individuals practice literacy
to make known their own personal stories, which exist in relation to the interrelated
stories of others. There is a key point I would emphasize. Within this conception of
literacy is struggle, which deals with the question: who has authority over personal
stories? Indeed, the Guys practice literacy to resist the cultural domination of others who
would “write” them along the margins of history and society. While they are intimately
linked to personal narratives, cultural situations, and social experiences, literacies then
are intensely political (Macedo, 1997), sometimes rejected altogether and other times
used to critique disagreeable aspects of human society.

Literacy, also, exists within a cacophony of voices, made available based on the
social situations individuals encounter. In this way, Shawn’s words are not indebted to
himself (or Hip Hop) alone. While his style and words borrow from larger cultural
traditions like Hip Hop, they comment explicitly on other literary and cultural traditions
as well. While some of the traditions that share resemblances with Shawn’s writing are
lauded in the public sphere, Shawn’s writing has rarely garnered such esteem. Before I
talk about how they are different, it is important for me to discuss how
mainstream/academic and non-academic literacies (literacies based on popular and folk

traditions, usually not relating to school) converged in the literate lives of the Guys.

17

Academic and non-academic literacies intersected uniquely in the lives of the
Guys. In this way, Shawn’s raps (as well as his reading of them) became peculiar to me.
While he wrote with painful silence and evocative clarity, Shawn read with doleful
excitement and restrained joy.

In their own way, Shawn’s raps were contradictory and complex. They blended
academic and non-academic literacy—a cross among the simplistic poetry of Cummings,
the complicated tragedies of Shakespeare, and the sobering rhythms of Tupac. In them,
Shawn is DuBois (1907), bossy and enraged in “The Song of the Smoke,” and yet, not
really. He has not set out to ring “worlds awry,” although he is Black. He simply wants
his melody to ring freely in places where his words might be heard. He is Dunbar (1993),
lamenting bondage and pain in “Sympathy.” Then again, he is not. Indeed, he “knows
why the caged bird sings” but refuses to rehearse its truncated melody of unfettered pain
and dehumanizing agony. His song cannot be modiﬁed by sorrow but frustration and
fear.

These ongoing tensions within his writing bear its complexity. His words are
rough, nimble, and forceful. They are also curative, physical, and inspiring. They
emanate from deeply within him. Again, they blend the academic and non-academic
uniquely and creatively.

The sophistication of Shawn’s writing is not surprising, for he himself is
sophisticated. The following rap illustrates this inner complexity, as his social
commentary becomes spiritual reprieve, draped in academic and beyond-academic
voices.

Shawn (rapping): I live in hell until God comes, no mo’ bail so I gotta run

18

Gotta git crunk to git away from the junk in the belly of the

beast,

So I look to the East, Bowing for my peace,

Asking God to cease the violence, it’s entangling me

Got me trapped, choked [locked ?], in the devil’s mean

leash,

Pain release me, free me, so I can be free,

Death do your part; its your art

I know you waiting for me . . .

In these lines, the “strangeness” of his writing becomes more familiar to me.
Shawn brings together tragedy, eulogy, and majesty in the traditions of the literary canon.
Hence, these are not foreign literary themes. Indeed, his ironic images of death and life
can be read in multiple ways. Yet, for many who fear death, Shawn’s meditation on it
seems unassuming, morbid, and even blasphemous. But living life in struggle as Shawn
has ﬁ'ees one to criticize existence in a way that gives both life and death new meaning.
As already alluded to, Shawn is not speaking out of turn. His words are kindred

to the words and ideas made immortal in canonical literature. As I mentioned earlier, his
words are intertextual, speaking to one another and back to other texts that are common
to human experience. In this way, Shawn is much like John Donne (1999/1921).
Shawn’s phrase “Death do your part” not only relates to Donne’s classical phrase “Death
be not proud,” it, in a ﬁne Bakhtinian (1986) sense, “echoes” it. The two phrases are not
only structurally and rhetorically united. Both phrases, also, embrace the immoral

character of Death with symbolic mortality. Where Donne chastises Death, Shawn

l9

invites it. This is as far as the similarities between them go. Unlike Donne, Shawn’s
practice of literacy is not only questioned, it is often ignored.

In this way, literacies are ranked. Literacies like Donne’s are cherished and
privileged in school settings. Conversely, literacies in the lives of many urban Black
males, like Shawn’s raps, are dismissed and even penalized in certain settings. Where
they might be equal, they are not because we have chosen too easily to distinguish them.

An Outline of Chapters to Come

The discussion of Shawn’s life and his literacies sets the stage for this work.
Though he is literate, his practice of literacy is obscured both socially and academically.
Purcell-Gates (2002) explains, “People without this social/political capital are told. . .that
they cannot learn to read because of the way they talk” (p. 157). This “linguicism,” or
“literacism,” as I call it, is like any discriminatory practice. It allows for the pollution
and corruption of thought and creativity and, thus, interferes with justice.

Shawn’s raps are viewed unlike Donne’s poetry. Instead of seeing where they are
alike (where academic and non-academic literacies meet), schools and society sanction
categories to distinguish them. In doing this, literacy becomes ordered, set on
superﬂuous scales that slide along radical lines of degree and acceptability, ranging from
high to low.

The appearance of a fair system serves the needs of the privileged to justify an
irrational, exploitative, and undemocratic system (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). It allows the
privileged to hide behind the darkened resolve of prejudice, conceit, and meritocracy.
Such resolutions misappropriate Shawn and other Black males as different, something

“other” than literate. It disguises the racism that plagues institutions of education and

20

mystiﬁes any notion of literacy that might serve the interests of the oppressed.

In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, I begin by reviewing relevant literature on
literacy as a social practice (Gee, 1990). Assuming that literacy is a social practice and
literacy learning a set of social processes, I examine the ways that literacy is deﬁned and
situated with regards to race and gender. I draw on “dialogic theory” and notions of
cultural production to extend what I see as literacy in the lives of urban adolescent Black
males and to provide a conceptual template that gives me entry into the Guys’ literate
lives.

In addition, I examine more closely two prominent features of society responsible
for the propagation of literacy and ideology: the media and the school. Using
Smithennan’s and van Dijk’s (1998) notion of symbolic racism and Ferguson’s analysis
of the school’s role in perpetuating racism against Black males, I analyze the role of both
media and school in projecting and helping to construct Black males as semi-literate. All
the while, we get to know Shawn and his friends more intimately. Stories surrounding
Shawn’s literate life become an important descriptive tool, which helps to extend a more
evocative understanding of Black males and literacy learning. By putting the literature in
conversation with Shawn’s life, we begin to see the limits of simply conceiving of
literacy as social practice. Indeed, the practices of literacy are dialogic, multiple, and
complex.

While Chapter 1 seeks to extend the notion of literacy as social practice into a
more conceptually nuanced notion of literacy as dialogic practice, Chapter 2 presents a
(discursive) methodology for exploring aspects of literacy both in being and in learning.

This chapter extends Hymes’s (1962) sociolinguistic methodology (i.e., the ethnography

21

of communication) and Heath’s (1983) sociocultural framework (i.e., the ethnography of
literacy events) by commenting on the need to understand literacy beyond and beneath
individuals’ and groups’ communicative practices (see Hyrnes, 1972; Gilyard, 1991).

Gee (1989) argues that literacy includes more than issues of language interaction
roughly conceived as communication. For Gee, literacy is inextricably linked to
Discourses, which mediate beliefs, values, and social practices through which members
within a discourse community (e.g., peer group [see Corsaro, 2004]) acquire identities.

In addition, Bakhtin (1981), also, refers to discourses as social languages, which help to
determine “the norms for who can talk, about what, and with whom” (Lee &
Smagorinsky, 2000, p. 6). In this way, being literate as observed through discourse
(symbolic expressions of being) can be helpﬁrl for understanding not only the ways in
which literacy is practiced within a given group but also for understanding the ways that
literacy gets attached to (or detached from) privileged spaces. At the end of this chapter,
I describe, in detail, the study’s design and its methods for data collection and analysis.

Chapter 3 examines cooperative aspects of literacy in the lives of the Guys. In
this chapter, I attempt to document the inherent cultural complexity and richness of the
Guys’ shared practice of literacy. In addition, this chapter documents the ways that
cultural reproduction and production work within the limits of history to (re)constitute the
material that the Guys used to practice literacy. The Guys lived between cultural spaces
and appropriated material from a vast range of connected cultural contexts, usually for
the purposes of group interaction. Learning literacy, then, was part of learning to
participate along the hybrid axes of cultures in both history and society (see also

Gutierrez & Stone, 2000).

22

The Guys’ practice of literacy was very much a process of bending to cultural
norms and revoicing their social inﬂections. Literacy, for them, was thus an act of social
sharing and cultural shifting through which the Guys became articulations of peers and
the subcultures in which they participated (Bakhtin, 1981). In this way, the subcultures
(or popular cultures) of Black America and urban youth greatly inﬂuenced literacy
practice and performance in the Guys’ lives. This collaborative aspect of literacy was
neither neutral nor politically innocent. The Guys practiced literacy within contested
spaces that were marked by intense social tension.

Chapter 4 explores some of these tensions. In it, I describe how the Guys resisted
dominant literacy practices and used literacy to resist dominant cultural presuppositions.
The cruel reality of social subordination sets in and the option of resistance becomes a
very real alternative for the Guys, who seek to respond to institutional oppression. As
such, being literate by school standards was not always desirable to the Guys. While
reading and writing were valued activities in the Guys lives, reading and writing in ways
consistent with dominant culture was not deemed as valuable. Instead of analyzing
Shakespeare, the young men analyzed Comic books and violent themes in newspaper
articles. Instead of writing term papers, they invented terms that they used in their raps.
Literacy for them was also a political tool, which allowed the Guys to situate themselves
as resistant social agents who deviated from the established norms of society, for good or
for ill.

Chapter 5 examines literacy in being, or literacy on the personal side of the
dialogue. I document, largely through critical discourse analysis (see F airclough, 1995),

the ways that personal stories and self-reﬂection write themselves into the literate lives of

23

the Guys. The Guys were in constant struggle within themselves to make sense of
personal stories that were uniquely and ubiquitously theirs. In their writings, the Guys
struggled to salvage a humanizing self from the tainted perspectives of others. Hence,
even the young men’s bodies act as resources/canvasses for literate expression.

The Guys’ bodies became both literally and ﬁguratively impossible to sever from
their literate struggles with self identity. Their practice of literacy, then, was
simultaneously a practice of self-reﬂection and personal story-telling, or to borrow from
critical race theorists, “counterstory-telling” (Delgado, 1999). It was a personal practice
through which the Guys understood themselves as scribes of social history and, uniquely
and powerfully, as writers of their own stories.

Chapter 6 suggests implication for future research and pedagogical literacy
practice. It responds to the perceived inequities in American literacy education.
According to Ladson-Billings (1999), educators have responded to inequities in literacy
education in three ways. The ﬁrst response has been to remediate a growing number of
Black males without reference to their social or cultural backgrounds. The second
response has been to acculturate Black males into mainstream behaviors, values, and
attitudes while simultaneously teaching them basic skills. The ﬁnal response, according
to Ladson-Billings, has been to facilitate leaming by using students’ languages and
literacies as a bridge to academic achievement. While there may be some merit in any, if
not all, of these responses, none of them will ever sufﬁce unless educators move beyond
bridges to revise literacy classrooms to incorporate and reﬂect the languages, literacies,
cultures, and personalities of all its students. Without inviting them and their literacies

into classrooms, our attempts to close the achievement gap will be more or less trivial.

24

To end this chapter and this dissertation, I provide an example of how a more democratic
(i.e., inclusive) philosophy of literacy might look.

This brings us back to Shawn. It takes great effort to bring him forward, for he is
found in places in which we seldom venture: a back pocket, a hidden notebook, on a
burned CD, and in the moving lines of rare yet revealing conversations. His hiding
places are bountiful vaults of texts, which conceal the unofﬁcial library of his
misunderstood literate community. By entering into these vaults, studying them seriously
with careful intensity, we see that the perceived mismatch between the worlds of young
Black males and the worlds of scholars is somewhat make-believe, conceived by good-
intentioned thinkers, attempting to understand why literacy as practiced by individuals
like Shawn is not quite like theirs.

Conclusion

I am passing a highway sign to my leﬁ, which tells me that I am getting closer to
Mason. I glance down to my leﬁ. Scattered on the passenger side seat are pages of notes
that I have written about Shawn and his ﬁiends. Surrounding me is evidence of my own
literacy, which does not readily resemble Shawn’s. Shawn and I are not the same. I must
make this point clear. But I wondered exactly how different are we? It is a no brainer.
Not much.

Considering this, I again question inequities in literacy education and, by
association, academic literacy achievement. At this point on my journey, the
achievement gap seems arbitrary. For me, especially due to my interactions with Shawn
and his ﬁiends, there is a more salient issue at hand. It deals with how we think,

especially with how we think about Black males like Shawn. Having been socialized to

25

believe that literacy deals solely with the command of print, I soon realize that literacy
deals more realistically with the bountiful ways in which various human groups learn to
interact symbolically.

Within literacy, and literacy learning, are ideologies, or the bendings of
knowledge, truth, and ability in the interest of social elites (Marx & Engels, 1974;
McLellan, 1986; Plamenatz, 1979). According to Apple (1995), ideologies are the bases
of society, as they promote the dispositions and beliefs needed to foster communities,
nationalities, similarities, and differences. But ideologies also help sanction privilege for
some and oppression for others (Boweles & Gintis, 1976; Freire, 1970; MacLeod; 1996;
Weiler, 1988).

Therefore, the casting of the self reﬂects the ideologies, the social myths and
illusions, of society as much or more so than it does society itself (Boweles & Gintis,
1976). Furthermore, this “casting,” and, by association, “out casting,” of individuals into
and outside of social groups, social roles, and social abilities are constructions, which
play a major role in (mis)representing how we have come to think of Black males, their
literacies, and their social roles.

As such, there is a fatal assumption made when we regard literacy as possession,
usually owned by schools. In doing so, we disregard the linkages between language and
discourse, between discrimination and racism, which Smitherman and Van Dijk (1988)
remind us “are complex and varied” (p. 17). According to them, “They are part of an
intricate network of social relationships in which power plays a central role” (p. 17). In
this way, the mechanism of schooling becomes a single way of enforcing the perspectives

of the privileged and the privileged group’s power to shape and control the production,

26

standardization, and proliferation of ideas.

Literacy becomes cultural ideology, working to reproduce racial oppression as a
way of controlling Blacks and other minorities (Smitherman & Van Dijk, 1988, 17).
Standing racial hierarchies are made legitimate by distinguishing those who can read
from those who “cannot”. And “racial oppression becomes structural, rather than
individual or incidental” (p. 17). Racial baniers become ﬁxed and confused, which make
literate abilities (and inabilities) indistinguishable from racial identities.

This dissertation begins to answer what Ladson—Billings (2003) terms “questions
about issues of race and literacy” (p. ix). In doing so, it interrogates the interrelationship
among society and its ideological instruments of proj ecting/(mis)representing Black
males. This dissertation will scrutinize the authority of institutions like schools and the
reach of media like newspapers and TV programs. Both instruments of “civil society”
(Gramsci, 1971) help perpetuate gross assumptions about Black males and their
literacies.

Further, it will redeﬁne literacy with Black males in mind because removing them
from any deﬁnition of literacy, theirs or ours, removes them as well from the
opportunities and tools that help shape culturally-integrated identities and promote
positive and prosperous social and economic selves. That is, to deny their literacies is to
deny them because the building and rendering of literacy “parallels the activity of human
existence, which is the building of a self” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 64).

There is much more thought and deliberation ahead, but I have ﬁnally arrived at
the Ingham County Jail. The forbidding building is anything but graceﬁrl and inviting.

Armed with a notebook and digital recorder, I walk slowly toward the building’s

27

entrance. Upon entering the building, I take a deep, long breath. The air is still, quiet
and cold. The building appears vacant and uninviting. Visiting hours for inmates begin
sharply at noon. 1 glance down at my cell phone. It is almost 11:30 am. I am early.
Having learned that late visitations are not pleasant ones, I am willing to wait. While
waiting, I see Shawn standing behind a glass wall. He sees me and greets me with a

smile.

28

CHAPTER 1
Literature Review

Some of the complexity surrounding literacy in the lives of Black males stems
from the nature of literacy itself. While there are many competing deﬁnitions of literacy,
there can be no single, “autonomous” deﬁnition of literacy (Street, 1984, 1995a, 1995b),
for ”what counts as literacy at a particular time and place depends on who has the power
to deﬁne it" (Bloome, 1997, p. 107).

As it stands, literacy is at an impasse. Deﬁnitions of literacy continue to change
and, therefore, elude scholars, as literacy itself is constantly in ﬂux, especially due to the
development of new technologies. Many now consider literacy to be the ability to locate,
evaluate, use, and communicate using a wide range of resources including text, visual,
audio, and video sources (Alverrnann, 2001; Reinking, 1995). As such, deﬁnitions of
literacy are shaped by the prevailing social and political trends of the time. Among these
are different deﬁnitions formulated to meet the needs of state or religious institutions, and
of those who oppose such institutions who link literacy to empowerment (Shor, 1992).

Another perspective widely cited in the literature with increasing frequency
suggests that literacy is more than the acquisition of reading and writing skills. From this
perspective, literacy is also a social practice or social currency (Bourdieu, 1977), and, as
such, a key to social mobility (Gee 1991). The conception of literacy as socially
constructed practices drives the anthropological notion (Erickson,1984, 1987;
Heath,1983; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984, 1995a, 1995b) that literacies are
multiple and socially situated (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; New London Group, 1996).
This conception pushes us away from deﬁnitions of literacy as transcendent skills that

can be taught in isolation, practiced, then transferred into other social contexts. Instead,

29

acts of literacy are always embedded in symbolic social practices, in which members of a
community seek to construct particular identities, relationships, or valued activities and
objects.

By contrast, mainstream society and school classrooms have their own particular
social practices in which literate acts are constructed by participants to achieve the valued
ends of schooling (Dyson, 1993, 2003a; Mahiri, 1998; Heath, 1983). Furthermore,
school (or academic) literacy practices seldom reﬂect the literacy practices of historically
oppressed groups (Heath, 1983, Morrell, 2004), in this case young, urban Black males.
This may be true because of racism. However, it might also be true because too much
remains unknown about literacy among disadvantaged groups. Hence, in order for Black
males to ﬁnd success in school and in society, there is an urgent need to better understand
literacy practices from their perspectives so that educators can begin to rethink classroom
literacy curriculum and instruction with them in mind.

This review has dual purposes: 1) to describe the anthropological framework of
literacy as social practices and 2) to illustrate where this conception of literacy needs
expanding, especially as it pertains to urban adolescent Black males. Hence, just as
rhythm takes on new meanings in the ears of different listeners, so too do literacies,
which in the narratives of Black men reveal themselves complexly both within and
beyond social limits. In this way, this review seeks to contribute to an understanding of
literacies as complex and dialogic, of Black males as literate and promising, and of our
potential to amend school literacy preferences in ways that extended literacy to include
literacy practices more familiar to young, urban Black males.

Literacy as Social Practice

30

Literacy is a social practice (Dyson, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978). Therefore, it is
important to frame this study within sociocultural literacy traditions (Heath, 1983;
Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984). This imperative assumes greater urgency because
in our age of “accountability,” pundits of culturally homogenized and standardized
literacy curricula invest a good deal of time, energy, and resources in the linguistic and
cognitive dimensions of literacy (Kucer, 2001). In addition, the federal government has
taken an overtly narrow stance in deﬁning what counts as “scientiﬁcally-based” literacy
research (NCLB, 2001).

Langer (1991) critiques narrow deﬁnitions of literacy, contrasting "literacy as the
act of reading and writing and literacy as ways of thinking" (p. 13). For Langer,
"...literacy can be viewed in a broader and educationally more productive way, as the
ability to think and reason like a literate person, within a particular society" (p. 11). She
argues:

It is the culturally appropriate way of thinking, not the act of reading or writing,

that is most important in the development of literacy. Literacy thinking manifests

itself in different ways in oral and written language in different societies, and
educators need to understand these ways of thinking if they are to build bridges

and facilitate transitions among ways of thinking. (p. 13)

Hence, limiting our understanding of literacy to language and cognition as gauged
through experimental designs is to overlook the social nuances of literacy practices
(Kucer, 2001). As such, this study problematizes narrow notions of literacy learning,
notions that I argue work discursively to minimize what counts as literate performance

and who counts as a literate person.

31

The research joins the work of other literacy scholars inﬂuenced by the social
turn, a research orientation that looks beyond the individual to the cultural, historical, and
political centers in which people live (Cushman et al., 2001). Assuming that social
context is central to human development, this line of research explores how the richness
and complexity of the setting, its actors, their goals, and the cultural tools available in the
setting interact to expand and shape how meanings are constructed (Kirkland & Brass,
2005; Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000, p.4). This work views literacy learning as a social
process (and literacy as social practices) mediated by the use of cultural tools, particularly
language, as people participate in culturally and historically valued activities.

In addition to Langer’s work, three broad theoretical perspectives have led to the
understanding of literacy as social practice—the ethnography of communication (Hymes,
1962; Heath, 1983), Vygotskian perspectives and cultural historical activity theory
(Scribner & Cole, 1981), and the New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1996; New London Group,
1996; Street, 1995a, 1995b). As deﬁned by Street (1995a, 1995b), these perspectives
provide a "broader consideration of literacy as a social practice and in a cross-cultural
perspective" (p. i). Unlike traditional views of literacy, which attempt to emphasize the
diﬂerences between "literacy” and "orality" (the written word and the spoken one), and
which put forward reading and writing as decontextualized technical skills, these
anthropological/sociolinguistic perspectives can be brieﬂy described as "integrated-
social-cultural-political-historical" views (Gee, 1996, p. 122). These views situate
literacy historically and politically and foregrounds issues of social interaction and
cultural practices/production as well as resistance and relations of power (Barton &

Hamilton, 1998; Heath, 1982, 1983; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; A. Lee, 1996; A.

32

Luke, 1988).

This social conception of literacy can be reﬁned using Bakhtin’s dialogic theory
(Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). From a dialogic perspective (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Dyson, 2003),
literacy includes a multiplicity and diversity of voices, which folds all human activity into
a complex unity of differences. In this way, literacy is inﬂuenced by a collaboration of
personal and social aspects that deﬁne individuals and groups by class, gender, race, etc.
(Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003). As such, literacy is linked to efforts of both individuals
and groups to redress social inequities (Auerbach, 1993). Its purpose is to test our own
and others’ ideas and ourselves and thus determine together what we should think and
how we should live. Its characteristic forms are the expression, juxtaposition, or
negotiation of our individual and our cultural differences.

Finally, this study focuses upon young urban Black males because recent
scholarship (Smith & Whilhelrn, 2002) and national achievement data (N AEP, 2004)
suggest that we do not have a very clear understanding of how to promote academic
literacy achievement among them. Further, scholars like Smith and Wilhelm (2002) are
beginning to accurately assess the need to understand the situation of literacy with regard
to speciﬁc social groups.

Literacy and its Complexities as a Dialogic Practice

Even as a dialogic practice, literacy must be thought of as more than interaction
between individuals and individual participation in groups. There are other social factors
that shape literacy and “literate” individuals. Perhaps chief among them are race and
gender and their political exponents, sexism and racism.

Race and Literacy

33

Lopez (2001) deﬁnes race as “a group loosely bound together by historically
contingent, socially signiﬁcant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry. . . Neither
an essence nor an illusion, [race] is an ongoing process of social and political struggle”
(p. 193). Following Lopez’s deﬁnition, race becomes a persistent factor in social
practices, including literacy. As such, race raises critical questions about power and
desire in the nature of literacy learning. In this way, I agree with Gee (1990) that to
“situate literacy in the individual person, rather than in the society of which that person is
a member . . . obscures the multiple ways in which reading, writing, and language
interrelate with the workings of power and desire in social life” (p. 27). In this regard,
literacy is not only a social practice, it is also a cultural/political one.

Scholars like Delpit (1988) argue that learning literacy, or the learning of hidden
rules and cultural codes of dominant culture, sanctions struggle and regulates mobility.
To be successful in school and society, racial minorities must be able to function and
move both within their own cultural communities and within the dominant society
(Mahiri, 1996; Morrell, 2004; Ogbu, 1974, 1978; Tatum, 1999). From Delpit’s ( 1988)
perspective, non-Whites may ﬁnd that their racial backgrounds may result in unequal and
limited access to education and other resources that can facilitate social or economic
progress (MacLeod, 1995; Rose, 1991). Due to their racial backgrounds, certain
individuals are marginalized in society, and their cultures, languages, and moral codes
frequently dismissed as inferior social practices, even in school settings (Delpit, 1995;
Dyson, 2003; Smitherman, 1977). Individuals who are relegated to marginalized social
positions consistently experience a lack of privilege and power. Therefore, they often

internalize this experience (Ogbu, 1978), and internalized oppression, or believing that

34

the self is somehow "less than" and "less worthy" than the other, which results in lowered
expectations in school and for life chances (R. Ferguson, 1998).

For African Americans, especially Black males, internalized oppression—or self-
hatred/disdain taught through racism (West, l993)—inﬂuences literacy learning among
Black males. In this way, Smitherman and Van Dijk (1988) maintain, “Text and talk in
many ways are constitutive of the social and political dimensions of structural racism in
society” (p. 12). However, racism, discrimination based on race, in contemporary society
isn’t always visible (Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003). As such, nascent forms of racism
must be distinguished from the more blatant and overt manifestations in order to fully
appreciate their impact on literacy leanring.

Nascent forms of racism are usually “subtle, covert, and possibly more insidious”
than more developed forms (Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003, p. 3). As such, it is difﬁcult,
but not impossible, to distinguish the role of race and racism in deﬁning literacy.
Nonetheless, this work looks deeply at the social factor of race and the political factor of
racism, both of which play a key role in all literacy learning. In this way, a critical
approach to literacy is needed to render literacy learning plausible even to those who do
not share activist politics (Gee, 1997, p. 273).

Literacy and Gender

Gender also plays an important role in how literacy is learned and practiced.
According to Pam Gilbert (1997), the nature of literacy practices are gendered (p. 60).
For example, girls are more apt to read school texts because the things that are read in
school closely mirrors the things that girls read at home, like stories involving romance.

This, in part, explains the gender gap between female and male literacy proﬁciency.

35

Males lag behind, in some important ways, because classroom literacy practices seldom
reﬂect their gendered interests. Then, in the leaminymaking (and researching) of
literacy, gender also matters along with other important social factors like race.

Parlo Singh (1997) takes Gilbert’s insight further. Singh brings to bear a nuanced
notion of gender that considers the various mixings of an individual’s social identity as
important to literacy learning. That is, not only is literacy at once gendered, it is also
dependent upon and deﬁned in relation to the political inﬂections of the self (raced and
gendered) and, thus, the intersection of the gender marker with other relevant social
identity markers.

While I emphasize the importance of race and gender here, I acknowledge that
there are other important social issues to be raised within the sociocultural tradition in
this regard. Heath (1983) maintains, “Opportunities, values, motivations, and resources
available for communication in each community are inﬂuenced by that group’s social
history as well as by current environmental conditions” (p. 6-7). As such, “social
history” and social environment, or the contexts of literacy practice, play an important
role in how literacy is practiced.

In addition, the way one does literacy and negotiates social space is shaped by and
intermittently shapes her or his race, gender, and geographic context at once. Therefore, I
not only assume that race, gender, and geographic context has much to do with how one
learns literacy, but I also contend that such factors are vital for understanding the
workings of literacy as social practice. As such, the study of literacy should speciﬁcally
contextualize literacy practices within the societal constructs with which individuals and

groups are associated. In order to understand its greater complexities, literacy research

36

must be situated with respect to race, gender, and geography.

Framing Black Males and the Complexities of Literacy

While there is a plethora of literature available on literacy as social practice, there

is relatively little literature available on how Black males practice literacy.
Notwithstanding, the literature that is available concerning Black males and literacy
paints a disturbing picture that proﬁles gaps in achievement between Black males and
other students (J encks & Phillips, 1998). In this way, the achievement gap between
White students and students of color has been well docmnented. While “the gap” has
been widely discussed by researchers, educators have found little success in closing it.
Hence, there is an urgent need to reﬁame the situations of literacy and achievement with

respect to Black males.

Commenting on the plight of Black males, Lee (1991) contends, “Young Black
males in contemporary American society face major challenges to their development and
well-being” (p. 1). For example, Black male students perform well below other students
in basic subject areas (Reed, 1998). Black males are more likely to be remediated or
placed into classes for students with learning disabilities than other students (Milofsky,
1974). Black males are suspended ﬁom school more often and for longer periods of time
than other students (Meier, Stewart, & England, 1989; Lee, 1991). Given only these
examples, it is not surprising that there is an achievement differential between Black male
students and other students. Not only are there achievement differences between them,
the school experiences of Black males are vastly different than other students (Coleman

et al., 1966; A. Ferguson, 2000).

A growing body of literature on Black male school experiences shows that being

37

Black and male speaks almost deﬁnitively to issues of literacy achievement (Hunsader,
2002; Pollard, 1993). According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NEAP), nearly 70% of Black fourth grade boys read below grade level, compared with
27% of White children. Even Hispanic and Asian fourth graders fared better on reading

exams than Black males, although English is their second language.

While there are many ways to explain why Black males perform more poorly on
“literacy” tests than do other students, Jones (2002) explains, “One of the main reasons
Aﬁican-American youngsters do poorly in school is because of language differences
between black and white children.” (p. 1). As Smitherman (1977, 2000) and others
(Foster, 2001; Hillard, 1991; Moore, 1996; Piestrup, 1973) have shown, schools, and
more speciﬁcally classrooms, penalize male students who speak African American
Language. From an early age, it has become increasingly apparent that Black males are
confronted with a series of barriers that make it more challenging for them to achieve

academic and social success (Kunjufu, 1985; Moss & Tilly, 1995; Noguera, 2001).

In thinking about the dilemmas facing Black males, my interactions with Shawn
have been helpful. The sociocultural battle I was waging with literacy morphed into a
political one, where deﬁnitions of achievement, literacy, and even “the gap” are
contested. By deﬁning literacy in a way that does not consider the contributions and
socio-syrnbolic practices of Black males like Shawn, the idea of literacy in the ofﬁcial
world has been constructed egregiously against them. In this way, the literacy agenda
that state and national policies like No Child Left Behind (2001) endorse pose a unique
social and educational threat to Black males. Accordingly, Smith and Wilhelm (2003)

warn, “Schools seem to be failing boys in literacy education. And while this failure may

38

be rooted in a complex amalgam of issues . . . perceiving a problem of ANY group of

students obligates us to try to understand it, so we can do something about it” (p. 3).

While we must address important issues about literacy and boys, doing
“something about” the multiple and disturbing issues surrounding Black males and
literacy is most urgent (Ogbu, 1990). As I will discuss later in this chapter using
vignettes from Shawn’s story for grounding examples, many urban adolescent Black
males are by far the most threatened demographic in our population both in school and
out (Gibbs, 1988; Lee, 1991). As I have noted, this threat requires immediate attention
because educational policies and literacy programs have failed and continue to fail to
acknowledge the social dimensions of Black male literacy learning. By extension,
ofﬁcial spaces are being shaped in ways that, by Situating literacy around unfamiliar
social practices, both ﬁguratively and literally exclude many, if not most, urban
adolescent Black males from educational contexts. To deal with these threats, scholars
must contend with society's ﬂawed deﬁnitions of literacy and its comprehensive
(mis)representation of Black males.

The Statistics and the Problem of (Mis)representation

While they will never tell us much about literacy in the lives of Black males,
statistics will always work as a social mechanism, which attempts to describe some
bounded phenomenon. In this way, statistics can be dangerous, as the pictures they paint
are usually inﬂuenced by the hands of those who weld the pen. Nevertheless, statistical
pictures can also be helpful. Given this, the portrait that statistics paint about Black
males and “literacy” gives us reason to be alarmed.

Of our nation’s youth, only 12% of Black males test proﬁciently in reading, as

39

compared to 40% of other American youth (NAEP, 2001). Rosa A. Smith (2004),
president of the Schott Foundation, relates these national data to other statistics that
describe the multiple crises confronting Black males. The Center for the Study of Social
Policy (1993) reports that close to forty percent of Black males will be jobless, either
unemployed or incarcerated, by 2020. In addition to exorbitant jobless rates, the US
Department of Health and Human Services (2004) reports that young Black men (ages
10-14) have shown the largest increase in suicide rates since 1980 compared to other
youth groups by sex and ethnicity, increasing 180%. Among 15-19 year old Black males,
rates (since 1980) have increased by 80% (Poussaint & Alexander, 2000). In addition, a
Black male is twice as likely to die before the age of 45 as a White male (Roper, 1991;
Spivak, Prothrow-Stith, & Hausman, 1988).

In education, Black males are at the bottom or near the bottom of all academic
achievement categories and are grossly over-represented among school suspensions,
dropouts, and special education tracks (Noguera, 2003). Given the unbelievable
magnitude of the situation, Rose (2004) describes the alarming situation of Black males
in both schools and society as “catastrophic.” In the forward to a recent Schott
Foundation study (2004) on Black male academic (under)achievement, Rose writes: “The
facts that startled us [the Schott Foundation] the most—and deﬁned new Schott work—
were the alarming data on Black male students showing bleak under-achievement on
every school related factor” (p. 2). But then again, there is more to Black male literacy
learning than statistics.

The achievement differential, especially in literacy, between Black males and

other American youth suggests that schools have not clearly understood how to promote

4O

successful literacy learning among Black males as a group. Moreover, the poor
performances of many young, urban Black men on national literacy assessments raise
signiﬁcant questions about the importance of social dimensions of literacy—including
racism (Tatum, 1992; Tronya & Carington, 1990) and gender politics (Thorne, 1993).

While the evidence clearly indicates that a troubling majority of Black males
perform poorly on standardized measures of literacy proﬁciency, it would be naive to
assume that all Black men are incapable of reading and writing in proﬁcient ways.
Rather, educators must attend to fundamental issues surrounding the social construction
of literacy curricula and the social practice of literacy instruction at the secondary school
level. Our collective failure to ameliorate such issues (i.e., injustice in the design of
public education) prevents us from helping more Black males achieve their highest
potential.

This explanation bears true in Shawn’s case. Upon hearing the title of one of his
raps (“Motherless Child” [see Introduction]), I began to question some tenuous and
unsettled explanations for racial differences in literacy achievement. Indeed, society
functions as an arbiter of literacy through the ways it labels and represents (and
misrepresents) individuals. In this way, Shawn was labeled by his school as an
“illiterate.” In their report to the School Board, his high school’s steering committee and
improvement team cited Shawn as an example of “the many Black male students who are
slipping through the cracks.” According to the report, “Deshawn Stevenson is an
example of the crisis, affecting our African American male students . . . many of [whom]
cannot and do not read. Their test scores in writing are abysmal and worsening . . .

Hence, it is the obligation of the school to rectify this issue before we develop a

41

population of illiterate Americans.”

While literacy learning may be at issue here, there is another more crucial issue
that deals with how schools label individuals as literate and illiterate. Labeling (and the
labeled through “self-fulﬁlling prophesy” [Rist, 197 0]) work to reinforce the valuations
of a privileged class while obscuring the values and abilities of the oppressed (see Freire,
1970). For example, while looking through Shawn’s school ﬁle, I caught a glimpse of a
note written by Shawn’s tenth grade English teacher, who “feared” Shawn was illiterate.
The note explained that Shawn “has trouble reading and shows difﬁculty expressing his
thoughts on paper.” But outside the classroom in the company of his friends and me,
Shawn was always writing and was, perhaps, the most driven writer of the group.

The differences between my observations of Shawn and his teacher’s observations
of him concerned me. First, there were no signs to me that Shawn was even remotely
illiterate, so why would she insinuate that he was? The only way that I could reconcile
his teacher’s conclusion (versus my own) was to assume that Shawn acted differently in
the classroom than he did among his peers and me, or that Shawn’s teacher did not know
him like we did.

The other issue that stuck out to me deals with the politics of accommodating
social norms. As I will document, some of the Black males 1 studied accommodated
inferior/marginal social roles at times as a way of protecting themselves from the
punishment of racism. More or less, they complied with some school norms, even when
those norms failed to match their social interests. In this way, a Black male who is seen
as threatening will ﬁnd greater opposition in a racist structure than one who is seen as

less threatening (books, 2003). Hence, researchers must never neglect the internal

42

tensions faced by Black males wanting to preserve a sense of self. In addition, they must
also acknowledge the systems of racism that inﬂuence the ways the young Black men
may or may not perform in public spaces. Finally, it behooves researchers to understand
that school literacy is used, not unproblematically, to interpret and label individuals like
Shawn as “slow,” “troubled,” and, worst, (because of his resistance to the literate norms
of schools and society) “illiterate.”

The Problem of School

While the statistics may be disturbing, it is important to examine and not neglect
the function of schools in manufactming troubling perceptions of Black males. In this
way, Ferguson (2000) warns that statistics are misleading, and for many Black males,
schools might be threatening. As opposed to describing them as victims of illiteracy,
Ferguson describes Black males as victims of the school. By taking an in-depth look into
the school lives of a group of Black males, Ferguson documents how schools create,
shape, and regulate social identities, from tracking some students to be doctors to
tracking others, particularly Black males, to be prisoners. She argues that the disciplinary
system of schools and their practices of labeling and categorizing students construct
Black males as deviant and deﬁant.

Complicating school’s role in constructing negative conceptions of Black males
(Ferguson, 2000) is the complexity of literacy and the limited nature of school literacy
practices. Literacy is never stable or ﬁxed, but is contingent and ﬂexible, a practice that
requires choice and selection (Barton, 1999). Why after four hundred years, then, do we
still read Shakespeare in classrooms? This question raises serious concerns as to who has

ownership over classroom texts. While they have some ownership over the texts they

43

read outside of classrooms, Black males, in general, have limited ownership over texts
read within classrooms.

Issues of authority and ownership of texts are not only important in understanding
school’s domination over classroom literacy learning. They are also important aspects of
literacy learning in general. In her work on literacy, Au (1997) referred to children’s
ownership over texts [read or written] as inﬂuential to their sense of self-conﬁdence and
command of reading and writing. Building upon Au’s work, Dahl (1994) and others
(Csikszentrnihalyi, 1991; Turner, 1995) suggest that the desire to participate in literacy
practices is connected to an attachment to and ownership of a given literacy task.
Therefore, the story about a person’s ability to read and write is always more complicated
than what schools reveal.

Even though he could read and write, Shawn was labeled by his school as barely
literate. In third grade, his teacher identiﬁed him as “a struggling reader.” Based on her
assessment, Shawn received Title I support in reading. While he hasn’t taken a reading
assessment test since entering high school, Shawn’s seventh grade Michigan Educational
Assessment Program (MEAP) scores bear out, at least numerically, the tension between
Shawn’s non-academic and academic literate performances. According to his 7‘h grade
MEAP scores, Shawn ranked below 75 percent of Michigan students in reading.

In a recent conversation with me, Shawn expressed frustration with reading in
school. To him, reading aloud was “scary,” reading in school “boring,” and “sometimes
a chore.” Even still, he admits, “I be reading stuff all the time at home. . . stuff that
interest[s] me. It’s not that I can’t read; I don’t like to [read] because the stuff they make

you read [in school] ain’t really important anyway.” He continues by critiquing the

44

school’s emphasis on Shakespeare.

Shawn: What am I gonna do with Shakepeare? He ain’t gon git me no job.

Since school literacy practices do not always reﬂect the cultural practices of all
students, deﬁning literacy solely along academic lines gives schools a potentially
dangerous inﬂuence not only over what counts as literacy, but also over who counts as
“literate.” This leaves a considerable number of individuals, many of whom are young,
urban Black males, powerless in a global economy that privileges credentials and labels
produced by schools (Powell et al., 1985).

This isn’t to say that multiple forms of illiteracy in America do not exist and
should not be dealt with. Rather, as I have argued, labeling individuals “illiterate” is
based not necessarily upon whether individuals can read or write, but upon ways that
schools do and do not deﬁne literacy. As I have argued, schools’ deﬁnitions of literacy
are at best narrow and, perhaps worst racist. Since Heath (1983) and others (Bialostok,
1999, 2003, 2004; F inn, 1999) have shown that school literacy is closely tied to the
cultural practices of middle-class Whites, deﬁning illiteracy exclusively in relation to
academic norms is not only myopic; it is fundamentally problematic.

Deﬁning literacy in narrow ways has led some to make questionable linkages
among “illiteracy,” Black males, and incarceration (Kerka, 1995). These linkages are
disturbing because they explain “the trouble with Black males” (i.e., incarceration) based
upon deﬁcit ideologies. Based upon these ways of thinking, prisoners are not
incarcerated simply because they have committed crimes or even because of personal
dilemmas, political rifts, or social inequities. Instead, prisoners are justiﬁably

incarcerated precisely because they lack the civilized abilities to read and write (Kozol,

45

1988).

Along these lines, Jonathan Kozol (1988) makes disturbing claims about illiteracy
in his book Illiterate America. Since much of Kozol’s argument about American
illiteracy is based on a narrow, school-based notion of literacy, the complexities of
literacy discussed earlier in this chapter get lost in Kozol’s analysis. According to Kozol,
the prison population in the US represents the highest concentration of adult illiterates.
Over 60% of those incarcerated have been labeled as functionally illiterate, and a large
and growing number of those incarcerated are Black and male (hooks, 2003, p. 40).
While K020] and others (books, 2003) relate the Black male prison crisis to the American
literacy crisis (see National Commission on Educational Excellence, 1983), scholars (A.
Ferguson, 2000) interested in the ways that schools shape Black masculinities argue that
schools (versus illiteracy) promote negative social outcomes for Black males.

hooks (2003) examines the role of the school in sanctioning “disengaged” and
“prison-bound” Black males (p. 40-41). According to her, “Educational systems fail to
impart or inspire learning in black males of all ages” (p. 40). Schools, then, assist in the
oppression of Black males, and the American “prison industrial complex” (see Davis,
1998) is just one manifestation of that oppression.

In response to the school’s role in manufacturing Black male oppression, scholars
must consider issues beyond reading and writing as we continue to reﬁne our deﬁnitions
of literacy. We must also consider the ways in which schools and society sponsor
oppression through their mechanistic control over how literacy is deﬁned and
disseminated in the public sphere. It is, therefore, not surprising that Kozol’s idea of

illiteracy gained national attention in the late 19803, as it put literacy in the hands of elites

46

(and illiteracy in blackface). These conceptions of literacy, grounded in school authority,
have helped to reinforce negative beliefs about Black males.
The Problem of Media Discourses

(Mis)representations of Black males and literacy raise some important scientiﬁc
and sociological questions, especially with respect to the Black male intelligence and the
role of the Black male in a civil society. A Black male who likes to read is often
questioned, perceived “as on the road to being a sissy” (books, 2003, p. 40). It is not only
those surrounding Black men who buy into these stereotypes. Black men, themselves,
also carry such ideological baggage. According to Madhubuti (quoted in hooks, 2003, p.
36).

No one actually told men ‘you should hate yourself.’ However, the images,

symbols, products, creations, promotions, and authorities of white America all

very subtly and often quite openly taught me white supremacy, taught me to hate
myself.

Indeed, there is a relationship between how one behaves and how one perceives
her- or himself. Complicating this relationship are media discourses surrounding Black
males and literacy. According to Smitherman and Van Dijk (1988),

[Discourses] are the means for the manufacture of an ethnic and racial, if not

racist, consensus. In other words, discourse is not just a system or a signal of the

problem of racism. It essentially reproduces and helps produce . . . racist

cognitions and actions (p. 18).

It would be, however, misleading to describe media discourses as acting in

singular ways. According to Lankshear and Knobel (1997), “Discourses are dynamic,

47

alive. Living in and through them is very much a process of constantly renegotiating
them” (p. 96). Notwithstanding, the media discourses surrounding Black males are
overwhelmingly negative (Wilcox, 2005). For example, Wilcox (2005) argues that the
majority of news stories featuring Black males paint them in negative light, as criminal,
social deviants, or lazy.
While media images of Black males are rarely blatantly racist, Smitherman and
Van Dijk (1988) explain:
Our respected quality press will hardly print a blatantly racist article anymore. . .
[but] . . . In everyday talk, underlying ethnic prejudices may indirectly appear in
“innocent” stories. . . Although such stories claim to tell the “facts,” describe how
“they” did it (wrong) again, or generally imply that “they” are stupid, lazy,
welfare-cheats, crirrrinal, or lack motivation to learn, the storyteller may, at the
same time, emphasize that he has nothing against “them,” . . . Yet, the stories
spreading quickly in families, schools, or neighborhoods, and occasionally greatly
magniﬁed by media reproduction, contribute to the fundamental communication
and reproduction of racism in society (p, 18).
In commenting on the role of the media and its proliferation of negative
Black male images, Smitherman and Van Dijk (1988) contend:
The forms of rhetoric and dramatization, their ability to focus and set public
agenda [sic], and their news values do more than simply favor “negative” stories,
or reﬂect what the elites, politicians, or institutions routinely communicate to
them in press releases or interviews. The media do not passively report the facts,

nor do they simply reﬂect the ethnocentric consensus; they help construct and

48

reproduce it. They magnify the attitudes of the powerful few, and reinterpret and

transmit this ideology to the powerless (p. 23).

Our perceptions of Black males and literacy are, thus, given to us unfairly. This
does not mean that we are passive consumers of such ideas; it simply suggests that we
have not been very active in countering them. In this way, Smitherman and Van Dijk
(1988) argue,

Ethnic attitudes in general, and prejudice in particular, are not individual

aberrations, or pathological exceptions, but structurally rooted, shared social

cognitions. The media in our information societies play the crucial role in
presenting such dominant ideologies, if only by the failure to present alternative

interpretations or counter-ideologies (p. 22).

Shawn’s literacy story presents, for me, an alternative interpretation to the media
narrative of Black males as illiterates. Further, as I attempt to situate Shawn’s story in
the literature on Black males and literacy, I realize that claims of Black male illiteracy are
not only misleading but threatening. As such, the true crisis that Black males, like
Shawn, face deals more with power, authority, racism, and de-centering than it does with
reading and writing. In this way, literacy has been constituted unfairly. In this study, the
Black youth studied participated in unacknowledged literacy practices (e.g., rapping,
tattooing, etc.) that kneel toward the bottom of the American literacy hierarchy. They are
often overshadowed by the authority of the school or ignored or viliﬁed in the exposure
of media.

Both power and prejudice are always present the contexts of literacy. According

to Luke and Freebody (1997),

49

. . . the contexts of literacy events are not necessarily ‘level playing ﬁelds’ where
all learners have comparable access to resources, whether construed as access to
representational systems and mediational means, linguistic knowledge, and
cultural artifacts, or in terms of access to actual ﬁnancial capital, institutional

entry, and status (p. 3).

Speciﬁcally, the “literate” and the “illiterate” are unfairly labeled. The events and
activities that deﬁne them are “constitutive of and by material relations of discourse,
power, and knowledge” (p. 3). Therefore, the image of the illiterate Black male deeply
obscures the reality that many young Black men—who many believe are barely literate—
are in some veriﬁable way highly literate. Notwithstanding, many Black males are
characteristically projected as less than literate and, at times, less than human. But as
Freire 1970/2001) suggests,

These men [speaking speciﬁcally of Latin American men, but African American

men certainly apply], illiterate or not, are, in fact, not marginal. . . They are not

9’

“beings outside of”; they are “beings for another. Therefore the solution to their
problem is not to become “beings inside of,” but men ﬂeeing themselves; for in
reality they are not marginal to the structure, but oppressed men within it.
Alienated men, they cannot overcome their dependency by “incorporation” into
the very structure responsible for their dependency. There is no other road to
humanization——theirs as well as everyone else’s—but authentic transformation of
the dehumanizing structure (p. 339).

Using F reire’s notion of “oppressed men,” I contend that Black males are

structurally oppressed and dehurnanized in a way that prevents their literate identities

50

ﬂom being formally acknowledged. For this reason, many Black males are looked upon

as illiterate, not because they do not practice literacy, but because many have chosen to

disregard the literacies they do practice. To report them as illiterates/low literates, which

further sanctions their oppression, makes legitimate the dominant literacy practices of

schools and the inaccurate projections of the media. Hence, the relationship between

notions of literacy/illiteracy works to widen a racially maintained literacy gap.
Rethinking Black Males and Literacy

As this dissertation will demonstrate, discourses (symbolic notions of being) act
in no singular way. There are discourses that endorse and even help to foster the images
of the illiterate Black male, and there are also discourses that challenge this image. Black
males like Shawn are, indeed, literate yet in ways that we too often ignore, fail to
privilege, or vilify.

A goal of this work is to highlight educational inequities between Black males
and other Americans. Are students like Shawn that much different than other American
youth? Dyson (1993) suggests that the literacy gap is an aberration that reﬂects more
accurately cultural derisions in our society than achievement ones. Hence, we must be
careful when making sweeping claims about the literate capabilities of any group,
especially Black males, as these claims have historically worked negatively to reinforce
dangerous assumptions about the cognitive and linguistic abilities of oppressed people.

Also factoring into educational inequity is the relationship between school and
culture. As noted earlier, school literacy practices resemble greatly the literacy practices
of middle-class Whites. In this way, the academic literacy practices of middle-class

Whites help to produce more groups of middle-class Whites. Conversely, our devaluing

51

of Black males helps to produce more communities of devalued Black males. Such
cycles have profound implications for shaping society. For many Black males the
implications can be catastrophic, as young, urban Black men ﬁll our street comers, our
prisons, and, worst, our cemeteries.

Another goal of this dissertation is to comment on the humanity of a group of
Black males by locating their meanings and identities in their texts and textual
understandings. As I listen to and re-read Shawn’s “writings,” I hear noises. But these
noises are nothing like the rehearsed rumblings of readings performed in classrooms.
These noises are peculiar, distinct, and even musical. They are poetry and spoken
word—silent but loud. They are tattoos and tags and raps, all of which are
communicative genres “rooted in the Black Oral Tradition of tonal semantics,
narrativizing, signiﬁcation/signifyin, the Dozens/playin the Dozens, Aﬁicanized syntax,
and other communicative practices” (Smitherman, 1997/ 1998, p. 269). Hence, Shawn’s
communicative performances are much like scholars communicative performances—
traditional, bearing “traces” or “echoes” of cultures, societies, and histories past (Bakhtin,
1984; Derrida, 1976).

As I pointed out in this dissertation’s introduction, Shawn’s writing is highly
sophisticated. It constitutes a collection of sounds which, all at once, sublirnely reach
backward and forward through both time and space, borrowing as it may the conjured
reverberations of the past while supplying a new voice and a new perspective for our
emerging future. Shawn’s words are candescent, lively, and ﬂesh. Yet, they are very
much motivated by the appropriations, the deliberate borrowings, of old songs, catch

phrases, and oral narratives, “reaccentuated” (Bakhtin, 1981) in both new and not-so-new

52

ways. In this way, literacy is a dialogic practice that allows individuals, groups, and

communities to add to history’s multiplicity and diversity of voices. It describes current

events, rendering old histories anew, giving established meanings new “accents”.

By ﬂaming this work within dialogic theory, which questions “the workings of

power and desire in social life,” I deﬁne literacies as dialogic practices mediated by the

use of cultural/symbolic tools (e.g., language), which allow individuals and groups to

participate in and negotiate community identities, shared relationships, historically valued

activites. Following this deﬁnition of literacy, this study has at least four important

implications for education and educational research.

1)

2)

3)

4)

It expands social conceptions of literacy by examining the intersection of
multiple forms of oppression, including racism, sexism, and economic
oppression.

It challenges linguistic and cognitive epistemologies of literacy and
literacy reform, which engender the thinking behind new millennium
educational reform initiatives like NCLB.

It relies upon qualitative empirical data to document and describe literacy
in the lives of urban adolescent Black males.

Finally, it raises questions about literacy policy reﬂected in textbooks and
classroom instruction, neither .of which recognizes the complex literate

existences of urban adolescent Black males.

In this way, the study seeks to answer questions about the ways in which the Guys

can be considered literate. Speciﬁcally,

1)

How do the Guys use literacy to participate in valued social, cultural, and

53

political activities?

2) What do symbolic materials produced/consumed by the Guys tell us about

literacy in their lives?

3) How do the Guys ’ literate lives extend existing notions of literacy?

By answering these questions, I aim to positively shift our thinking about both
Black males and literacy. I also seek to raise pivotal questions about what counts as
literacy and successful school-based literacy performance.

In the next chapter, I describe the methodology 1 used to complete this project. I
deﬁne key analytic terms like discourse, cultural production, and resistance. While you
may know Shawn well by now, the next chapter introduces the other Guys to you.
Finally, I present the study’s design and describe the methods used to collect and analyze

data.

54

It is sometimes helpful to say that it is not individuals who speak and act, but rather
historically and socially deﬁned discourses speak to each other through individuals. The
individual instantiates, gives body to, a discourse every time he acts or speaks and thus
carries it, and ultimately changes it through time. . . the individual is simply the meeting
point of many, sometimes conﬂicting, and socially and historically deﬁned discourses.
——James Gee, 1991, p. 3

55

CHAPTER 2
Methodology

“Man, I cain’t take this shit?”

“Uhrn sayin. Who da fuck is Beowulf. . .I’m not gone need [to know] Beowulf to
get a job. Shit, nobody I know, even my mama and she smart as hell, don’t know this
shit. And she got a good job.”

“I know what you sayin. . . . This shit ain’t me.”

“Me either.”

I remember overbearing Derrick and his ﬂiend, Tony, wearily whispering in the
back of the crowded classroom. They weren’t reading Beowulf; yet ironically, they were
talking about it, about how it was not them. Beowulf had obviously crept into their
disassembled lives. The epic story of the pre-Celtic, tragic hero weighed on the two
dejected young men this day like the sad, deep irony of serious thought, laboriously
resting on the concerned mind.

Derrick, a conﬁdent young Aﬂican American male about ﬁfteen years of age,
folded his handsome, already solid, and resolute face in purposeful protest against the
class’s choice of reading. He did not want to read Beowulf—didn’t see the purpose of it.
Intrigued by his rude and articulate denial, my attention was eloquently caught by
Denick’s resistance and understanding of himself. Hence, it was not only his
conversation with Tony that began to teach me about what literacy meant to him, it was
also his understanding of himself—his being and the subtle nuances of his identity that

made Beowulf not for him.

56

While we have learned much about literacy ﬂom ethnographies that analyze
communication (Heath, 1983), a dialogic understanding of literacy can never be fully
achieved through analyses of communication alone. Surrounding communicative
dialogue are discourses [Bakhtin, 1986], which are symbolic “ways of being” or “forms
of life” that integrate language, ideas, values, beliefs, and various opportunities and
motivations (Gee, 1996; Purcell-Gates, 1998). As such, discourses carry with them
unseen and often unheard elements, such as the intentions of others, desires and
motivations, various and sometimes competing ideation, and limits (both constraining
and expanding).

From this perspective, literacy is much more than the product of communicative
events; it is——as James Gee has suggested—an element of discourse. Therefore,
researchers of literacy who intend to more fully understand the literate lives of
individuals (especially when in relation to questions about what it means to be literate)—
in addition to studying communicative practices—must also explore the various
discourses that arrange literate activites.

In this chapter, I discuss methodological1 conceptions that underpin my
understanding of literacy in the lives of the Guys. In doing so, I examine the multiple
ways in which various “ways of being” constitute literacy and can, therefore, be used as

an analytical tool to examine literacy in practice. Following the discourse theories of

 

' The methodology that I am attempting to express has emerged over some time. From January 2003 until
December 2003, I studied qualitative research methodology under Dr. Anne Haas Dyson, a pioneer scholar
in the ethnographic study of literacy. From August 2003 until June 2004, I conducted pilot (and practicum)
work for my dissertation research. During the summer of 2004, I was awarded a generous research
fellowship that helped me work out a “construct” methodology for studying literacy and urban adolescent
boys. This section on methodology is the result of countless hours of study, apprenticeship, and ﬁeld work
and, while still in progress, represents an encouraging way to study literacy in the lives of disadvantaged
groups, particularly poor urban adolescent boys.

57

Smitherman (1977), Laclau & Moffe (1985), and Gee (1991), this chapter will explain
three notions central to my analyses of literacy in the lives of the Guys: discourse,
cultural production, and resistance (MacLeod, 1996; McLaren, 1994; Willis, 1977).
After explaining these ideas, I provide a detailed sketch of the procedures used to
complete this study.

Traditions in Literacy Research

From a methodological standpoint, this work is situated socially (Barton &
Hamilton, 1998; Cazden, 1988; Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Heath, 1983; Kress, 1985; Scollon
& Scollon, 1981; Street, 1984, 1995) and builds upon “the new literacy studies” (New
London Group, 1995) dialogically (Bakhtin, 1986; Dyson, 1997, 2003; see also Chapter
1). While this work views literacy in relation to social activities, not all language and
literacy research is governed by social epistemologies.

Not so very long ago, scholars, hoping to answer questions central to language
and literacy learning, arrived at a complex conceptual intersection. By the late 19605 and
early 19705, complex methodologies arose, blurring the rigid lines between spoken and
written language, between the individual and her or his societies (Hymes, 1964, p. 63;
Florio-Ruane, 1987, p. 187). For example, the ﬁeld of psycholinguistics, which emerged
out of the scientiﬁc optimism of modernity, introduced “new” and innovative research
practices, which put forth groundbreaking theories about language as made speciﬁc in
concepts like, “linguistic competence” and “linguistic performance” (Chomsky, 1965).
For researchers like Chomsky (1965), linguistic theory was to be “concerned primarily
with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who

knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant

58

conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interests, and error
(random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual
performance” (p. 3).

While Chomsky and others (de Beaugrande, 1984; Smith, 1994) maintained a
psycholinguistic approach to language and literacy research, scholars ﬂom a diverse
range of disciplines, looking hard at issues related to language and literacy, focused
instead upon the complex social aspects of language in use (Bruner, 1985; Hymes, 1969),
or the context of the linguistic situation (Halliday, 1974). Hymes, for example, extended
Chomsky’s linguistic theory by providing an explicit conceptual basis for the
sociocultural features of language and literacy in what he referred to as, “communicative
competence” and “communicative performance.”

Extending Chomsky’s linguistic theory, Hymes noted that “linguistic
performance” needed to relate “actual performance” with underlying rules of
performance. That is, language, while rule-governed, is neither innately learned nor
genetically “hardwired” into humans. Instead, language develops through use and in
relation to the various context(s) in which it is evaluated. Hence, implicit in Hymes’s
deviation ﬂom Chomsky’s linguistic theory was an equally viable deviation ﬂom
Chomsky’s methodology for understanding an individual’s language and literacy
practices. In his chapter in Janet Maybin’s Language and Literacy in Social Practice
(1977), Hymes writes:

One cannot simply take separate results ﬂom linguistics, psychology,

sociology, ethnology, as given, and seek to correlate them, however

partially useful such work may be, if one is to have a theory of language

59

(not just a theory of grammar). One needs ﬂesh kinds of data, one needs

to investigate directly the use of language in contexts of situation, so as to

discern patterns proper to speech activity, patterns that escape separate

studies of grammar, of personality, of social structure, religion, and the

like, each abstracting ﬂom the patterning of speech activity into some

other ﬂame of reference (p. l 1, emphasis in the original).

By limiting our understanding of literacy to language and cognition as gauged
through experimental designs (see NCLB, 2001), some literacy researchers and policy
makers have overlooked (in the way that psycholinguists had) the social nuances of
literacy practice (see Malinowski, 1936; Halliday, 1987; Kucer, 2001). In this way,
language, although rule-governed, gains “accents” in use (Bakhtin, 1986). That is,
language “is living and, as such, is subject to improvisation, negotiation, and change—it
has a history, a present, and future” (Florio-Ruane & McVee, 2000, p. 155). People use
language (both written and spoken) to participate in valued activities, settings, and
interactions. Thus, language (in) use (spoken and written) is a key element in the practice
of literacy (Baron, 1992, 1997; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Heath, 1982a,
1982b; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1994).

Within this social sphere in which one acquires language, there is a cultural,
historical, and even geographical ﬂagrance that complicates words and literacies.
Languages and literacies are yet alive, living intensely in the vicarious situation of
individuals—both mind and society (V ygotsky, 1976). Research methodologies that
account for these complications in the social study of literacy problematize

uncomplicated assumptions that push to homogenize and decontextualize what literacy

60

learning truly might be. Such a reduction (i.e., decontextualized notions of literacy)
poses a signiﬁcant threat to the future of literacy education.

My study of literacy in the Guys’ lives moves away ﬂom any sterile or reduced
notion of words detached ﬂom their situated meanings. Further, it attempts to ground
more theoretically fertile notions of what language (and by extension literacy) means in a
given social and cultural context. Still, there is much work to be done in order to make
literacy classrooms more inviting and more culturally and linguistically representative
spaces. For it is impossible, even after acknowledging the social and cultural nature of
our words and our literacies, to disentangle language and literacy learning ﬂom the
political and social complexities involved in their construction. It is, however, possible to
resolve some of these complexities by examining the discourses that ﬁre] their
construction. Methodologically, this study is situated within the sociocultural traditions
of literacy research.

Theories of Discourse

Since it has been used (perhaps overused) so much and in so many ways by
educational researchers, discourse as a conceptual unit for understanding literacy is
unhelpful unless deﬁned. As such, I use discourse to refer, in one sense, to “the
contribution of the folk”—one integrated social and historical group—to one’s literate
heritage or being (Snrithennarr, 197 7, p. 103). In this way, discourse represents “folklore,
folk utterances, songs and tales of folk expression” that make groups unique
(Smitherman, 1977, p. 103). For many Black males, “being cool” acts discursively, as it
greatly inﬂuences social behaviors such as clothing, talk, interests, and other behaviors

that suggest one’s being (Kirkland & Jackson, forthcoming; Majors & Billson, 1996).

61

Further, “being cool” is deﬁned relative to the social and cultural practices of folk (i.e.,
rappers, famous athletes, and other popular ﬁgures [Kirkland & Jackson, forthcoming]).
According to Smitherman (197 7), discourse in this way comprises the cultural, social,
and political history of language used and in use, which are derived ﬂom mutually
understood “verbal strategies, rhetorical devices, and folk expressive rituals” (p. 103).

In another (but not altogether different) sense, I think of discourse as the nucleus
of one’s social being, of meaning, and identity (Gee, 1991). To be Black and male
carries with it ways of “reading” and “writing”. This notion of “being” literate lies at the
heart of this study. That is, the meanings of words and symbolic practices gain value
within social settings as they latch onto the “folk” they label and come to deﬁne (see
Chapter 1 & 3).

The nature of “folk” is ever present but changing/amending in our thoughts, our
actions, and our words. “Folk” and “folk expressions” (i.e., discourses) are forever in
ﬂux. Therefore, at the center of social (inter)action are unresolved and dilemma-ﬁlled
plays of meaning and symbolic activity that individuals negotiate as a result of
sociocultural choices, choices that give rise to contingent forms of expression. In this
way, discourse can also be thought of as “a socially accepted association among ways of
using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a
member of a socially meaningful group or a social network” (Gee, 1991, p. 1).

Discourse also mediates identity and power, which embodies the conﬂicting
values and stances of different social groups. For instance, Bakhtin (1981) suggests that
discourses are tied to the idea that languages [and other symbolic resources] are socio-

historical formations, rather than alristorical structures. For Bakhtin,

62

Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse

[napravlennost’] toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely

ﬂom this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, ﬂom

which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a

given word in life. T 0 study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that

reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological

experience outside the context of that real life toward which it was

directed and by which it is determined (p. 292, emphasis in the original).

Bakhtin’s understanding of discourse helps us to see how words are socially and
historically situated and emerge relative to other such words and the individuals and
groups who have or still are using them. In this way, discourses are central to
understanding human histories and human societies because they permeate both the
individual and the group.

Individuals and the groups to which they belong are consumed by, immersed
within, vast oceans of circulating discourses that transmit ideas, desires, and motivations
that are born out the near or distant past. This is not to say that discourses are at all
random, neutral, or acting in some trivial way in the production of human society.
Rather, discourses are “populated—overpopulated—with the intention of others”
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294). So while they function at a social and historical level,
discourses, in fact, carry fundamental political underpinnings that radicalize the body and
the mind, the read and the written.

In this way, discourses are united by a common object of study (e. g., law), a

common methodology (e.g., logic), and/or set of common terms and ideas (e. g., justice).

63

They are tied to various elements of cultural production—the production of knowledge,
of diﬂ'erence, and of identity. They can be ordered by their ﬁrnctions: for instance,
discourses that constrain the production of knowledge, difference, and identity, and those
that enable new knowledges, new differences, and new identities.

Understanding discourse in this way has helped me to raise important questions
concerning how power is enacted/negotiated in the literacies the Guys practiced. In my
observations of them, discourses can be seen as forming and maintaining sets of social
competitions (privileging and marginalizing), inﬂuencing unequal power relationships
that distinguish and create conﬂict among folk (e. g., literates and illiterates), folk groups
(e. g., Blacks and Whites), and different folk practices of literacy. Discourses, in effect,
sanction power and simultaneously constitute the conﬂicted 'nature' of the self (Foucault,
1976), the unconscious and conscious mind (Lacan, 1984), and the emotional life of the
folk they seek to deﬁne, group, and govern.

Viewing discourse in this regard has allowed me to raise important questions
concerning the contested conditions under which literacies emerge and are practiced. It is
within this larger light that I have begun to understand how discourses mediate power,
legitimacy, and authority in the Guys’ social situations and at the same time shape the
conditions under which the Guys’ culture and cultural activities (e. g., reading and
writing) were produced, practiced, and maintained.

An ethnography which observes and examines discourse becomes a signiﬁcant
tool for understanding and uncovering the literate behavior(s) of groups because it reveals
signiﬁcant aspects of literacy, like folk contributions, power relationships, and identity

formations. Therefore, in keeping with Snritherman’s and Gee’s use of the term, I use

64

“discourse” broadly to refer to the presence of “folk”—values, beliefs, and assumed
identities——in the literacies that the Guys practiced (see Bakhtin, 1986; Derrida, 1976). I
also use the term to refer to the ways that being (e. g., Black, angry, feared, resistant and
resisted, etc.) and symbolic action (e.g., tagging, tattooing, rapping, etc.) can constitute
alternative notions of what it means to be “literate.” Locating such discourse(s) has
provided me with a way to describe and explore un-proposed purposes and hidden
meanings for literacy (e.g., “literacies as self-recovery” in see Chapter 5 of this
dissertation) in the Guys’ lives. Using an etlmography of discourse (which I am
explicitly deﬁning as being neither stable nor ﬁxed) has given me a way to give the
literacies practiced by the Guys meaning, voice, validity, identity, and connectedness
within this literacy research (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).
Theories of Cultural Production

Discourse inﬂuences cultural production. By looking speciﬁcally at a given
discourse (e. g., being literate), one can observe the social and cultural forces that
inﬂuence group situations and the symbolic activities that, as a result, occur. One can,
then, begin to analyze individuals through the intimate social practices that promote
cultural production, as such practices are themselves products of culture, time, and space
(Barton, 1996; see also Chapters 3-5). Perhaps Rogoff (2003) states it best: “individual
development must be understood in, and cannot be separated ﬂom, its social and cultural-
historical context” (p. 50).

In this sense, culture is active, tied to discursive movements in generative social
spheres where groups are present (e.g., a living room, a basketball court, a classroom,

etc). Culture, itself, emerges as discourses are enacted by individuals in social spheres.

65

Within the social sphere individuals make meaning, compose identity, and establish
commitments, either as a way of being or in the process of becoming (Gee, 2001). In
addition, the discourses that constitute a given social sphere (i.e., culture) are borrowed,
reaccentuated, if you will, by their borrowers, and employed strategically as youth and
we do culture (Bakhtin, 1981; Dyson, 1997, 2003). Hence, one can see literacy
functioning within culture through the multifaceted prism of discourse (Sperling, 1995,
2003).

Given this, we must note that culture is not static. Rather, “It is formed ﬂom the
efforts of people working together, using and adapting material and symbolic tools
provided by predecessors and in the process creating new ones” (Rogoff, 2003, p. 51).
Kucer (2001) notes, “Culture is a particularly powerﬁrl social ﬂamework that can

signiﬁcantly impact the nature of” social practices (p. 181). While culture inﬂuences
’ social practices (including literacy practices), Rogoff (2003) warns, “culture is not an
entity that inﬂuences individuals. Instead, people contribute to the creation of cultural
processes and cultural processes are mutually constituting rather than deﬁned separately
ﬂom each other” (p. 51, emphases in original).

Cultural production, then, is a cultural process mediated by the discourses that
surround the activities of groups and individuals. Discourses have productive value in
the making of culture, contributing to and amending cultural practices and the social
landscapes upon which individuals and groups participate. From culture emerges cultural
products like languages, texts, and identities—all of which revealed a great deal about the

literacies the Guys embraced and the literacies they opposed.

66

Theories of Resistance

I could not investigate literacy in the Guys’ lives without attending to their
opposition to literacy practices associated with dominant culture. To do this, I needed a
way of accounting for the Guys’ resistance. In this regard, the work of Paul Willis (1977)
has been helpful. For example, Willis (1977) explains that culture and cultural practices
can be more clearly understood by observing the symbolic elements of certain social
groups. He implies that one must visit the place of interaction, of social nutrition and
discursive activity, seeking out meanings, origins, and meaningful social patterns in order
to wholly understand literacy as it is enacted in social situations. According to Willis, in
order to understand cultural products (e.g., tattoos, raps, etc.),

we must go to the cultural milieu . . . and accept a certain autonomy of the process

at this level which defeats any simple notion of mechanistic causation and gives

the social agents involved some meaningﬁrl scope for viewing, inhabiting, and
constructing their own world in a way which is recogrrizably human and not

theoretically reductive (p. 172).

Willis argues, “The cultural level is marked by a sense of contestation, resistance,
and compromise” (quoted in MacLeod, p. 20), and itself implies “the active, collective
use and explorations of received symbolic, ideological, and cultural resources to explain,
make sense of and positively respond to ‘inherited’ structural and material conditions”
(Willis, p. 112, emphasis added). In accounting for the “symbolic, ideological, and
cultural resources” used in the production of culture, Willis encourages researchers to
focus closely on the symbolic tapestry which enables social, ideological, and cultural

existence. Things that stimulate existence (i.e., discourses) also stimulate resistance.

67

In addition to accounting for culture as a dynamic social unit, Willis observes that
culture itself comprises complex and contradictory practices, which warn against “a too
reductive or crude materialist notion of the cultural level” (Willis, p. 171). The “lads” in
Willis’s study (197 7), produced culture, which did not conform to the roles deﬁned for
students by school rules or comply with the standards and norms of the school itself.
This “counter-school culture,” as MacLeod (1995) would later term it, for Willis, seemed
to reject the widely accepted practices of the school in lieu of practices valued by peers.

Building upon the work of Willis and others, Giroux (1983) develops his theory
of resistance by examining nonconformity and opposition in marginalized youth.
According to Giroux, resistance in these groups can be seen as “a response to the
educational system, a response rooted in moral and political indignation” (p. 136).
Giroux suggests that we carefully analyze these resisting discourses (in addition to
producing ones) for “radical signiﬁcance.”

For Giroux and others (MacLeod, 1991; McLaren, 1994), not all discourses that
produce reproduce existing social conditions. There are in fact those that oppose
reinventing the norms of society. These resisting practices stem ﬂom a critique of social
oppression (Freire, 1970) and social isolation/exclusion (Purcell-Gates, 1996). There is
logic to resistance. According to MacLeod (1991), “The logic of resistance runs counter
to the social relations of schooling and calls for struggle against, rather than submission
to, domination” ( p. 21).

In this way, production is one side in this cultural coin ﬂip. There is also
opposition, which suggests counter-cultural production or resistance. That is,

nonconformity itself is instantiated in the folk—in their “ways of speaking, listening (and

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not listening), writing, reading, feeling, valuing, believing, etc.” (Gee, 2000, p. 204). By
analyzmg literacy in this way, I see literacy as being not just one thing. Rather, literacy
necessitates a complex amalgam of dispositions. A complex study of literacy must
account for the many situated, sometimes contested social practices that lead to thought,
action, reaction, and rebellion within and to literacy. Theories of discourse, cultural
production, and resistance help to set the stage for much needed study of literacy in the
regard.

Design and Methods

I designed this study, wanting to know more about literacy in the lives of the
Guys. I continued to visit Derrick’s classroom on a weekly basis. I also followed him
and his ﬂiends to the hallways of their school, sometimes to their jobs and homes, and
anywhere else they would let me go. This was the initial design of the study: accidental
encounters made systematic by my curiosities and their letting me “hang out” with them
to get to know them in the back of an English classroom.

In the scheme of things, a more organized study emerged. Though things did not
start off very organized or very well conceived, the lack of order opened up “multiple
worlds” (Dyson, 1989) in which the Guys practiced literacy to me. I would later make
better sense of literacy in their lives within these “multiple worlds”. Between worlds, the
phenomenon of literacies in the Guys’ lives seemed to have no true beginning, middle, or
ending. The Guys practiced literacy everywhere. For me, it did not make sense to
disentangle the multiple settings in which literacy was practiced, for each context was in
some important way connected to the next. Focusing on literacy practices (as opposed to

contexts of literacy practice), I was able to locate multiple literacies within such settings

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and began to understand the complex ways in which literacy functioned in the Guys’
lives across their “multiple worlds”.
Multiple Worlds

I ﬁnished the study where it began, somewhere in the periphery of six young
men’s lives, however, no longer seated in the back of an English classroom. Though I
ebbed closer and closer to their literate center, I found that the young men’s literacies had
multiple and sometimes competing centers. As such, this study of literacy took place in
multiple settings within two distinct locations: a high school and a neighborhood. The
study was beginning to take shape.

The high school was a complex nexus of many settings, including two English
classrooms, hallway lockers, and a lunchroom. I point these settings out because they
were key settings within the high school where the Guys’ practice of literacy was most
visible. The English classrooms, in particular, were the most distinctive settings.

I remember entering Mrs. Crankshaw’s classroom on a moody Monday morning.
The walls were comfortably decorated with quotations ﬂom “great” American authors—
many of which featured the faces and biographies of dead White men—and goofy
cartoon caricatures, which illustrated the “eight” parts of speech and other popular rules
for English grammar. The classroom, you can say, was a small world in itself, enriched
by its own scenery. It was a pervasive and overpowering space, which created a highly
intriguing cultural/political landscape—one that privileged a narrow set of cultural ideas
steeped in western tradition and Eurocentric ideologies.

The neighborhood, which was also the neighborhood of the school, was also a

complex site. It, too, was composed of multiple settings: the homes of two of the Guys,

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the workplace of another, and various other venues in which the Guys and I periodically
met. I spent the bulk of my time for this study within the neighborhood, mostly at
Sheldon’s home or at a nearby restaurant. The Guys and I usually met at one of these
sites to talk. Sometimes they would perform, spitting their latest raps, schooling me on
the latest “Black talk” and the meaning of their tattoos. In Sheldon’s living room, they
would let me watch as they competitively played Madden 2004 and NBA Live.

For more formal conversations, I would treat the young men to lunch at a nearby
neighborhood deli, at which Tony worked “folding” sandwiches and cutting bread among
other things. I parked my car in ﬂont of Sheldon’s home, so that I could walk with the
young men to the deli, which was located about two blocks away. On the walk, I listened
to the young men’s verbal “play,” which usually included boasting or “capping” (what
Smitherman [1977, 1999] calls “the Dozens”). When it was required, I participated in
their play but never as an expert, always as a learner. These were memorable journeys,
as they factored signiﬁcantly in what I learned about literacy in the Guys’ lives.

Although their social world did not seem as vast then, as I think about it now, it
was huge and complicated. The Guys learned and practiced literacy in multiple social
settings, which contributed to their knowledge of themselves and of the larger social
world surrounding them. The arbitrary binary that many researchers set between “the
school” and “the home” seemed contrived and limiting to me.

Attempting to understand literacy in the Guys’ lives, I learned that there was no
single or isolated context in which this could be accomplished. To isolate any given
social context too neatly and too narrowly in literacy research neglects the inﬂuential role

of other contexts in shaping literate behaviors. As stated earlier (see Chapter 1), literacies

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are hybrid and dialogic in nature, constitutive of the situation of the multiple spaces we
traverse in a given lifetime. The dichotomy of constituting all learning between the
school and the non-school world is a big mistake. Individuals, indeed, develop a literate
repertoire based upon the many contexts in which they inhabit. Hence, schools,
neighborhoods, and other “social spaces of practice” (Gutierrez & Stone, 2000) are
mutually informing, as they provide literate experiences—experiences that allow
individuals to absorb and produce more fully culture and society (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
However, the universe of literacies is immense, perhaps too immense to travel. In order
to limit the scope of this study (to make it manageable), I studied literacy in the lives of
the Guys, speciﬁcally, in their school and in their neighborhood.

The Guys

This study proﬁles six ﬁiends, who live in Lansing, Michigan. Lansing is one of
Michigan’s largest cities, with a population well over 100 thousand residents. Like other
cities, Lansing presents a burgeoning urban context, enriched by cultural and linguistic
diversity and distinguished by the academic and social struggles of its adolescent Black
males. Like other nearby cities, Larrsing’s Black male population is at or near the bottom
of all achievement categories and hold the highest jobless rate in the area.

While this project stands on its own, I met its participants during a study I
conducted about three years ago at the high school. That project examined literacy in one
of the above mentioned English classrooms. The purpose of that study was to identify
what literacies urban youth learn in secondary English classrooms. I also wanted to see if
students would employ out-of-classroom (versus out-of-school) literacy practices to

scaffold classroom literacy leaming. Some of the students, in fact, did use a variety of

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literacy practices borrowed ﬂour a variety of places to meet the literacy demands of their
English classroom.

Speciﬁcally, four of the Guys (who were taking the class) found ways to
participate in classroom activities in spite of and in relation to their social identities. For
example, Derrick critically responded to an ofﬁcial classroom text in the language of his
peers.

Derrick: I don’t think Paris (in Homer’s Iliad) is right. He sold his whole

family out for a female and then acted like a punk when
Agamemnon and Menelaus came for her [Helen].

Derrick’s rendering of Paris’s personality in the Iliad is striking, not because it
reveals a level of unaclmowledged complexity in Paris (i.e., he “acted like a punk”), but
precisely because it acknowledges Paris’s known complexities in language that is
meaningful to him. Derrick’s response suggests that he understood the text, personally
connected with it, and was able to make valuable meaning of (evaluate) it.

My understanding of literacy in the lives of the Guys, at this point, only began to
acknowledge the (false) dichotomy between in-school and out-of-school literacy
practices. The Guys were learning academic literacies in-school when they were
motivated and could appropriate academic literacies in their non-academic lives. Within
this light, a good deal of sociocultural research on classroom literacy has focused on how
non-academic resources (vernacular languages, popular (con)texts, multicultural
identities, etc.) can be used to help them learn academic/classroom literacies (Cazden,

1995; M011, 2000)

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By chance, I stepped outside the classroom and observed how some of the young
men used classroom material in their peer spaces.2

Tony: [Boastful] Nigga, I’m Achilles.

Derrick: [Teasing] Nigga, you ain’t Achilles. You a ho like Paris. Pause.

Silence. Laughter.

Outside of the classroom, these young men—some of whom sat quietly and
seemingly inattentive inside the classroom—effortlessly discussed and critiqued the Iliad
as part of their everyday verbal play, making use of its characters in their own signifying
manner. In the above example, the classroom text blended complexly with the cultural
language practices of the young men. For example, Tony’s use of “Achilles” presents the
boasting of AAL discourse style (see Smitherman, 1977, 2000). Derrick’s teasing of
Tony, comparing him to “Paris” as a “ho” presents another feature of AAL discourse
style—the dozens (Smitherman, 1977, 2000). Hence, the participants of this study
transported literacies back and forth across many contexts, not just ﬂom home to school.

From my experience working in a Lansing high school, I developed a profound
interest in the intellectual mobility and resilience of urban youth. As a way to explore the
complex workings of urban poverty, Blackness, and masculinity in the practice of
literacy, I purposefully selected Shawn, Derrick, Keith, Jose, Tony, and Sheldon to
participate in this research. It must also be noted that these six young men, who I called

the Guys, were all ﬁiends.

 

2 I acknowledge that I was an adult participant in the situations that I observed. Not just that, I am an
English teacher. Yet, the boys saw me as someone that they could trust, someone who sat in the back of
the room with them. While they may have not revealed everything to me, their conversations with me and
around me were always candid and, to my knowledge, ﬁlled with honesty.

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Shawn was perhaps the most vocal of the group. He also struggled the most in
school, which was a place that Shawn did not enjoy very much. He along with his two
siblings—a younger sister and brother—lived with his grandmother in a small three
bedroom house on Lansing’s lower Westside. He was athletic. Shawn loved to play
basketball, but since he did not do well in school, Shawn never played organized sports.
Instead, he was “pursuing a rap career” because as he saw it, he was “a rapper.”

Derrick, a dark-skinned, tall, husky young man, was also a rapper. Along with
Tony and Jose, the young men formed a rap group called “Grind Season.” Like Shawn,
Derrick was not a stellar student, and like so many young, urban Black males his age, he
never read an entire book. He, too, was athletic. He was the captain of his school’s
football team and key member of its wrestling squad. Unlike his ﬂiends, Derrick kept a
journal and wrote poetry. Because he was quiet yet not shy, this is where I found many
of Derrick’s most intimate thoughts and ideas.

Keith was ﬁrnny, or should I say, liked to have ﬁrn. Along with Sheldon, Keith
took playing video games very seriously, as he boasts: “Cain’t nobody beat me in
Madden.” More reserved and quiet than his peers, Keith was an above average student, a
secret that he liked to keep to himself. Like three of his ﬂiends, Keith read comic books
and, like all of his ﬂiends, was into Hip Hop magazines like Source and Vibe. Keith was
the only one of the Guys who lived with both of his parents. The rest of the Guys with
the exception of Shawn lived in single mother homes. (One of the single mothers was a
girlﬂiend.) Shawn lived with his grandmother.

Tony was the youngest of the group and the most timid. Shawn was a big brother

to him, as their relationship was guided by respect and admiration as opposed to equality

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and camaraderie. Tony was an average student, in most classes on the fringes of failing.
He adored Hip Hop and carried an unofﬁcial history of the cultural art form in head.
Though he was very thin with a caramel brown complexion, Tony adorned his body with
art. He had more tattoos covering his body than all the others with the exception of
Shawn. He liked to read the horoscope.

In contrast to Tony, Jose was a thick guy, who admitted to not liking to read. His
displeasure in reading was probably more aimed at school texts than it was at texts in
general. Jose, too, read comic books, as his collection of X-men and Batman comics and
Yu-Gi—O cards suggested. He also wore ink on his arms and had bands of ink around his
wrists with his relatives’ names on them. Jose was very family oriented, and his friends
were an extension of his family nucleus.

Sheldon, Derrick’s cousin, was meticulous, especially in the things he was
interested in. He was an above average student, possibly following the example of his
mother, who was a college student at the nearby university. She surrounded Sheldon
with books ﬂom her classes. She also received the local newspaper, which Sheldon read
almost daily. As was in his nature, Sheldon wrote about things. He took notes on the
video games that he and his ﬁiends competed in, incidents in the newspaper, for school,
and for play. I asked him what was he going to do with his notes. He simply replied,
“I’ll write a book one day.”

As mentioned earlier, my relationship with the Guys emerged in the back of an
English classroom, where Derrick, Tony, Jose, and Sheldon, anticipating my Monday
morning visits, would “save a seat” for me. As I began to realize that my explorations

into literacy would take me beyond their English classroom, I asked the young men if I

76

could go with them “outside” into the hallways and then to their homes. They agreed to
take me; I agreed to go. While navigating the multiple contexts that constituted their
“out-of-classroom” worlds, 1 met a few of the young men’s ﬁiends. Two of them,
Deshawn and Keith, agreed to meet and talk with us. They, subsequently, joined the
project.

Although the young men were ﬂiends, they were by no means the same. They
were academically diverse and varied in age ﬂom 16 to 18. Three of them worked part-
tirne jobs, one had been recently released ﬂom jail, and another lived alone with his older
girlfriend.

In addition to spending time with the Guys, I spent a good deal of time with
people closely associated with them ﬂom their school and community. Among them,
two English teachers ﬂom the Guys’ school helped me to gain valuable information for
this research. In the Guys’ neighborhood, I interviewed Marcus Graves, a deli owner,
and Tony’s boss. I interviewed Betsy Kennedy (Sheldon’s mom) regularly, Ida
Stevenson (Deshawn’s grandmother), and Silvia Smith (Derrick’s mom). In addition to
these individuals, I got to know some of the Guys’ family members—brothers, sisters,
cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews.

All participants have given me permission to use the information that I gathered
ﬂom them. Of course, the names of all participants and places have been altered to
protect participants’ identities. To maintain the integrity of the work, I use pseudonyms
that have all been selected by the participants themselves and have attempted to reﬂect

their cultural heritage and racial backgrounds. Finally, I selected the Guys to participate

77

in this work because they shared at least four common traits of interest to me: their race,
their ﬁiendship, their maleness, and their urban testimonies.
Researcher ’s Role

The promise of research is not necessarily in deep ideas, but in the heart of deep
ideas, which connects the sometimes impossible questions we ask to the sometimes
impossible lives we lead as researcher. I began this dissertation with a story to illustrate
that research is much more than our work. And yet the story that I am telling illustrates
many other stories that intersect with the lives of many Black males, including myself.

As researchers, we sometimes straddle the tight rope of certainty, taking extra
care with every step we do and do not take to protect both the integrity of our participants
and of our work. It may or may not have been beneﬁcial to share snippets of Shawn’s
and Derrick’s stories, but it is important to me (and of course to them) not to reveal the
Guys in tragic terms. That is, it would be problematic for their stories to be received in
sympathy, while their educational oppression is explained by their “poor backgrounds” or
as a result of their “dodging bullets.” There is much more to us than struggle and much
more to our struggles than us.

I am in very much part of the Guys’ stories, hoping to reduce the catalectic
impulse that many of us might have to rush too quickly to ask questions about how
culture and upbringing of urban adolescents Black males contribute to their failures. My
hope is that my role as a researcher in conjunction with what you have read will allow us
to raise more salient questions as to the structural and discoursal roots of common

struggles over knowledge, literacy, and their representations.

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In the spirit of counterstorytelling, I exist in this work to reiterate the humanity of
urban adolescent Black males, a demographic who, through false media representations
and the like, come to our minds dehumanized. Not only are they steeped in complexity—
complexities that enter the classrooms with them, the lives of these young men reveal the
shared vocation of individuals, who work Michelle Fine’s (1994) hyphen, as a way to
reinvent space and opportunities for more possible lives.

In this way, I am situated very much in my work and acknowledge the ways that
having been an urban adolescent male of color contribute to my knowledge and curiosity
about literacy in the lives of all urban youth. By this, 1 am acknowledging that
researchers are never truly absent ﬂom their work; hence, we must ﬁnd ways to write
ourselves in our research to make known how who we are informs what we do and do not
see and say.

As a researcher in a classroom setting, I had to abide by the teacher’s rules. But
as a teacher, my role was complicated, as I wanted access to the intimacies of students’
talk, which was sometimes negative toward their teacher. When I heard the young men
talking about their teacher, allowing myself to hear it became dangerous. While their
comments in class about their teacher might have revealed volumes about the nature of
their resistance to school, any ﬂirtation with such information may have set me at odds
against the teacher, who was allowing me, as a guest, to sit in her classroom. There were
clear lines drawn between the teacher and young men who sat with me in the back of the
room. To elect their voices over their teacher’s even tentatively might have given the

young men reason to believe that I sided with them.

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The truth is, I sided with neither the teacher nor the young men who sat with me
in the back of the room. This is not to say that I was by any means a neutral participant
in the classroom, objectively observing the Guys interact, using some fabricated set of
social heuristics based on changing regularities. At best, I sided with the research and the
ftmdamental questions that guided my being there.

Guided by reason, much of my decision-making was subjective. At points, I
looked more closely at a predetermined set of things (practices, artifacts, events,
activities), which was stimulated by both my compassion for the young men, my
positioning as a Black male, and my training as an educational researcher. I admit to
deliberately looking for “things,” like literacy practices exclusive to the Guys. I never
found these, but in my looking, I may have created—based on my own personal, cultural,
political, and intellectual agenda—some regularities that were not there (see Appleman,
2003). In the search for meaning, I had already deﬁned, at least in part, and have had
substantial help in deﬁning the situation which I now—in some self-involved way——
wished to understand.

This is not to say that my work was not systematic and that my presence in the
ﬁeld yields the work no true value. Instead, as a qualitative researcher, my imagination
and insight, agenda and professed plans were all governed and grounded by my
participation in the ﬁeld. In fact, “being there” as it were allowed for a kind of personal
testimony that was grounded in experience. This experience has given me authority to
write this dissertation.

In spite of my presence, the science in this study is evident. When we consider

the will of the scientist to search for questions to answers that bear no sufﬁcient resolve,

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she or he must begin to imagine what may be in the midst of what is and to transform
what she or he thinks into substance ﬂom which new thoughts can arise. Hence, in the
ﬁeld, I am in the middle of a puddle, wet—perhaps dripping wet, but ﬂying not to get too
' muddy. I was, in effect, an eyewitness—a primary source—to all the things I am
reporting.

Gaining Access

This study developed ﬂom a conversation I had with Mrs. Crankshaw at a
statewide English conference. Mrs. Crankshaw attended a session I presented on Hip
Hop and literacy. After the session, she approached me asking what she could do to
incorporate some of my suggestions in her classroom. We talked, and as we continued,
the conversation evolved. We began talking about her students, particularly her male
students of color who were passing her course. We exchanged information and then a
few emails. Soon I was visiting her classroom to observe her students learn and her
teach.

Within her classroom, I sat quietly in the back of the room, never lonely, almost
always in the company of four of the Guys who, too, seemed distant ﬂom the rest of the
class. Toward the end of the school year, the four young men began to “save a seat” for
me, which in some way prevented me ﬂom sitting anywhere else in the classroom. As
the school year progressed, I focused more on the young men and their conversations
within class. Over time, I would focuse on these four young men exclusively.

They took me beyond their classroom, and with their blessings, I followed them

into the school’s hallway, meeting some of their friends. From the hallway, I was invited

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into the lunchroom. By the time school ended, I was invited to their homes, where we
would sometimes sit, chat, and play Madden and NBA Live.

During the summer of 2004, I was awarded funding to continue collecting data on
the Guys. During that time, I spent more time with them off school grounds, in and
around their neighborhood. By this time, we were no longer strangers. I was no longer
the curious observer who sat in the back of their English classroom. I was now a familiar
presence. They welcomed me not only in their social worlds but in their homes. (One of
the mothers even cooked me dinner once.)

Data Collection Procedures

I think of the Guys in at least two ways: as constituting six individual cases and as
one peer unit (ie., one case). Based on these two distinctions, I gathered data in two
ways. First, I met individually with the young men twice a week at their homes for
approximately four hours per meeting for about six months. During our meetings, I
documented their literacy practices (their reading, writing, speaking, listening, and other
textual practices) and talked to them about school, reading, writing, books, and other
things that I felt dealt with literacy in their lives. During my visits, I also attempted to put
together their personal literacy stories. These were events ﬂom school and home that
expressed in concrete ways how they saw themselves in relation to the larger symbolic
world. This helped me to identify the literate discourses (i.e., being rappers and rapping)
that circulated in their lives.

I also collected data with the Guys as groups. In talking with the Guys as a group,
I addressed speciﬁc questions about themes that emerge out of our interactions and their

stories. For example, if the boys commented on “being poor,” I probed for what it means

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to them to be poor, asked what do poor people read and write, and investigated what
opportunities and motivations were in place for poor people to participate in the larger
society as literate individuals. From these questions, I gained insight into how notions of
being, speciﬁcally being Black and male, inﬂuenced the Guys’ idea of literacy.

I also observed the Guys together, in their everyday worlds, to see how they used
(or refused to use) texts and how this use (or disuse) was governed by being Black, male,
etc. For example, if we were at a local store, at the magazine/newspaper section, I would
listen to how they talked about the texts. I began to ask questions like: What did they
read and refuse to read? How did they comment on the texts? How and where did they
see themselves in these sources? What observable discourses, speciﬁcally, were
operative in their practice of engaging and discussing symbolic materials? On a few
occasions, the Guys and I went for walks and ate at nearby restaurants where we had
conversations, some of them tape-recorded. The young men and I continued interactions
like these until the project ended.

As a matter of procedure, I took detailed and extensive notes on what I perceived
as important to understanding the practice of literacy in the Guys’ lives. I carefully
speculated on how their activities constituted literacy practice and cultural, social, and
political work. Usually within an hour of leaving the Guys, I rewrote my notes as formal
data entries into a ﬁeld log (Emerson et al., 1995). In addition to documenting their
literate performances, I ﬂequently talked to the young men (both individually and as a
group) about their interpretations of my notes and the ways that their literate actions may
or may not have inﬂuenced my interpretations of them. All conversations that I had with

them were recorded. With their permission, 1 transcribed important episodes of these

83

conversations, and whenever possible I spoke with at least two of the young men about a
common episode to gain multiple points of view.

I have received academic information about the boys, including their entire school
records, which I obtained with the permission of the young men’s parents ﬂom their high
school. Whenever possible, I collected a list of other artifacts (ﬂom September 2003
until June 2005) that were helpﬁrl for understanding literacy in the young mens’ lives.
During the same time period, I collected samples of the young men’s schoolwork,
including term papers, vocabulary tests, journal notebooks, etc. I collected texts that the
young men personally read and wrote (e.g., magazines, personal letters, raps, tattoos,
books, etc.).

The Guys’ parents and English teachers were like second pairs of ears and eyes
for me. They relayed information to me involving the Guys’ interest in downloading Hip
Hop lyrics and reading sports magazines for classroom projects. They also commented
about times when the young men would use these texts to respond to school-related tasks.
The English teachers and I talked regularly about the Guys since September 2003.

Data Analysis Procedures

I organized data by themes (i.e., patterns that emerge around particular discourses,
deﬁnitions of literacy, and ftmctions of literacy [Emerson et al., 1995]) and by site (i.e.,
school [classroom, lunchroom, hallway] and neiborhood [home, work, playground, etc.])
to identify “theoretically rich” literacy practices and products, where differences between
academic literacy and non-academic literacy practices seemed evident (Dyson & Genishi,
2005, p. 88). After establishing my initial codes, I engaged in more focused coding,

which concerned “breaking down ﬁeldnotes even more ﬁnely into subcodes” to uncover

84

tensions, “new themes and topics and new relationships” hidden within discourse that
might tell us speciﬁc things about the young men’s literate lives (Emerson et. al., 1995, p.
161).

Based on these emergent themes, I generated as many ideas as possible about the
nature of literacy in the Guys’ lives. During data analysis, I sought to answer the
project’s guiding research questions:

1) How do the Guys use literacy to participate in valued social, cultural, and

political activities?

2) What do symbolic materials produced/consumed by the Guys tell us about

literacy in their lives?

3) How do the Guys literate lives extend existing notions of literacy?

I organized data based on certain distinctions. For example, if data emerged
around the notion of “identity formation,” 1 arranged data in that way. Subcategories
would include reading practices associated with identity, writing practices associated
with identity, etc. when a participant read in order to be part of the larger group, I
examined what it meant to be part of the larger group, identiﬁed what the group read/did
according to the young men’s testimonies, and explored if other young men shared the
same motivations for reading as did the Guys.

To further probe this theme, I asked questions about what literate opportunities
did being part of the group afford? What opportunities did it prevent? What sense of
belonging did members secure ﬂom being part of the group? When one is part of the
group, what other things does one resist being? The answers to these questions became

the basis for the assertions I provided in the chapters to come.

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Finally, after arranging data by subcodes, 1 generated as many ideas as possible
about the relationship among literacy, masculinity, and urban life. From these
hypotheses, I rearranged data into two categories—conﬁmring and discont
(Erickson, 1985). Hypotheses based on sufﬁcient data were kept; hypotheses that were
not supported (and sometimes refuted) were rejected or used to organize other sets of
claims. After developing a set of assertions that could be veriﬁed through data and
grounded in evidence, I used my supported claims to answer my research questions. The
goal of data interpretation for this project was to generate theory that grows out of or that
is directly relevant to understanding literacy in the lives of the young men I studied.

Conclusion

Where this work is concerned, I am obliged to side with Erickson (1984): “In
substance, my work is an attempt to combine close analysis of ﬁne details of behavior
and meaning in everyday social interaction with analysis of the wider social context. . .
In method, my work is an attempt to be empirical without being positivist; to be rigorous
and systematic in investigating the slippery phenomena of everyday interaction and its
connections, through the medium of subjective meaning, with the wider social world (p.
120).” In the chapters to come, I use my assertions to stimulate awareness about how
many urban adolescent Black males practice literacy in their everyday lives.

I used discourse as an analytic tool to help me put together an altogether unique
story about literacy, a group of Black males, and the politics of learning. The story itself
becomes a larger claim, which comments on endemic inequities in how we deﬁne literacy

and label the literate. In the next three chapters, I present my ﬁndings.

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CHAPTER 3
“I Guess We Be Homies for Life”:

(Per)Forming Literacy, (Re)Producing Culture, and Appropriating Popular Media

Derrick:

Shawn:

Tony:

Shawn:

Tony:
Shauan
Tony:

Shawn:

Tony:

Shawn:

in Peer Play
Let’s do it. I guess we be honries for life, livin good.
Can’t tell me notlrin ‘cause my guys done did good, livin hood. . .
I guess we be homies for life, rockin beats strong, days long.
I never trip, Pimp, ‘cause my homies up next about to ﬂip, rip a
beast song.
Keep on. . .
The niggas done done it again.
Slipped out the streets and we at again.
Gripped back. . .
Bendin the pen, been in the pen, dying for sins.
Let go the paper. . .
‘Cause we lockin those ends.
I guess we be homies for life—so fuck a friend.
We brothers.
Don’t need nobody else ‘cause these niggas with me to the end. . .

And still we be homies for life . . .

The Guys’ linguistic play is characterized by an expanding sense of their

symbolic possibilities, which are encouraged through their shared experiences with one

another (Dyson, 1993; Stern, 1985). In this way, the Guys brought to social situations a

repertoire of literate material or “familiar ways of using language” (Dyson, 2003) and

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texts.l These familiar ways of using language and texts helped the Guys to engage in
cooperative literacy practices, as evidenced in the above rap. It also helped them to
reproduce existing cultural norms and produce new and dynamic, hybrid notions of
community.

As the rap powerfully demonstrates, these literacy practices—writing, rapping,
and multi-voicing—were a sophisticated, marked, and shared array of linguistic
creativity, verbally pitched in dynamic rhythm and literate playfulness. This playfulness
(of cultural and eclectic creativity) with language (and other symbolic material as I will
demonstrate later in this chapter) illustrates a key feature in the Guy’s literate lives. In
their play, literacy, as it were, was deeply embedded in the Guys’ imagined, experienced,
and emerging worldviews.

While, in many ways, they used literacy to write (about) themselves into the
promiscuous and often misleading “transcripts” (Scott, 1990, p. 14) of the printed world
(see chapter 5), the Guys also practiced literacy (e.g., rapping) as a way to personally
connect with peers, navigate peer experiences, and most importantly establish peer
commitments (i.e., obligations that bind individuals to groups through literate practice).
These peer commitments helped the Guys establish a set of common literacy practices
that privileged popular culture. The Guys also expanded their literate universe beyond
the popular media, as literacy became a tool for their own cultural production. In this
chapter, I write about popular media and literacy in the interest of the group—both of

which become tools for performance and play, cultural reproduction and production.

 

' Language and text is realized in spoken, written, and ascribed (or worn—as in tattoos and clothing) forms.
This is important because it extends the binary discussion between written and spoken language beyond the
two forum of language.

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Pop Cultural Reproduction:
Literacy, Peer Commitments, and the Making of the Guys

While personal stories offered them an invitation into literacy, peers offered the
Guys a context/community in which to practice it (ﬁgure 3). Within the context of
ﬁiends, literacy, for the Guys, became alive, escaping the limits of time and space. And
strangely, cultural norms and social practices became re-inscribed, replicating important
features of popular culture‘. Hence, as a living thing, literacy helped to create the Guys’
collective identities, while maintaining the norms of the (pop) cultures surrounding them.

This maintenance of popular culture was important in establishing allegiances,
which also mediated participation and membership in the group. For example, the Guys
appropriated existing and valued cultural materials, speciﬁcally, ﬂom popular media to
characterize a range of things, ﬂom their patterns of talk to their clothing. Embedded
within larger social systems, popular media became a local tool that the Guys used to
participate with this larger literate community. In this way, the Guys’ practice of literacy
reinforced features of popular media that the Guys used in their everyday lives. For
example, Derrick and Shawn both explained: “we wear earrings everyday ‘cause they
make us look good.” For Derrick, they also helped to make him look cool or, to use his
words, “‘bout it like other popular rappers.” Shawn explains that wearing accessories
like earrings is part of “being Black and Hip Hop.” According to him, “This is what we
do. We wear do-rags, sport Hip Hop gear, whatever it take to let people know where we

coming ﬂom.”

 

2 Literacy in the Guys’ lives was as much about meaning making as it was in the mainstream world. In this
way, the Guys were helping to re-establish existing cultural purposes for literacy and, therefore, helped to
reproduce existing cultural norms. This is not to say that the purposes for literacy in the lives of the Guys
were predetermined. As I will explain in a later section of this chapter, the Guys also extended the
purposes of literacy to suit them and the cultures which they helped to produce.

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In a conversation with Shawn following this exchange, I asked, “why does
wearing earrings let people know you down?”

Shawn: All the rappers, ball players, anybody who is anybody stylin like
that. See we get what we wear ﬂom TV [using TV to allude to the
popular media], rap videos, magazine. We part of that. That’s
why big companies like Nike and nem be targeting young people
to sell they stuff. So they be paying these brothas cheddar to sport
they gear. If the dude wearing the gear is ‘bout it and you and yo
crew feelin it, then you start wearing it too. Same thing with
language. It sends a message to everybody else that you ‘bout it
too. That’s all. You want people to know who you is.

In this sense, “gear” appropriated ﬂom popular media acts as language. Like
language, it is ﬁlled with the intentions of others (Bakhtin, 1986). Moreover, Shawn and
Derrick used their clothing, which was usually appropriated ﬂom popular artists and
athletes, to foster visible connection to these intentions and to communicate their
“coolness.” This practice of literacy, for them, served the purpose of communicating
important aspects of a group identity that was rooted ﬁrmly in the popular media.

Not only did it serve the purposes of communicating aspects of group identity
(e.g., the Guys viewed themselves as a rap group “like D-12”), literacy in the lives of the
Guys was established upon peer commitments, which too involved appropriating popular
media. The commitments to one another that the Guys held helped to bind them in ways
that made the literacies they practiced hard to disentangle ﬂom the group. Within the

groups, literacy was practiced playfully, spontaneously, and creatively, as part of the

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young men’s verbal interactions. Aspects of popular media were never far ﬂom such

play, as popular media characters, topics, scenes, etc. almost always found tribute in the

Guys’ interactions. For example, the Guys played a game they called “What You Be

Like.” Derrick explained the rules to me:

Derrick:

Shawn:

The Guys:

Shawn:

The Guys:

Shawn:

Keith:

Shawn:

Sheldon:

When it’s your nun and we say “What You Be Like,” you have to
tell us about something you be like. Only thing is, it got to be fast
or funny, or you out.

Let me show him. Y’all ask me what I be like.

What you be like?

I be like Eric Benet. I be plugging Halle Berry [smiles].
[Laughs]

Kirk, what you be like?

I be like Nikola Tesla, enlightening people [smile].

Who the hell is that [laughs]?

You not suppose to use somebody we don’t know. Use somebody
famous, like ﬂom TV.

Dog, he not one of us. That dude don’t even watch TV [snrirks].

This episode is telling in at least two ways. First, it demonstrates how the

bonding (i.e., the collective play) of the Guys was built around popular media. Hence,

popular media was a site where the Guys gathered and borrowed symbolic material with

which to play. In this way, the popular media was a place of shared knowledge and

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shared cultural resources for them. They, therefore, maintained and remade aspects of it
in their literate routines and practices.

Second, the episode speaks to how cultural knowledge mediated the group’s
interactions. This idea is understood most easily in the context of Bourdieu’s (197 7)
theory of cultural capital. Bourdieu argues that cultural resources gain value only in
speciﬁc cultural contexts (p. 164). Hence, knowledge of popular media in the context of
the Guys was a valuable asset, as it allowed each one of them to participate in a range of
literate activities that were privileged (and made sense) among the others. By contrast,
not knowing popular media was dangerous, as it outcasted individuals like myself who
instead invoked a great but less familiar inventor.

In so many ways, literacy as expressed in the lives of the Guys put self-identities
in constant dialogue with group identities. That is, the literacies that helped to make
known the subjectivities of each individual participant (see chapter 3) also exposed
important symbolic threads that helped to connect each individual participant to the larger
group (the Guys). If we regard literacy as a dialogic practice (as I am doing), then
literacy in the lives of the Guys can “only be understood as part of a greater whole”
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 426).

In keeping with this idea, we can understand literacy as intertextually linking the
Guys to one another as a group and to the common commitments (i.e., forms of
contentment, company, and command) that the group made possible around common sets
of texts (i.e., popular media). As literate individuals, the Guys appropriated available
symbolic, textual, and cultural material ﬂom locations such as popular media to fashion

their ﬂiendship and to maintain their common ties and shared histories.

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When we listen to them, we begin to know them, not individually, but as a unit.
To this point, the following sections give examples of the literacy practices that helped
unite the Guys around a set of shared material and experiences, which rarely get talked
about in discussions of literacy.

Keith: Yup, in my white T (shirt)3.

Sheldon: You a fool, Bone [a nickname for Keith]. . . I got my own.

This brief episode speaks to two related ideas. Each comes ﬂom my
understanding of how the Guys practiced literacy. First, valued popular material and
language, especially that found in Hip Hop culture (Dyson, 2003; Fisher, 2003; Kirkland,
2006; Morrell, 2004), was constantly up for grabs among the Guys. Keith’s rehearsal of
“yup, in my white T” was language taken directly out of a popular Hip Hop song. For
Keith, the statement/phrase communicated his appreciation for not only for Hip Hop, but
for Hip Hop’s expressions.

In this way, there is relationship between the individual “utterance” (e.g., “Yup, in
my white T”) (Bakhtin, 1981; Dyson, 2003) and the greater symbolic universe (Hip H0p
culture) of which the utterance is a part (Bakhtin, 1981). Drawing upon this relationship,
Keith uttered “Yup, in my white T,” as it connected him to the larger social world of Hip
Hop. His appropriation of the form “white T” also linked him more explicitly to his
peers as they too rocked white Ts (e.g., Sheldon saying, “I got my own”). I must note,

this practice of appropriating symbolic material for larger communicative purposes is

situated deeply in embedded histories and shared understandings.

 

3 This is a line made popular by the Franchise Boys ﬂom their hit rap song “White T”.

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Material like a white T (like a trendy hairstyle, a new term, etc.) comes to life
somewhere in the situation. As implied in the example, a white T4, among other
examples, was used to link the Guys (e. g., Sheldon’s admission “1 got my own) to larger,
more valued, and uniformed group comnritrnents. These commitments encouraged
appropriations (hence reproductions of popular culture in the peer space), as wearing a
white T connected the Guys’ peer world to the more trendy popular one.

Like wearing earrings, a white T communicated certain values and beliefs that the
Guys held. According to Sheldon, “All my boys wearing them.”

Me: Why?

Sheldon: I don’t know. I guess it is the cool thing to do. Franchise Boys be

wearing them. They hot right now. I’m saying, why can’t we
wear white T’s?

Me: I never said that.

Sheldon: Naw, I ain’t talking about you. It’s like, why do they wear suits?

Me: Who?

Sheldon: White people. This us. . . This is who we are.

A second important idea comes into play. As Sheldon’s commentary on the white
T explains the white T signiﬁcance to him, we learn that white Ts were appropriated by
the Guys to express a range of things: group afﬁliation, race, and power. It was in this
way that I began to perceive how membership in the group and its concern with popular
media were important to understanding literacy in the lives of the Guys. Hence, the

symbolic use of the white T united the Guys not only to the larger world of Hip Hop, but

 

’ I analyze the Guys use of the white T to illustrate the ways in which popular culture inﬂuenced the Guys
and their practice of literacy. Hence, white Ts are just a single example of the many resources the Guys
borrowed ﬂom popular culture to do themselves and to practice literacy.

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more importantly to one another. It also helped to afﬁrm them and the valued practices
they together embraced.

It is no coincidence that both Keith and Sheldon understood the signiﬁcance of
the white T with regards to the larger group. When asked why white Ts were so popular
among them, Keith commented, “That’s what Black guys wear these days.” In
appropriating the white T, these Guys were also appropriating the Black race. Hence,
literacy in their lives existed in the middle of a power struggle over self-identity, where
one could choose Blackness by choosing to wear a white T-shirt.

In addition to understanding the signiﬁcance of the white T in the power struggle
over self-identity, it has been equally important for me to understand how the Guys used
the white T symbolically to forge their commitments to one another. In this way,
wearing a white T afforded a sense of being, of solidarity, and most importantly a way to
articulate a common (hi)story. It is within this story (in this case, the story of a common

Black body masked in white fabric) that the individual narrative of the Guys became a

corporate one.
Shawn: These my brothas [talking about Derrick, Sheldon, Keith, Tony,
and Jose].
Keith: We been knowing each other since we was in what?
Jose: [Interrupted] I met him [pointing to Tony] in third grade.
Keith: We been knowing each other for a long time . . . [interrupted]
Tony: Since elementary school.

As their common stories came together, the narrative of the Guys’ friendship

became a practice of collaborative storytelling, as illustrated in the above example. The

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story begins with Shawn’s declaration: “These [are] my brothas.” Adding to the story,
Keith continues: “We been knowing each other. . .” Jose adds: “I met him in third
grade.” Tony concludes: “Since elementary school.” Hence, their story was being
created in a rich array of voices, where the Guys would sometimes complete one
another’s sentences.

Co—authoring or collaborating in the narrative structure of storytelling was
common among the Guys, who always told stories. Where one person would introduce a
topic, another would continue it until a story evolved. Like other practices of literacy in
their lives, this literacy practice usually drew heavily upon aspects of popular media.

Keith: They need to make a TV show . . . for us. Instead of calling it
“Girlfriends,” they can call it “My Ni gga-a-a-a-s” [grins]

The Guys: [Laughs]

Derrick: Keith, you will be the dingy one [laughs].

Keith: The funny one [smiles].

Sheldon: I’m the one getting all the girls.

Shawn: Naw nigga. You be the married one, cheating on his wife ‘cause
you got married in high school. Y’all know how that nigga be
fallin in love [laughs].

Keith: Naw, it’ll be a cross between “Girlﬁiends” and “Making the

Band.” We gone be a rap group, getting our ass beat by Diddy

[laughs] . . .

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This practice continued until the topic was exhausted, a new topic introduced, or
until the group went their separate ways. It usually ended with some ﬁnal summarizing
point or possible point of contention.

Shawn: Now you gone too far. I ain’t gone get my ass beat by nobody.

Derrick: Let me ﬁnish it. [interrupted] . . . We gone be like the Five Deadly

Venoms [a popular 19703 martial arts ﬁlm]. We gone be kicking
the ass [laughs].

After Derrick laughs, the group laughs and moves on to another topic. Though
incomplete and undecided, the story was collaboratively constructed and jointly
abandoned. It might be picked up at a later time, its themes used in a rap, or maybe it
will be revised altogether. Yet as it stood, the collaboration made cooperative sense, a
story about the Guys that rendered meaning only in the context of them.

In this way, no one person held possession over the group’s story. Instead, stories
like the one above evolved creatively, constructed by multiple members of the group,
using multiple voices ﬂom the group. When the Guys told stories like those above, their
telling necessitated a literate practice and imagination that privileged group collaboration
and playfulness, as is also evidenced in the examples to come.

Another way to see the Guys performing literacy and appropriating (con)texts was
in their complex expressive language practices (see Miller & Goodnow, 1995). In such
practices, the Guys borrowed, interpreted, and recasted symbolic material ﬂom the varied
kinds of voices that ﬁlled the garrulous landscape of their everyday lives. I must reiterate
that their expressions were marked by sensitivities to nuances of popular media made

manifest in popular music, comic books, and magazines. Folk tales about the group

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emerged out of such practices. These tales also borrowed ﬂom a range of sources,
including song lyrics, popular magazines, and comic books. Below is a rap written by
Jose, which gives an example of how the group was expressed by its individual members
through their appropriation of popular media5 :
Jose: (rapping) They call me Professor X, about to ﬂex this cool groove
rhyme.
The X-men got my back; the niggas done come at the nick of the
time.
I’m like Pac in his fury. A judge. You know the verdict. My guys
the jury; sure we won’t budge . . .

In this example, Jose uses and blends at least two pOpular media icons: Professor
Charles Xavier ﬂom the X-men comics and Tupac Shakur. While he uses popular media
to help write his raps, he also uses popular media to construct a group of which he sees
himself a part. Where he views himself as powerﬁrl, “like Pac in his fury,” he views the
group as equally powerful, like himself or like a courtroom “jury,” capable of issuing
a”verdict.” Further, to make sense of himself and the group to which he belongs, Jose
symbolically fuses three existing public domains. He takes us at once to the ﬁctitious
world of a comic book (a world of mutants and warlords), the arduous world of a rapper
(Tupac’s “furious” world of violence and ineptitude), and the resolute world of public

jurisprudence (a common courtroom). Hence, the Guys were being made (while helping

 

5 Group identity, as this chapter suggests, was a key thematic in the Guys practice of literacy. From
creative storytelling to exaggerated storytelling, the Guys often practiced literacy to conjure stories about
themselves. In these stories, they either reproduced elements of popular culture or “wrote” themselves
within popular culture altogether.

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to make Jose) between multiple situations that existed somewhere in the hybrid realities
and ﬁctions of inter(con)textual being and the popular media.

Also evidenced in Jose’s rap was the presence of borrowed voices. Like the rap
that starts this chapter, Jose’s rap, while a solo verse, was marked by other people’s
phrases and voices. It is not plagiarizing to adopt other people’s words. Rather, the act
of adopting the voices of others into one’s symphony of ideas composed a text that
allowed Jose to give new meaning to himself, his ﬁiends, and the material he
appropriated. “They call me. . .” was a popular introductory phrase commonly employed
in rap music and attributed to the lyrics of the Sugar Hill Gang. The term “ﬂex” (as in
ﬂexing muscle) is symbolic of masculine strength. The phrase “. . . got my back” is a
borrowed folk expression, which gained popularity in Black culture through Hip Hop.
Hence, Jose’s collection of terms and phrases was a rich and dynamic array of voices that
had been scattered through time and space. In his rap, Jose brought these phrases
together, giving them one distinct voice.

The myriad of voices that helped to constitute Jose also helped to constitute his

Guys. For example, Shawn’s “Cool G Rap” borrowed not only ﬂom popular media but

also ﬂom Jose.
Shawn: [rapping] This is that Cool G Rap
Got the track in the back that
Make you want to clap to that

Cause I’m cool like that

I said I’m cool like that

So call me the Ice Man

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One of the X-men, pops
Ready to drop a bomb

1 move Hip Hop

1 said I’m cool like that . . .

Shawn’s rap, while different in style and composition, mirrored Jose’s rap in that
is borrowed ﬂorn other people’s voices. “I’m cool like that. . .” is a popular Hip Hop
phrase made famous by the group Tribe Called Quest. As you recall, Jose used X-men
in his rap, like Shawn, to illustrate exaggerated characteristics of himself and his peers.
Also, the /k/ sound was present in all but three lines of the verse, giving Shawn’s rap a
music that added melody to its many voices.

There was something naturally musical in the way the Guys practiced literacy. In
the Bakhtinian (1981) sense, the Guys were exercising literacy outside of the authority of
formal structures like school. Instead, they practiced it in relation to their vernacular
voices and folk traditions, which gained value in particular, pedestrian situations. Hence,
as the Guys practiced literacy, they did so jointly as a matter of social nature and mutual
obligation. The voices that Jose and Shawn practiced were theirs to borrow. Yet, they
did not belong to an individual, but to the group for play and performance and for the
reproduction of popular media forms that the group absorbed, accepted, and accentuated.

Nevertheless, contextual overtones surrounded literacy in the Guys’ lives. These
overtones imbued the literacies they practiced with a social connotation, which was
embedded in the values and unsanctioned authority of other people’s voices. This
transformation of old symbols to produce new meanings is basic to all symbolic activity

(Dyson, 2003; Hanks, 1996).

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In this section, I have demonstrated the ways in which literacy mediates group
performance and peer play among the Guys. 1 have also shown how the Guys drew
richly on popular media to establish common bonds within such activities. In the next
section I write about how the Guys expanded my notions of literacy, as literacy for them
was also a tool for cultural production. In addition to borrowing literate forms, the Guys
were producing and participating in new literacies and new ways of performing and
playing.

An Expanding Universe: Literacy and Cultural Production

Lines between personal and collective practices usually blur as literacy gets
enacted in social (i.e., peer group) situations (Dyson, 2003). As illustrated earlier, stories
of the self merge profoundly into stories of the group. Sociocultural bonds converge
within these stories to (re)constitute the fabric of the group and the material (e. g. “White
T’s”) that the group uses to practice literacy. For example, the Guys existed between
cultural spaces and appropriated material ﬂom a vast range of connected cultural
contexts, usually for the purposes of interacting with one another.

In this way, literacy learning is very much a process of cultural reproduction-—
bending to cultural norms and revoicing accepted notions of what it means to be. On the
other hand, literacy learning is also an important part of cultural production. As
individuals participate along the hybrid axes of an expanding cultural universe in both
time and space (see also Gutierrez & Stone, 2000), they learn to behave literately to mold
culture into unique arrangements so that some aspect of society is contoured distinctly to
ﬁt individuals who are like themselves. As such, literacy functions as a mediating force

between self and society, weaving within the fabric of life constant revisions of culture so

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that culture, itself, is not only reproduced, but simultaneously and altogether produced
anew.

The literacies the Guys’ practiced were instrumental in the production of the
Guys’ culture. Though it is a contested term having many meaning, I am deﬁning culture
here as the integrated patterns of group knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors that depend
upon a group’s capacity for learning, practicing, and transmitting language and literacy to
its members. The literacies the Guys practiced carried with them the customary beliefs,
social forms and formats, and material traits of the social groups. It instantiated the sets
of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes every human group and
its members.

As they practiced literacy, the Guys became articulations of their peers and the
hybrid cultures in which they participated (Bakhtin, 1981). Within these peer groups and
hybrid cultural communities, multiple lines of being intersected in complex ways to
greatly inﬂuence how literacy was practiced and how culture was produced. In their
practice of literacy, the Guys were producers of cultures, helping to expand an ever-
evolving cultural universe. Perhaps Derrick explains this point best in his discussion of
taking “the game to another level”:

Derrick: We be taken these words [when we rap] and be creating something
new. We ain’t trying to be like other rap groups. We trying to
take the game to another level. We trying to change the game.

Derrick’s statement about “changing the game” speaks to a key function of
literacy within the group. For the Guys, language—written, spoken, or ascribed—was at

times meant to create “something new.” With this, a common goal of literacy for the

102

Guys was to inﬂuence culture in a way that allowed the group to move beyond the
restraints of the “other” so that they could “change the game.” These cultural aspects of
literacy were, therefore, neither neutral nor politically irmocent (see Chapter 4). The
Guys practiced literacy at the cultural level in a way that added to this level. This isn’t to
say that they did not coalesce in the reproduction of existing cultural norms (see
MacLeod, 1996); it merely suggests that they also molded (or at least intended to mold)
culture by innovatively playing with words and their meanings. I use an excerpt ﬂom
Denick’s poem—which he called “the new spoken word” to illustrate this point:
U turn
left b Hind
Legs sprawl ing on top of Black back
Mountains
Rivers that Run Deep
Like Sheba’s Queens and she Loves
Open pours
inside empty cups that rim over
hope like Escalades
that phaint in Darkness
that phreeze in Night
That phuck in morning, morning
Uprising
Lite skin white men

Blues is my brothers

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Black is my Berry
Sweet is my juice
So U turn back to me
I re turn back to U
I die daily 4 U

In his poem, Derrick boasted an interesting sprawl of cultural and linguistic
markers. Lines like “Blues . . . brothers” allude to popular media characters (e. g., Dan
Aykroyd’s and John Belushi’s “Blues Brothers”). The lines “Black is my Berry/Sweet is
my juice” is borrowed ﬂom a popular folk phrase in Black culture: “the Blacker the
Berry, the sweeter the juice” (Smitherman, 1999, p. 176). Embedded in the poem are
literary allusions ﬂorn respected texts like the Bible (e.g., “Sheba’s Queen” and “cups
that run over”) to classical Black literature like Langston Hughes’s poem “the Negro
Speaks of Rivers” (e. g., “Rivers that run Deep”). Derrick also appropriated modern
linguistic conventions, like the creative spelling of words like you (U) and for (4) and
sounds like /f/ (“ph”). While these examples point to how Derrick’s poem was situated
within existing cultural norms, deeper analysis suggests that it also extended those norms.

Derrick explained his use of “ph” in the words “phaint,” “phreeze,” and “phuck”
as giving words new meaning. As Smitherman (1999) explains, liberties with language
are common features of Hip Hop and an emerging feature of popular media. This is
important because, as mentioned earlier, Hip Hop culture and the popular media greatly
inﬂuenced the practice of literacy in the Guys’ lives. Where popular media and Hip Hop

push the cultural envelope, so too did the Guys. According to Smitherman:

104

One of the least understood communicative practices in AAL is the
manipulation of EAL’s [i.e., “European American English”] semantic
structure. Often inappropriately dismissed as “Black slang,” this
rhetorical maneuvering amounts to linguistic appropriation, what late
linguist Grace Holt (1972) called “semantic inversion.” . . . It is a process
whereby AAL speakers take words and concepts ﬂom EAL lexicon and
either reverse their meanings or impose entirely different meanings (pp.
279, 280).

Keeping Smitherrnan’s explanation of “semantic inversion” in mind, an explicit
connection can be made between “semantic inversion” and Derrick’s use of “ph” to spell
terms traditionally spelled with “f.” In his own words, Denick explained his revisions of
the terms freeze and fail:

These words ain’t new. But they is new when I use them like this
because, to me, they can mean different things. It’s like the difference
between fat and phat. Fat spelled with an “f” means big like out of shape.
Phat spelled with a “ph” means that it’s nice, like that phat watch you got
on. It aint out of shape. It’s nice. So I use the “ph” in the poem to make
old words mean new things. “Phaint” don’t mean to fall out; it means to
get away ﬂom—to fall below the radar screen of everybody. But you still
operating correctly. Yo game is still on point, but you just ain’t putting it
out there for everybody to know ‘cause everybody ain’t got yo back.

“Phreeze” don’t mean to be cold; it means to get ﬂee, to move quietly

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away ﬂom what haunts you. Being a Black guy you gotta creep in the
night ‘cause if you let them know what you doing, they gone get you.

In the traditions of Black folk (Collins, 1996; Gilyard, 1991; Labov, 1972;
Richardson, 2003; Smitherman, 1977, 1999, 2006), language and symbol gets played
with (in this sense inverted and spelled differently) to create a unique, new voice, which
liberates speakers ﬂom the limits of dominant cultures (and by extension dominant
vocabularies). In this sense, culture is expanded, or enlarged, in such a way that
perspectives, which seldom ﬁnd place in of public transcripts, can be voiced and put into
parlance. Then, as groups come to practice literacy and play with language and symbol,
cultural seeds are planted, giving the intentions and perspectives of its tillers room to
grow outwardly in society’s fertile “landscape of voices” (Dyson, 2003, p. 12).

I am sitting in Sheldon’s living room with the rest of the Guys with the exception
of Shawn, who by now is serving time in jail for an alleged drug offense. The Guys are
huddled around a television set, playing Madden 2003. Sheldon has a notebook ﬁlled
with scribbles, part of his contribution to the Guys’ culture of video game play. It
contains a list of strategies and notes he has documented for playing Madden. (Sheldon
regularly jotted notes in his notebook to give him an advantage. His note-taking
stimulated Tony to take notes as well. Hence, note-taking became a practice within the
culture of their video game play). As a serious player, Sheldon researched strategies for
play Madden ﬂom the Internet and video game magazines. Sheldon’s interaction around
playing Madden became a spark in his literate life, which ignited bountiful literate
activities for himself and his peers. Looking at Sheldon’s notebook, Keith glanced at him

and asked, “What you got?”

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Sheldon: These my notes.

Keith: You better take notes. You can’t beat nobody without them
{laughs}-

Sheldon: [admittedly not the best Madden player] I bet I beat you.

Tony: [pulling a crinkled sheet of paper out of his pocket] I got notes
too.

Keith: Y’all niggas take this game too serious.

Sheldon: You just mad cause you can’t read and write.

The Guys: [laughs]

The evidence of literacy was prevalent in every aspect of the Guys’ lives, found in
a pocket full of notes and in the marked-up pages of a hidden notebook. It was promoted
in the lure of competition, exercised intensely as the Guys gathered together to perform
and play. None of this is new, however. We know that males engage literacy as a
competitive practice (N ewkirk, 2003). Young Aﬁican Americans engage it as part of
their group play (Dyson, 2003) or within particular “participatory communities” (Fisher,
2003). Surrounding the Guys’ practices of literacy were literate artifacts, however, like
Sheldon’s and Tony’s notes. Beyond the notes was the instantiation of a new cultural
enterprise: an integrated pattern of group knowledge (what’s found in notes), beliefs
(note-taking can improve video game play), and behaviors (the act of taking notes) that
depended upon a group’s capacity for learning, practicing, valuing, and transmitting new
knowledges and literacy practices.

In this sense, the video game culture of the Guys was active, tied to group’s

interests and produced within the group’s symbolic activity. The video game culture (and

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the literacy practices associated with it) emerged as literacy within the group was enacted
to help chart meanings, compose identities, and establish performances, either as a way of
being or in the process of helping one become (Gee, 2001). In addition, the literacies that
constituted the video game culture were not only borrowed; they were altogether
produced anew, accentuating, if you will, new found strategies for group play (Bakhtin,
1981; Dyson, 1997, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). Hence, one can see literacy as a function of
cultural production, operative in group play (Dyson, 2003; Sperling, 1995, 2003).

Given this, it is important to note that culture is not static. Rather, “It is formed
ﬂom the efforts of people working together, using and adapting material and symbolic
tools provided by predecessors and in the process creating new ones” (Rogoff, 2003, p.
51). As such, “Culture is a particularly powerful social ﬂarnework that can signiﬁcantly
impact the nature of” social groups and literacy practice (Kucer, 2001 , p. 181). However,
where they cannot ﬁt into existing cultural locations, social groups, like the Guys, carve
out new cultural sites where they might ﬁnd belonging. Video game culture, for
example, was a site mediated by literacy practices that surround the group’s video
playing activities. From it emerged cultural products like notes, which revealed a great
deal about the literacies the Guys practiced and the literacies they also opposed.

Conclusion

Following my discussion of cultural production, it is important to note that
reading and writing, while important, were but small parts of how the Guys practiced
literacy. In a similar way, raps and tattoos, while also important, were but small parts of
how the Guys invented themselves and expanded the cultural universe in which we all

live. As such, the Guys used literacy—reading and writing, raps and tattoos—to inform

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their sociocultural (inter) actions. These practices and texts were extensions of the
contexts and characters present in the Guys’ social worlds where they encountered units
of meaning that brought their symbolic play to life.

In the lives of the Guys, literacy was based on encounters with meaning, captured
in multisensual formats, produced in a variety of human environments. Therefore,
literacy can never be said to be learned passively nor does an active explanation capture
its complete, holistic complexity. One is an active participant in her or his learning of
literacy, but never actively participates alone. There are contributions, immutable, which
occupy and actively assist, as well, in the learning of literacy. Literacy learning, like
video game play, where music, mood, pairings, and even the room inﬂuences movement
and inspiration, is contingent, based upon the cultural vibe of the very moment.

There is a complex combination of forces at work in all literate activity. In this
way, literacy learning is an interactive process, which requires the participation of various
elements both beyond and surrounding the individual. The individual comes to be seen
as not only an agent in literacy practice but a partner, whose actions depend, in part, on
the actions of others.

Finally, literacy is practiced in tension. Some might even argue that the
achievement debate surrounding the academic literacy performances of urban adolescent
Black males is at the heart of this tension. As I have attempted to demonstrate, it is not
always the case that low-performing Black males lack literacy. As this chapter suggests,
many Black males are like the Guys; they may well be, in fact, highly literate. The
experiences of the Guys, if properly elucidated, raise questions about how we deﬁne

literacy.

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While we are hell bent on changing them, getting them to submit to our purposes
for and deﬁnitions of literacy, many young, urban Black men, like the Guys, battle,
instead, to retain their identities and own purposes for literacy. In their struggle over
intent, a common goal surrounding literacy emerges: to resist social and cultural
domination. The next chapter examines the ways in which the Guys practiced literacy to

resist cultural domination or resisted literacy to maintain a sense of self.

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CHAPTER 4
Literacy and Resistance in the Lives of the Guys

Literacy is precisely situated at signiﬁcant points of contestation (Hull, 1993;
Freire & Macedo, 1987 ; Giroux, 1987). Notions of literacy are conﬂonted with issues of
content, purpose, value, authority, inequalities and imbalances of power. These issues
paint literacy with new and imposing challenges, which make non-mainstream literacy
practices as relevant and as likely to have an impact on mainstream culture and education
as academic literacy practices (Morrell, 2004).

As such, literacy operates as a dynamic, shifting, and sometimes subversive part
of society, making a difference in the way people see themselves, their world, and their
likelihood for social action (Freire, 1987). Consequently, literacy can be seen as a site at
which contested forces like race and gender are mediated and dominant ideas and forms
resisted or altogether rejected (Giroux, 1983). In this way, literacy in the lives of the
Guys had much to do with rejecting dominant literacy practices and resisting dominant
notions of what it means to be literate. Resistance, here, can be thought of as a contrary
action or condition to withstand the force or effect of symbolic/cultural domination either
by rejecting dominant cultural forms (e. g., academic literacy) or by articulating critiques
(through various symbolic modes) of dominant culture.

For the Guys, literacy served as a key location for the propagation of resistance,
where language was “recontextualized” (Dyson, 2003) in terms of political struggle for
social justice and civic enﬂanchisement (Giroux, 1983). Certain types of literacy were
rejected altogether, and silence acted as political voice of disruption and as a possible site
of displeasure. At other points, silence acted as a cooperative voice, which ironically

articulated the group’s unwillingness to contribute to the unjust project of cultural

lll

domination. In this chapter, I examine the tenuous dynamics of literacy as practiced or
rejected by the Guys and explore the social critiques necessarily present in their literacy
products.

Realizing Resistance: Situating the Politics of Literacy Practice

An interdisciplinary range of scholars have used the term resistance to discuss the
contested practices of literacy and to shed light upon the contradictions of society and the
conﬂicting locations of groups within society (Giroux, 1983; MacLeod, 1996;
Smitherman, 1999; Willis, 1977). According to this body of work, resistance is made
manifest in social struggles, highlighted by a rejection of social values and meanings
embedded within the principal literacy practice (i.e., academic/ofﬁcial literacy [see
Dyson, 2003; Morrell, 2004) prevalent in dominant society.

The intersectionality of language and race also plays a major role in linking
literacy and resistance. For example, Smitherman (1999) argues, “The Black Experience
is a narrative of resistance, of an on-going struggle to be ﬂee, perhaps the motive force in
African American history” (p. 34). Since literacy is inextricably interwoven within a
group’s culture and history (see Chapter 3), literacy in the lives of Aﬂican Americans
would shape or help shape “narratives of resistance.” Smitherman (1999) argues, for
example, that rappers, writing within the “racialized rhetoric of rap music” (p. 271)—
which “is embodied in the communicative practices of the larger Black community" (p.
271)-—employ rap as a form of literacy to resist social and cultural domination.
According to Smitherman (1999),

. . . in their quest to “disturb the peace,” [rappers] deliberately and consciously

employ the “antilanguage” of the Black speech community, thus

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sociolinguistically constructing themselves as members of the dispossessed. Even

when the message in the music does not overtly speak to racial resistance, the use

of the Black speech community’s syntax covertly reinforces Black America’s
400-year rejection of Euro-American cultural, racial—and linguistic—domination

(pp. 274, 278).

Like Smitlrennan’s description of rappers’ use of language as a tool for resistance,
resistance within (and to forms of) literacy privileges distance rather than proximity to
grand social narratives and the people whom they embody. Resistance to and within
literacy become part of a larger, lingering struggle of the suppressed, who are active in
maintaining a struggle against cultural absorption and for symbolic and emerging aspects
of cultural heritage. As such, resistance in literacy critiques dominant narratives,
challenges the dominant literacy paradigm with alternative paradigms, and reshapes
social events and literacy practices in ways that afﬁrm the histories and perspectives of
suppressed social groups.

This shifting and reshaping of literacy and the role of language in social space
works to invert power relations, if only temporarily, by exposing, evading, and/or
subverting the fallacious accounts on which social hierarchies are founded and sustained.
Resistant literacy practices become necessary for group survival and the group’s social
viability, as they serve to offset the ideological technologies of reproduction while
preserving a group’s sense of itself and its possibilities for social (re)action and social
(ex)change. Resistance in literacy, in this way, merges the existential realities of Black
male bodies (i.e., ﬁght, struggle, invisibility, and durability) with alternative social

realities that are altered frequently and profoundly ﬂom the perspective of Black males,

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who themselves render radical examinations and revisions equally of history, language,
literacy, and society.

Another way to view resistance is productively, as having a potential for human
agency and effecting progressive and deliberate social change in a contested world
(Freire, 1987). Hence, resistance for the Guys was a response to being resisted as Black
males in mainstream society. Further, resistance to them, as justiﬁed by negative
portrayals of Black men in society (see Chapter 1), characterized the Guys as
intimidating, angry, and violent (hooks, 2003; Noguera, 2003). I speak more explicitly to
this point later in the chapter.

The knowledge produced by the Guys in their practice of literacy, however, has
always been regenerative and potentially emancipatory, as their practice of literacy
allowed them to respond to being resisted. Through literacy, the Guys created knowledge
and understanding they purposefully used to solve their own life problems, which usually
stemmed ﬂom inequities laden in society. As their literate products and conversations
with me indicate, the Guys were making sense of the world in a way that positioned them
as critics as opposed to critiques.

As I continue their story, I must point out that the narrative of the Guys’ literate
histories mark some of the most overt forms of Black male resistance to social
domination I had ever witnessed. By calling attention to their forms of resistance, I
attempt to open a space in which interested readers are more likely and able to make
sense of the incongruous perspectives of such young men while continuing to challenge
what it means to be literate.

Two Types of Resistance

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There is an ongoing body of work which constructs Black males as “oppositional”
to mainstream culture and society (Kotlowitz, 1991; Noguera, 2003; Ogbu, 1974).
However, the term “opposition” can be thought of in the dialogic sense (see Bakhtin,
1986; Dyson, 2003), as it ﬁts within the reciprocal perspective of social physics. That is,
for every (re) action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Using this idea, we can
view “oppositional” practices as moving bidirectionally [see ﬁgure]—as sustained
reactions to “equal and opposite” “oppositional” actions.

Therefore, another way to view resistant Black males, especially the Guys, is as
being resisted. For example, the Guys were often made objects of fear and humiliation,
which promoted, in them, emotive responses (or reactions) of resistance, usually
articulated in despair or anger. These dispositions noticeably lead to the Guys’ textual
preoccupations and deep interests in the themes of death and violence (themes that are
prevalent in the Guys’ raps, tattoos, and other writings). Later, I provide examples,
which more than likely shed light on some of the Guys’ everyday experiences to illustrate
these points.

bell hooks (2003) writes that Black males, while rarely loved, are often feared.
Hence, as Black males, the Guys were made objects of fear, which itself worked as a
meta-narrative that pronounced to them society’s rejection of them. The dehumanizing
gazes and gestures that the Guys and I received while walking through a mall, for
example, worked to shape us as subhuman—not as dependent children to be cared for,
but as vile beast or suspicious creatures to be feared. In the eyes of certain mall-goers,
we were very literally like the “boogey man,” physical manifestations of a lingering

socially constructed fear of Black men that society perpetuates. I use examples #1 and #2

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ﬂom my ﬁeldnotes to illustrate this point.

Example #1 (ﬂom ﬁeldnotes. 05/04/2004):
The Guys and I were in a mall, casually walking away ﬂom the foodcourt.

 

We had just wrapped up our group session, and Derrick and Tony wanted
to “walk around the mall to look at some clothes.” We were moving
along, in a random direction, walking slowly up a wide corridor as we
passed a middle-aged White woman. Upon seeing us, the woman gripped
her purse ﬁrmly. I could visibly see veins suddenly popping out of her
hands, as they convulsed, collapsing tightly onto her shoulder strap. She
tucked the purse under her arms, glanced at us, glanced away, then back at
us again, and hastened her pace. . .

While it is pure speculation on my part, in the presence of certain mall-goers (in
this case, a middle-aged White woman), the Guys and I presented a threat (or at least
upset her casual, “peaceful” reality). We had to be averted, run away ﬂom, so that our
Blackness, even at distance, could not be seen. The woman carrying her purse perhaps
perceived us as a threat and, therefore, constructed us as criminal (thinking that we would
steal her purse). Her racist reaction to us was not, however, because she was White.
Rather, she resisted us most likely because we were Black males. The following example
describes a Black couple’s reaction to us in the same mall on the same day.

gamble #2 (ﬂom ﬁeldnotes. 05/04/200‘Ik

We were still at the mall, walking and playfully chatting through the
mall’s wide-open lanes. A middle-aged Black couple, who were walking

toward us on the same side of the mall, looked at us squarely. Still staring

116

at us, the man grabbed the woman by the hand and, obtrusively, pulled her
to the other side of the mall with him. With quick feet, the woman
followed, as they both retreated down the corridor opposite us . . . As
distance grew between the couple and us, I glanced back to see if the
couple was still walking. Indeed, they were walking. They were walking
down the lane still moving in the direction opposite us. However, they
were no longer on the opposite side of the mall. Having gained some
distance ﬂom us, they crossed back over to the side of the mall that we
were on . . .

The dehumanizing gazes and peculiar reactions that we received at the mall were
nothing new for the Guys and me. We had become accustomed to being looked at oddly,
even by other Aﬂican Americans. According to Shawn,

People always looking at us like we gone kill them or something. We don’t want

nothing ﬂom them. We minding our own business. . . We don’t cringe up when

they come around us.

The societal loathing of Black males is institutional, propagated by schools and
mainstream media (for further discussion on this, see Chapter 1). This is nothing new.
Black males attending urban schools have long reported signiﬁcant incidents of distrust
that stem ﬂom society’s psychic fears of them (A. Ferguson, 2000; R. Ferguson, 1998).
In addition, many Black males attend schools where their entering and leaving are always
under special suspicion. To enter school, many must pass through an uncaring system of
metal detecting devices, and upon leaving, they are escorted out of sight under the

watchful eyes of security patrol people, surveillance cameras, or police ofﬁcers.

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Being feared sometimes lends itself to anger. For Black males, the longing for

humanity, to be embraced as human subjects instead of repulsive objects, results in their

resentment of a fearful mainstream that projects them as unpleasant bodies of anxious

concern. Their reaction to resentment becomes a leitrnotif in their literacy products.

Multi-sensual expressions of anger became an accessible text to which the Guys could

easily and readily relate and, therefore, produce and consume. To illustrate this point, I

turn to a conversation I had with the Guys following the mall incidents discussed in the

above examples:

Derrick:

The Group:

Shawn:

Derrick:

Shawn:

Derrick:

Sheldon:

People be thinking that rappers all mean in stuff. They ain’t mean
at all. They just got a complaint. I mean. You Black. You living
in a world where don’t nobody want you [around]. What you
gonna do? Join hands and rap kumbaya.

{Laughs}

[Interrupting the laughter]. Naw, D right. This shit ain’t fair. We
gotta go through this shit everyday. We got a right to be mad and
let people know we mad. Damn right, rappers sound mad because
they got a right to be mad.

I wouldn’t say they got a right to be mad, but they do got a reason.
Naw. They gOt a right ‘cause, I don’t know about you, but I get
tried of being treated like I’m some kind of, kind of. . .

Crook. I see what you saying.

It pisses me off too when White people be gripping they purse

when you come around, when they follow you around the store,

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start walking fast to they car when you and them come out the
store at the same time. I’m saying.

Me: How does that make you feel?

Tony: I feel like I’m the boogey man, yo. They scary. Scared of me. So
that make me stronger than them.

Keith: I feel like. . .man. . .I ain’t even good enough to be around, like the
stinky kid in school. [Laughs] Naw . . . for real . . . I ain’t gone
lie . . . that make me mad.

Sheldon: I be mad too.

Jose: I don’t care, man [puts his head down and laughs].

While anger was not a unanimous (at least not everyone admitted to being angry)
reaction to being feared/resisted, it was the overwhelming sentiment shared among the
Guys. Even as Jose didn’t care, his gesture of putting his head down suggests a level of
degradation. Where Tony felt “stronger than them,” he also felt like the “boogey man,”
which in anyone’s terms is less than empowering.

Perhaps, Derrick’s discussion of violence in rap puts it best: “they [rappers] just
got a complaint.” The Guys’ complaint, indeed, was a reaction to, and in dialogue with,
the presuppositions of others, who, even while walking through the mall, articulated ﬂom
safe distances their disdain for them. Whether it is simply a “reason” or a “right,” the
Guys’ anger certainly provides an example of how mainstream resistance (fear) worked
to foster counter resistance (anger) on the part of a group of young Black men.

Like anger, violence was also a response to the resistance the Guys endured. I am

not talking outright about physical/actual violence, but textual violence. Hence, violence

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too became an accessible text, both produced and consumed by the Guys. The

following set of conversations takes place individually with the Guys. I talked with

Sheldon about newspaper articles he liked to read:

Me:

Sheldon:

Me:

Sheldon:

Me:

Sheldon:

Me:

Sheldon:

How often do you read the newspaper?

I read it every day. My stepfather gets one.

What do you like reading the most?

I don’t know. Most people like the sports section. I read that too,
but I be mostly reading about what happening around here
[locally].

Like what?

See this article [pointing at the newspaper]. I knew this guy. He
went to school with me. He killed these girls at the park and was
shooting at [a local restaurant]. Reading the newspaper is more
interesting when you know the people in there, especially when it
is about something violent.

Why violent?

Violence is exciting. Violence shapes my world. It is something I

know a lot about.

Violence was a theme, which seduced Sheldon’s imagination. In his own words,

“Violence is exciting. . .It is something I know a lot about.” When asked about what he

likes to read, Tony shared Sheldon’s sentiments about violence. To him, violent comic

books were not only interesting and relevant; they were in some strange way therapeutic.

Me:

Tony, what do you like to read?

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Tony:

Me:

Tony:

Tony:

I don’t like to read [Laughs].

I know you read something.

I’m almost done with high school, and I ain’t never read a book all
the way through. I don’t like reading.

You write raps, don’t you?

Yeah.

Do you read them?

Yeah, but that’s not reading, like reading books. I see what you
saying. Rap is poetry. So when you on yo ﬂow, I guess you be
reading it. But it ain’t like that.

[Interrupts] Okay, I understand that. Do you read magazines?
Yeah, but I read comic books.

See you read. How long have you read them?

I always liked comic books.

Which ones?

I like the classics: X-men, Batman is my favorite, Superman,
Spiderman, Spawn. The video game books like comics too.
What makes comics interesting?

The struggle. It’s like life. You gotta struggle to make it, to
overcome your enemy. Life is action packed.

Like a comic book?

Yup. The action you get in comics is in yo face. It’s entertaining

to see people struggle. And I think violence is like sex; it sells.

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That’s why it’s around us. It make me feel better.

This notion that violence was not only entertaining but therapeutic ‘disturbed me.
In addition, violence was counter to what I had known about Tony, who, among the
Guys, was the only one to never have had a ﬁght. To me, it seemed like Tony was living
vicariously through the experiences of the characters in the comics he read. He was
attracted to the violence because it represented a ﬂacture in the battle between good and
evil. It was a place where the underdog could ﬁght back (as was the case with X—men),
attempting to reclaim a sense of worth ﬂom a world that robs individuals of dignity and
humanity. Hence, for Tony, violence was struggle, a form of resistance that celebrated
his own longing to overcome the obstacles of social oppression.

My conversation with Shawn was a bit different because it was about his writing
interests as opposed to his reading interests. Notwithstanding, the theme of violence was

ever present, as it powerfully showed up in Shawn’s writing.

Me: Tell me a little about what you write about.

Shawn: Like what? I only write raps.

Me: Well. I don’t know. Whatever you want to tell. Tell me about
your raps.

Shawn: I write about a lot things in my raps: about how I’m feeling, about

my life, my journeys, my struggles. I don’t know. I just be getting
things out, and usually people like me, they relate.

Me: People like you?

Shawn: Yeah. Young Black men like me, other rappers. We catch hell out

here. You know it. So we got to document what’s happening.

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Ain’t nobody else gone do it. It ain’t easy out here for us, and
people need to know about it. When life make you mad, make you
want to beat up against the wall, you gotta get it out. Or you gonna
beat somebody head in. So instead of knocking somebody block
off, we write. So the anger, ﬂustration, violence—all that—come
out in our raps.

From the personal testimonies of these three young men, violence is seen both as
an attractive part of reading, for it is—to them—relevant. The violence expressed in
texts, however, was also a response for them to the lingering remnants of anger they
failed to conceal (e. g., “. . .the anger, ﬂustration, violence—all that come out in our
raps”). When reading violent stories, the young men gained a sense of enjoyment and
escape and entered a space where struggle against social norms was not only allowed but
also elucidated. When writing, making violence visible in verse served a similar
function. As Shawn pointed out, writing violent lyrics takes the place of the physical
ﬂustration that accompanies being feared and oppressed.

Being resisted stimulated resistance ﬂom the Guys. In order to be useful,
resistance must be understood within this dialogic ﬂame. That is, even while they were
resistant, the Guys were being resisted. As the Guys used literacy to resist cultural
domination, they also resisted literacy (Tony: “1 don’t read”) as a way of opposing the
value and status imposed upon dominant literacies by those who have long resisted them.

In this sense, we can view the Guys’ resistance in two ways—as rejection and
critique. The Guys employed resistance (social rejection) sometimes overtly by not

appropriating dominant functions of literacy like reading “books”. They also employed

123

resistance (as critique) within the literacies they practiced like writing violence in raps.
We now turn to an analysis of the Guys’ resistance in and to literacy and dominant
society.
Narratives of Resistance: Literacy as Social Critiques and Silent Struggles
Literacy in the lives of the Guys sometimes acted as a form of resistance,

6

privileging radical literacy practices— ‘the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a
vocabulary turned against those who had once used it . . .” (Foucault, 1977, p. 154).
Shawn’s “Fuck the Police” (ﬁgure 5) tattoo was an example of this kind of resistance.
While the phrase was appropriated ﬂom Black people’s historical struggles with law
enforcement and Hip Hop artists’ (most notably NWA) articulation of this struggle,
Shawn’s tattoo gives evidence to how the Guys positioned language and literacy to resist
mainstream domination. Hence, literacy became a tool to criticize institutions, like law
enforcement, which made such domination possible.
Shawn’s tattoo was not the only example of social critique produced by the Guys.
Such commentary usually showed up in all of their writings. For example, in the
following excerpts taken ﬂom Derrick’s journal, another example of social critique and
commentary is presented. Derrick’s personal stories, like Shawn’s brash “Fuck the
Police” tattoo, were narratives of resistance.
Excerpt #1:
What is a man with no blood in his vain and no water to drink?
Good people have no reason to do good things for no reason

because in one's mind it is the right thing to do. Evil deeds can

only be put in one's hands but it is that person's choice to do it or

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not. I can't say that all weak minded people are evil and vice versa
but we all must make choices in our lives. Everyday choices are
laid out before us to test the soul mind and body. Yes, the choices
are laid out before us to test the soul, mind, and body. Yes, the
choice will always be as long as you have time. In my mind, I
have no choice. I do what I must to be strong. My choices are
here, so I will choose now!

While the excerpt expresses Derrick’s personal thoughts about life, a deep reading
suggests that it issues deep criticism about an unjust world. In the excerpt, Derrick
struggles to make sense out of the sometimes difficult choices individuals must make in
order to survive. He questions, “What is a man to do with no blood in his veins and no
water to drink?” The statement is profound, for it introduces a critique of society, which
Derrick characterizes as a place in which “Good people have no reason to do good things
for no reason.” He reasons, “Evil deeds can only be put in one's hands. . .” These
statements appear to defend evil, which goes against popular ideas where good always
wins. However, Denick is critiquing evil by questioning a population of individuals who
see themselves as “good” but fail to “do good” unless they have reason. Hence, the
society Derrick exposes is one where the black and white treatment of good/evil is made
complex. This allows Derrick to, also, render complexly the choices of individuals,
which, too, are neither black nor white.

While Derrick’s writing is revealing, it also tragic and ironic. In a world where
“we all must make choices in our lives,” Derrick sees himself with “no choice” at all.

This tragedy of irony was a crucial part of Derrick’s social critique. It presents a counter-

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narrative, which exposes a less than romantic society. In the following excerpt, Derrick

continues to shed light on a disparate world, far removed ﬂom our conscious and

everyday thoughts.

Excerpt #2:

A bullet ﬂies. It hits me, collapsing my lung. My mouth opens
wide, but the song is unsung. Why did this happen? What wrong
have I done? More shots rain out—hollow tips ﬂom his gat. I've
been shot too many times. Is there a chance of coming back. Out
of about 13, one hits my heart, as my body is thrown back. My
whole plan falls apart. This was no work of nature, more like a
work of art. And I herd him say as I was going to the bottom, "I
got what I wanted, now I'm glad that I shot him." I love him and
the bullets both the same, but I hate that I am an immortal in so
much pain. All too tiered of the strain with the bullets in my body,
I still had to get up. Living life with these sheep man, I want to
give up. I can't follow your shepherd cause he is a corrupted one.
He give you all the bullets, but didn’t give a gun. You tried to be
the man, so you tried to put me out. But you can't stop me; it's just
sad to see how you show so much stupidity. You should have lived
life by thinking critically. Keep your head up. Don't try to follow
me. Try to be someone different. Live independently. The fact
that you tried to hurt me didn't hurt me. It’s the fact that you’re

hurting yourself trying to hurt me that hurts me.

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In this excerpt, Derrick’s preoccupation with death and dying is clear. There is
the violence of gunshots and the vivid story of “collapsing lungs.” But like the ﬁrst
excerpt, this example criticizes crucial aspects of society (e. g., “I can't follow your
shepherd cause he is a corrupted one”). Denick presents a dog cat dog world, where, “to
be the man,” you would have to put someone else out. Derrick considers this competitive
existence as stupidity, as it offers no joy. Simply put, it offers only tragedy, which is
profoundly captured in Derrick’s other statement of irony: “The fact that you tried to hurt
me didn't hurt me. It’s the fact that you’re hurting yourself trying to hurt me that hurts
me.”

In addition to using literacy to critique society and offer these tragic and ironic

counter-narratives/narratives of resistance, the Guys resisted dominant manifestations of

literacy by resisting to read and write in formal, academic ways.

Shawn: I don’t like to read, Kirk.

Jose: Me neither.

Me: Why?

Jose: It’s boring

Shawn: Naw. It’s the stuff they have you read [in school].

Me: Like what?

Derrick: We reading Macbeth in my English class. Hell, when I do read it,

I don’t lmow what he saying. I know it ain’t important.
This part of our conversation suggested that the Guys were voluntary resistant
readers because academic reading lacked relevance to them. As the conversation

continued, their resistance to reading gained greater justiﬁcation, as academic reading not

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only lacked relevance, it also presented a perceived threat.

Shawn:

{Laughs}

Tony:

Shawn:
Tony:

{Laughs}
Keith:

Me:

Keith:

Yeah, they be trying to get you to read all that White stuff, like that

gone make you smarter. It’s gone make you Whiter.

That’s why I don’t read. In my class, we don’t even read about
Black people. What I’m gone read for. I just be quiet and put my
head down.

Nigga, that’s cause you can’t read [laughs].

I can read better than you

Cain’t none of y’all read. Y’all been hooked on phonics since y’all
was three and y’all asses still hooked on phonics [Laughs].
Keith, do you like to read.

Not in school. I hate to read in school.

Beyond their joking, the Guys’ resistance to academic reading suggests that

academic reading served the purpose of cultural domination, to “make you Whiter.” The

Guys were suspicious by the perceived lack of cultural representation in their choice of

school texts [e.g., “In my class, we don’t even read about Black people”]. This lack of

selection silenced Tony, as he admitted to resisting reading texts that did not represent

Black people. For them, reading in school for school purposes made reading a bad

experience. To this point, Keith admits: “I hate to read in school.”

Our conversation continues, now with the focus on writing in school.

Me:

How about writing? Do any of you like to write in school?

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Derrick I know you write.

Sheldon: I don’t like writing for school. . .I just B.S. my way through my
papers [Interrupted].

Derrick: It’s not the same writing for a class. You can’t be you. See my
man [pointing to Shawn]; he got his own style. In school, they
don’t let you be you.

This last example also illustrates the ways in which the Guys were reacting to
being resisted (e.g., “. . . they don’t let you be you”). Hence, their resistance to academic
forms of literacy was more or less a response to being resisted. It was also their way of
battling/dealing with the forces of irrelevance and cultural domination, forces that they
conﬂonted daily in school and out.

Inherent in this form of resistance (i.e., rejection of academic literacy) was the
societal labeling of the Guys as low literate (see Chapter 6). In this sense, the Guys
resistance to academic literacy helped to reproduce structural relations of oppression
(Weis, 1982). Ironically, in resisting dominant manifestations of literacy, the Guys
rejected this promise of mainstream inclusion, and of their own volition, cemented their
existing peripheral social positions. However, they continued to practice literacy—
beyond the authority of the school—in their own ways.

Conclusion

As they practiced literacy, the Guys contested cultural domination. They
employed literacy to call attention to, to critique, and to reconﬁgure the relationship
between and to put into dialogue society’s racist points of view and their own. In this

way, their practices of literacy were sometimes at odds with the norms of society. When

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the reality of racism set in and the option of resistance was a very real alternative, the
Guys sought social asylum ﬂom institutional oppression in silence or in critique.

Being literate by school standards was not necessarily desirable to the Guys.
While reading and writing were valued practices, reading and writing for detached
academic reasons were not deemed as valuable. Instead of analyzing Shakespeare, the
young men, on their own volition, analyzed Source Magazine. Instead of writing term
papers, they invented terms and used them in their raps. The practice of literacy, for
them, was a political act, through which they could situate themselves as social agents
capable of deviating ﬂom the established norms of society, for good or for ill.

Despite their opposition to school, the Guys were, nonetheless, affected by the
“ofﬁcial script” (Gutierrez & Stone, 2000) or norms of school, or what I refer to as the
standardized literacies of society. Notwithstanding, they operated mostly within a
counter narrative, which articulated the positioning of these young Black men against the
status quo. Reading and writing ﬂom the margins, the Guys articulated social criticism
through a practice of literacy that allowed them to engage in a battle in which nothing
less than the ﬂeedom of identity and expression were at stake.

This spirit of resistance was, for them, an important symbol of hope, whereby
change became visible through struggle. It is in this production of resistance that
students like the Guys gain the possibility of promise and teachers interested in critical
pedagogy gain a valuable resource for progressive change (Folds 1987, Woods 1990). It
is, then, no surprise to me that the Guys employed resistance to offset the numbing
effects of cultural domination. There resilience, while collective, was personal. In the

next chapter, I look more closely at this personal aspect literacy in the lives of the Guys.

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CHAPTER 5
Discourse and Literacy: (Re)Forming Identities and Re(Dis)covering Selves

Two years ago, something tragic happened in my life that required me to go
through a great deal of soul searching and life changing.

It was a warm October day, and the rays ﬁ'om the Sun had awakened me.
Everything was well, and my cousins were getting ready for school like any normal day.
It just seemed as if life just changed in a blink of an eye. This was my tenth grade year,
and it was also the day before the city playoﬂ between my school and its cross town rival.

While I was on my way to school, I got a call from my mother, telling me that my
little cousin Clarence had been hit by a car on his way to school. Well actually he was
waiting on the bus and this car jumped the curve and hit him. When the news hit me, it
seemed as if my heart dropped into my stomach. I tried to be strong and hide behind my

football body, but this didn ’t work As each hour ticked by, I tried to tell myself: “It 's
just a broken leg or am. He ’11 be ok. " But doubt always stood in my mind . . . death.

Later on that day, I tried my hardest to participate in practice, but my mind
wasn ’t with the team that day. After practice my uncle came and picked me up and drove
me to Saint Robin Hospital. When I arrived there, I could hear blood curling screams
that sent tingles down my spine. There, I learned the worst news. My cousin would not
live. The doctors told us that he had a fractured skull and many broken arteries. All we
could do is pray and leave it in God ’s hands.

That next day, God called my cousin home. From that point on, I dedicated my
next football season to him. I wore his birthday day as my jersey number: #26. I also
dedicated my first two tattoos to him. Since he was young, I feel that it ’s my way of
making sure he lives on.

R.I.P.
Clarence Duolley
(Written artifact, 10-03-2003, Derrick Todd)
In so many ways, the dominant group determines not only what gets said and

heard in public discourses (Scott, 1990, p. 14), but controls what happens to subordinate
groups and how their identities and realities get projected in public spaces (Freire, 1970;
Smitherman & van Dijk, 1988). As political theorist James Scott argues in Domination
and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), discursive and social sites, like
literacy, shape and take shape within "a zone of constant struggle between dominant and

subordinate" groups (p. 14). Hence, literacy practices have, in part, served conﬂicting

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public roles, usually made acceptable when serving the interests of the social elite and
unacceptable when encouraging the perspectives of the socially marginal (Besnier, 1995;
Cope & Kalantzis, 1994; Luke, 1996; Macedo, 1999). However, the purpose of literacy
is not always public and its function is not altogether conﬂicting.

The literacy practice in the lives of some young men are in fundamental ways
intimately personal (N ewkirk, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2003), connecting the richness of
cultural heritages to the ascribed complexity of social circumstances. These practices
allow for the manufacturing of personal narratives and the recasting of personal
experiences, which otherwise might get lost in the distances of forgotten memory and the
politics of far-reaching oppression. For many urban adolescent young Black men, it is
the personal aspect in the dialogic of literacy that is vital for both life and liberty, as it
affords them some agency, or control, over how they are perceived and perceive
themselves in relation to a larger society. This has held true in the case of the Guys.

The Guys’ astute aesthetics of effervescent tattoos to the painful poetics of
fastidious raps are deeply personal, motivated only in part by larger symbolic forces
(Bourdieu, 1991; Smitherman & van Dijk, 1988). Such forces, or discourses, delve
deeply into the corral of consciousnesses—both selves and others—and contribute to the
shaping of social beings. As such, there is a dialogic tension at work in the practice of
literacy, which can be clearly seen through the Guys’ tattoos, raps, jersey numbers,
(video) game play, and everyday language use.

While chapter 3 and 4 examined the role of the collective/political in the practices
of literacy, this chapter examines how the Guys practiced literacy to negotiate and

articulate personally authored aspects of themselves. Artifacts of literacy (like those

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mentioned above) reveal how the Guys perceived themselves and the multiple and
oftentimes tenuous realities (and harmful ﬁctions) that they endured. Discourses,
realized as a complex nexus of distinctive possibilities, rendered the Guys’ personal
identities visible. While such identities were produced, evocatively exercised in
thoughts, they were volubly voiced and made known through the Guys’ human
testimony.

As such, the Guys read and wrote, sometimes using their ﬂesh as canvass, about
the deep things affecting and sometimes afﬂicting them. Literacy practices offered them
personal reprieve ﬂom hijacked identities, formed on the bases of prejudice and dissent.
Both literacy and identity for them, while publicly contested, functioned privately as a
way of helping the Guys reﬂect upon personally valued narratives and burgeoning ways
of being.

This chapter starts with them, in the literate stuff that both shaped and deﬁned
them. Throughout the chapter, I attempt to document how literacy, not only inﬂuenced
major aspects of their social belongings, but also their personal beings. For when they
practiced literacy, the Guys were not only shaping symbols, they were also shaping
themselves. Hence, the Guys practiced literacy as much to cope with the sometimes hard
to deal with circumstances related to their intra- and interpersonal beings as they did to
gain social acceptance and belonging.

Authoring Selves:
Forming “I”dentities in Texts and Personal Reflections on Literacies

The practice of literacy is a critical site of identity formation for individuals (Gee,
1991, 1996). This relationship between literacy and identity can be more clearly

understood in what Bakhtin (1979) characterizes as an “act.” In this case, the individual

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who performs an act or deed holds a unique place within the architecture of her or his
being (Bakhtin, 1979, pp. 40-41, 53—54). Since the individual holds such an important
place in identity formation, and because uniqueness is both given and yet to be achieved,
the individual must actualize (or “articulate”) her or his uniqueness (pp. 41-42).

In this way, the individual embodies a distinct view of the world, her or his own
sense of meanings, relations, and intentions. Identity as a result determines and is
determined by both cultural and personal formations. It is a material production of (and
social practice in) a particular time and place. It has the worldview of the individual it
identiﬁes embedded in it, juxtaposed against the multiple worldviews operative in
dominant society.

In the Bakhtinian (1981) sense, identity is forged through dialogue (as opposed to
contestation) between the self and the society. In this way, dialogue centers on the
dynamic relationship between self and society, where self occupies a relative core and,
thus, requires society (or the other) for existence. In Bakhtin’s (1986) broad concept of
dialogue, all human experience is a complex web of interrelations with other selves.
Writing Raps, Producing Selves

The Guys, while molding language and other symbolic material as they practiced
literacy, were being molded by the literacies they practiced. Writing raps, which helped
to establish them as central participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in a larger (Hip Hop)
community of literate peers, also gave the young men an opportunity to write themselves
onto the foreboding tapestry of uncharted human experiences. In a conversation with
them, the Guys were adamant about the powerful role that writing (and reciting) raps

played in their making:

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Shawn:

Shawn:

Keith:

The Guys:

Shawn:

One of the
Guys:

The Guys:

Shawn:

Kirk can’t feel my ﬂow [refening to me].

Why can’t I feel it.

‘Cause you don’t hear me. You don’t write raps (which was true).
And you be reading stuff about rap, but that don’t make you a
rapper. [Smiles]

You boogie, we hood. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Aw man.

So, I can’t get down.

You can get down. [Laughs] All I mean is this stuff make us, us.
I be writing it for my life. Just like you writing your dissertation
for yours, to understand us or something about Black males. 1 be
writing my raps to understand me, to understand what happened to

me. I live in my pen and paper. You don’t live in it like us.

You live in your computer.

[Laughs]

It don’t make you like it make us.

What is more interesting than the way that the Guys were constructing me was the

way that they were actively constructing themselves. While Shawn was directing them

more globally (e.g., “it makes us”), his comments suggested something more personal

(e.g., “I be writing my raps to understand me”). It is this aspect of the conversation that

was most important. At one level, Shawn revealed himself as misunderstood. Writing

raps was a practice of discovery/recovery, where he found himself and began to

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understand essential aspect of life, for which, in his words, motivated the things he wrote

about.

The conversation continues, as other young men chimed into the discussion.

Sheldon:

Jose:

Shawn:

I know what he [Shawn] saying. [Directed at me] He saying ﬂow
(or rap) is a way that we tell about ourself . . .

[Interrupts, stutters] Y-Yeah . . . I know when I write (Jose doesn’t
like to write raps and, therefore, doesn’t write raps often), my stuff
come ﬂom my heart [Interrupted]

[serious] And ﬂom my life . . . the streets . . . the hood . . . all the

things that make you, you. You use’ em, and remake yourself . . .

At this point in our conversation, the Guys, while musing over what rap

personally means to them, concurred that the writing of rap served personal and intimate

purposes. For Sheldon, writing rap was a practice, or “way/’ to “tell about ourself.”

Adding to Sheldon’s understanding of writing raps, Jose contended that the personal

tellings privileged in rap were intimate, concerning things that “come ﬂom” the “heart,”

that, in Shawn’s words, “make you, you.” Further, there seemed to be agreement among

the Guys that the writing of raps was consistent with the authoring of selves. This point

was made clearer as the conversation continued.

Derrick:
The Guys:

Derrick:

[Laughs] You be giving yourself a verbal make-over.
{Laughs}

[serious] You know, you brag and stuff, write and rewrite who

you are. That’s why rappers, in stuff, [ﬁdgeting with a straw] they

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always talking about who they be . . . this and that. They trying to
demonstrate who they are.

Shawn: [Pointing his hand toward Derrick] Sometime you gotta stretch the
truth when you doing that because we more than the truth. If you
listen to society, all rappers and the Black man are drug dealers,
thugs, and basketball players. That’s it. That’s their truth. We got
ours [our truth]. It don’t be all lies all the time just like theirs ain’t
always lies. There is some real to it. But your truth is real to you,
too, and the tighter your line [rap?] is, it can be just as real to
everybody around you.

In this part of the conversation, the Guys displayed a complex understanding of
authoring. That is, authoring was contested and contingent, based upon who had the
authority to make truth claims (Foucault, 1976).

The agency over self that the Guys gained in writing raps was, perhaps, not theirs
alone. Rather, the ability to fashion raps that opposed society’s other “truths”
belonged—in part—to the sociolinguistic traditions to which the Guys belong. In
keeping with important semantic and discursive features of Aﬁican American Language
(AAL), or Ebonics, things like meaning and voice ceremoniously got played with and
complexly performed. Meanings were multiplied and inverted (Smitherman, 2000), as
living in “the hood” or “the streets” become privileged markers of status and being. The
bragging, an AAL mode of discourse (Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Smitherman, 2000),
was admittedly practiced, as the Guys both “bragged” and “stretched” the truth in their

“verbal make-over[s].” Even the Guy’s discussion of rap was saturated with the richness

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of AAL. Their verbal play extended into put-downs (e. g., “you boogie”). As a perceived
outsider, I got signiﬁed on because I couldn’t “feel” Shawn’s “ﬂow” due to my “reading
stuff about rap,” which, to them, didn’t make me a rapper.

Clearly operating in AAL, the Guys were mediating possible selves with existing
cultural tools (e. g., rap and AAL) as a way of achieving desired personal goals of
reclaiming their identities. The point, here, was that self-authoring was not divorced
ﬂom the “landscape of voices” that Dyson (2003) talks about in her study of “the
Brothers and Sisters” (see also Bakhtin, 1981). Like “the Brothers and Sisters,” the Guys
borrowed and revoiced, hence, “recontextualized” symbolic, social, and ideological
options ﬂom their “landscape of possibilities” (Dyson, 2003).

The rules for verbal play and performance in rapping and writing raps were not
without limits, however. According to the Guys, where “stretching the truth” was
allowed, stretching the truth too narrowly ran the risk of transgressing boundaries of
acceptable verbal play. In this way, hyperbole was privileged over understatement. The
following conversation illustrates this point:

Shawn: . . . you don’t lie to make yourself look bad, and you deﬁnitely
don’t lie and don’t make your lie look like a lie. [You lie] Only
about what you can do better than the next man, and, then, you
blow it up. Like you say [he begins to ﬂow]—I can put my ﬁst
through steel/kill the will of those niggas who be ﬂontin on
me/pulling bills by the mill/gotta breezies sweatin me . . .

Tony: [Quietly whispers] That’s what’s up.

Shawn: That’s what’s me, nigga. [Laughs]

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Shawn’s acknowledgement that rap stretched the truth seems ironic against his
ﬁnal statement, “That’s what’s me.” This irony can be resolved when we understand
Shawn as constructing himself, not as someone who can put his “ﬁst through steel,” but
as someone capable of authoring complex and exotic metaphors that demonstrate his
conﬁdence and strength. Compared to someone who can put a “ﬁst through steel,”
Shawn believed that he can achieve the extraordinary and, therefore, authors himself as
extraordinary, “pulling bills by the mill[ions]” with women “sweatin” him.

The use of hyperbole as opposed to actual ability was like shouting as opposed to
using a normal vocal pitch. Like shouting, one uses hyperbolic statements to be heard,
especially in the midst of dominant ideologies that work to silence urban Black males
(Baker, 1993; Kunjufu, 1996). Rose, in Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in
Contemporary America (1994), argues that "rap music, more than any other form of
black cultural expression, articulates the chasm between black urban lived experience and
dominant, ‘legitimate' ideologies regarding equal opportunity and racial inequality" (p.
102). It is a place where the voiceless are heard and the ghetto storytellers can paint
authentic urban histories (Snritherrnan, 1999). It is also a place where the invisible are
made visible.

Baker (1993), in “Scene . . . not heard,” characterizes Black males struggles to be
heard. He argues that Black males, whose authentic selves desire voice, are rendered
silent participants in the “scene” of American violence. This silence is further
complicated by the challenges that Black males face in their struggles to effect, or inﬂect,
versions of history with sounds and symbols of their own voices and narratives of their

own experiences. In this way, as Shawn notes, Black males are unfairly projected as

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deviant and, worst, rarely ﬁnd social opportunities to negate such inaccurate
representations. It is, therefore, telling that writing rap—as literacy practice—was used
by Shawn and his peers to not only rewrite/disrupt histories, but to rewrite/reclaim selves.
Body Language: Literacy, Identity Formation, and Flesh

Part of literacy as self-authoring is the act of reclaiming selves, which involves
reclaiming stolen, lost, and sometimes distorted bodies. Throughout history, bodies have
been rendered and received, and Black male bodies have long been the site of struggle
and contestation. bell hooks, in We Real C001 (2003), maintains that the Black male
body is a place of antimony, given its public presentation of strength lacking dignity.
During chattel slavery, European regimes stole Black bodies—some of them female——
and quite literally manipulated them for their own desires, intents, and purposes. In this
way, the body is important to understanding self-authoring, but it would be careless to
discuss it without acknowledging the ﬂesh, as the ﬂesh reveals the story of Black bodies
through embedded wounds and scars.

Spillers (1994) makes a distinction between “body” and “ﬂesh” which is useful in
terms of understanding the relationships between literacy and self-authoring, to which the
Guy’s tattoos speak. According to Spillers, this distinction is central to understanding
captive and liberated subj ect-positions. In that sense, before the “body,” there is the
“ﬂesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment
under the brush of discourse or the reﬂexes of literacy (Spillers, 1994, p. 45 7). In the
case of Black Americans, if we think of the “ﬂesh” as a primary narrative, we mean its
tragic darkness, complicated by its “seared, divided, ripped-apartrress” and other types of

iconography that reveal the Black body (Spillers, 1994, p. 457). For example, in portraits

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of Aﬁican captives, we witness brutal bruises, wounds, and scars that narrate the bondage
of Black bodies.

What Spillers terms the “ﬂesh,” in other words, is what Shane White and Graham
White (1998) discuss as the surface of Black bodies, on which “in ﬂeedom, as in slavery
the struggle between black and white was often cruelly etched, and on which the
record of that struggle may be read” (p. 126). White and White cite, as an example, the
story of an ex-captive named Sandie. Sandie mutilated his body and threatened to
comnrit suicide in ﬂont of White witnesses who were attempting to return him to
bondage after documents attesting to his ﬂeedom had been burned in a ﬁre. White and
White recount how many years later Sandie, by then a successful farmer who was
distinguished for his physical strength, still bore the signs of his struggle for ﬂeedom on
his body, or, in Spillers’s terms, on his ﬂesh (pp. 125-26).

Like narratives of the ﬂesh, in general, and especially those inscribed on Black
ﬂesh, Sandie’s scars could not give true hearings to the “scenes” of violence that
produced them (Baker, 1993). Although a person’s ﬂesh may be “traced by language,”
such texts are always subject to dissolution by ideas and obscuring forces (Foucault,
1977, p. 148). As Foucault (1977) contends, the body manifests the stigrnata of past
experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors. These elements may join in
a body where they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an
engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes the pretext of their
insurmountable conﬂict (p. 148).

In the Foucauldian sense, the body (i.e, the ﬂesh) is a site of sociocultural

inscription, where a sort of hegemony of norms gains purchase. It follows that such

141

inscription can be rewritten, fostering resistance to the establishment of such norms.
Subcultures, like the Guys, employ the lyric-laced pen and the tattoo needle for this
rewrite.

The Guys tattoos, for example, coined tales that, according to Shawn, “belonged”
exclusively to their making. Yet, having tattoos, regardless of their “deeper meanings,”
afforded the Guys entry into a wider world where having tattoos is also “cool” (see also
Bilson & Majors, 1996; Kirkland & Jackson, forthcoming). Notwithstanding, the tattoos
that marked them (both literally and ﬁguratively) were theirs, containing their personal
stories, which helped to constitute their social identities. Using personal materials to etch
tattoos, the identities of the Guys were self-authored and, using their bodies as tablets,
made visible, as they were recorded in both pain and ink.

The tattoos of Derrick and Shawn were of special importance to me because of
the explicit linkages they made between their identities and their body art. This art gave
evidence to the will of the Guys to rewrite themselves on a canvass of ﬂesh, even when
that ﬂesh was publicly ridiculed (hooks, 2003; Platt, 2002). While this art physically
demonstrated the personal dimensions of literacy in the lives of the young men, the Guys’
tattoos also ﬁguratively demonstrated how the young men used words and ﬂesh to

construct themselves through icon and stories that, because of them, became alive.

Derrick: My tattoos mean a lot to me.
Me: Can you tell me more about what you mean by “mean a lot”?
Derrick: Yeah. I mean, every tattoo that I got has a story. See this one here

[showing me a tattoo he has on the left side of his chest, where his

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brother’s nickname, “Boss,” prominently and permanently appears
over the image of a bulldog].

Me: I do.

For Derrick, having a tattoo etched in his brother’s name was meaningﬁrl. That,
in itself, is revealing. It suggests that tattoos can carry personal or affective functions
(e.g., “every tattoo that I got has a story”). In addition, tattoos also connoted a sense of
being or personal meaning for Derrick (e.g., “My [as a personal possessive] tattoos mean
a lot to me”). This latter function was more clearly illustrated, as our conversation
developed.

Denick: To a lot of people, this is just my brother’s name on me, but I put it
on me after he got killed because Boss was more than a brother to
us [speaking of his other siblings and himself]. He was like my
father, my best friend, my punisher. Everything. He protected us,
feed us when we was hungry. Did everything for us.

For Denick, to inscribe his ﬂesh with his brother’s name was an act of power—
keeping his brother alive through his body. The tattoo was a personal story, literally, kept
close to Derrick’s heart. His body became the living moment of his brother’s memory.
Derrick authored himself as memorial, especially to a brother who was meaningful to
him. He continued:

Derrick: When he [Boss] died, I couldn’t take it. I wanted to be where he

was, so I started doing stuff, acting reckless. I was always
ﬁghting, trying to die. My momma came to me one day and said,

“I know you hurting.” I was. I just broke down right there. .

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.started crying. She started crying, screaming, “Why?” I didn’t
know what to tell her. I wanted to know why, myself, man. Why
did God have to take my brother? He was a good guy. I didn’t
know why he had to go. But seeing my momma crying was like,
man . . . [pause] . . . I had to be strong. I had to be strong like my
brother for my mother and for my sister and brothers just like Boss
was strong for me. That’s what I’m saying.

At this point in our conversation, the notion of deep meaning was more clearly
revealed, illustrated in tears and voiced in screams. The meaning of the tattoo was made
manifest, as it became less of a memorial and more of a symbol of stolen strength, or will
appropriated (e.g., “I had to be strong. I had to be strong like my brother . . .”). By
bearing his tattoo, Derrick was self-authoring. He was constructing himself according to
his image of Boss, as strong “like Boss was strong for” him.

According to Platt (2002), strength and survival are common themes inscribed on
the bodies of many urban Black males. For example, Platt explains in his book Only the
Strong Survive (the title is telling) that basketball superstar Allen Iverson’s tattoos

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(“soldier, strong,” and “survive”) narrate how he has overcome his lived struggles.
According to Platt, many urban Black males are like Allen Iverson, ﬁnding ways to write
(about) their struggles and triumphs through their tattoos. Pratt argues that tattoos serve
this personal function of narrating a complex existence, which lies at the ironic
intersection of Black nihilism and the audacity of Black hope (West, 1993). For Pratt,

tattooing is a way of documenting pain, speaking of and back to a difﬁcult past, and

surrendering that pain in the ascribed strength of symbols. For one to remain, one must

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be strong, no matter how tough a situation might be. The story is a common trope in
African American folklore (Baker, 1993) as well as in Hip Hop (Platt, 2002)—one of
continual progression: “By strength, I’ve come a long way. By being strong, I can go a
little farther.”

Strength is also the permitted illusion of a self that many Black folk, especially

Black women, deploy to mask their inner vulnerabilities (see Morgan’s [1996] critique of
the “strong Black woman”). For Derrick, the tattoo of Boss’s name was helpful in
allowing him to deal with the deep feelings of pain and regret associated with his
brother’s untimely death. In his words: “This one right here [pointing to his tattoo of
Boss’s name], this one did something for me.”

Derrick: It helped me cope [stops, smiles] and is helping me cope with my
own struggles ‘cause I loved that dude and he gone. But he ain’t
gone, see. He in my heart; that’s why I got his name right here
[pointing to his chest] written on my heart . . . I take him wherever
I go. He alive in me.

Me: I see why your tattoo means a lot to you.

Derrick: I don’t know. [Pause] I want to be like him [Boss]. Having his
name on my chest helps to remind me of what I want to be.

Me: What’s that?

Denick: A better man.

Using Boss’s name, Derrick wrote himself, who he wanted to be, and his

brother’s memory—all at once—in ﬂesh and ink. His brother, who he perceived as “a

better man,” presented for him a dialogic unity, a combination of self and other. Through

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his brother, Derrick inherited, if you will, a renewed sense of himself. The tattoo labeled
this aspect for (and of) him and allowed Denick to appropriate and revoice the “living
pulse” of language that deﬁned Boss beyond, even, his name.

The use of tattoos as a tool for self-authoring was not exclusive to Derrick.
Shawn also made use of tattoos to formulate signiﬁcant aspects of who he desired to be
and to articulate aspects of his identity that he, himself, had authored. By locating
himself in his tattoos, personal aspects (such as self-contained stories, meanings, and
perspectives) contributed to the complexity and power of Shawn’s self-authored identity.
While his tattoos recontextualized material ﬂom diverse social worlds, they uniquely
blended these worlds, which afforded him his very own uniqueness. For example, Jose
referred to one of Shawn’s tattoos (a black ﬁst enveloped in ﬂames) as “sweet,”
commenting, “I ain’t seen no one else with it . . . I’m gonna get one just like that, but I
gonna put my name in mine.” In a similar way, Derrick taunted, “I know it’s Shawn.
You can tell him by his tattoos. Ain’t nobody got ones like he got” (which probably
wasn’t true).

While Shawn acquired many tattoos in a span of ﬁve years (he received his ﬁrst
tattoo at the age of twelve), his discussion of one in particular helps to demonstrate the
ways in which he used tattoos to author his spiritual identity.

Shawn: I got this one [a tattoo saying “Vengeance is Mine thus saith the

Lord]” ‘cause it remind me [Tu] Pac [Shakur] [who had a tattoo of
a cross on his back, which ﬂamed the label “Exodus 18:11”].
While the Guys’ tattoos served multiple purposes, usually helping to author

multiple aspects of their identities, they practiced literacy usually to etch crucial aspects

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of their identities as young Black men. Literacy, to them, was about projecting,

maintaining, and attempting to understand oneself, which was deﬁned in relation to both

their personal and social experiences.

Personal Carnivals: Appropriating Race in Identity Formation
Jose: There is a difference between the tattoos that Black people and

White people get. White people be getting thorns and skulls and
demonic stuff. We usually get stuff that means something to us,
that displays our Blackness, like T upac’s [tattoo of a] black
panther.

Essential to the Guys’ sense of being was their appropriation of race. Race—
deﬁned as “a group loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially signiﬁcant
elements of their morphology and/or ancestry” (Lopez, 1995, p. l93)—played an
important role in both how the Guys’ authored themselves and in the literacy practices
they used to contribute to their authoring. According to Fine (1997), race “is a critical
and deﬁning feature of lived experience that young and old people of all colors reﬂect
upon, embody, challenge, and negotiate” (p. 251). This is clear in Jose’s assessment of
the differences between “the tattoos that Black and White people get.” Hence, how one
inscribes their ﬂesh reveals important aspects of how one establishes oneself as raced.

In understanding the role of race in self-authoring, it is helpful to explain race,
using Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of “carnival.” Race, like carnival, is a general sense of the
world, a way of life, as opposed to a spectacle seen by people. We live in it, and
everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people. As a form of being, race

is speciﬁcally an expression of limits. One is limited to being something and never

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everything at once. When one becomes a mixture of multiple races, one becomes none of
those races at all, but something altogether new and different. In this way, there is no
other life outside of race.

As such, race is not only a marker of the individual. Rather, it is an invitation to
become a part of a complex unity, a bodily collectivity. In this sense, race is carnival,
where “the individual body ceases to a certain extent to be itself; it is possible, so to say,
to exchange bodies, to be renewed (through change of costrune and mask). At the same
time the people become aware of their sensual, material bodily unity and community”
(Bakhtin, 1984, p. 255).

In a similar way, critical race theory abandons the innocence of authoring,
recognizing the afﬁxed normality, hence, invisibility of race in everyday social and
personal expressions of literacy (Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003). Race is undeniably an
element in the symbolic/personal construction of the self, “negotiated as a social process
rather than as a biological determinant” (Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003, p. 8). In this way,
critical race theorists set forth the premise that race is a permanent feature in one’s
construction (Bell, 1992; Delgado, 1995). The permanence of race in one’s construction
means that racial identities inﬂuence every aspect of the self, including the liteacies one
chooses and does not choose to practice.

While they practiced literacy to reclaim/reinvent their identities, the Guys also
practiced literacy to afﬁrm their race. In this way, the Guys struggled constantly within
themselves, to make sense of racial identities that became uniquely and ubiquitously

theirs. As mentioned, even the young men’s bodies acted as resources—canvasses—for

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racialized expressions of literacy. The body became both literally and ﬁguratively
impossible to sever ﬂom the Guys’ literate/racial identities.

Early in this study, Sheldon made this point clearer for me.

Sheldon: I be reading all the time, but as a Black [male], I can’t be reading

that stuff they be reading in school, like with my boys. I got a
rep[utation] to protect [laughing] . . . you know it’s hard. I still
gotta read, though, ‘cause I don’t want no body to think I’m a
dummy. But you gotta keep it on the low ‘cause you don’t want
no body to think you like White [people] either.

Sheldon’s admission of his public/private struggles with race and literacy, to me,
seemed problematic at ﬁrst because I inaccurately interpreted his comments as suggesting
that reading was equivalent with Whiteness. That is, Black males had no inheritance in
the practice of reading, as he personally felt obliged to abandon the practice in the
presence of peers.

Beyond not being cool, I initially interpreted Sheldon’s comments as meaning
reading was not being Black. I, later, understood that Sheldon was not critiquing reading
at all. Rather, his critique had more to do with ways of reading, especially with ways that
schools promoted reading, which according to Heath (1983) also deals with personal
choices and social ways of being. In a similar vein, Ferguson (2000) maintains, “To
perform the act too realistically [of schooling], to appear to adopt whiteness not as a guise
but as identity, is seen as an expression of self-hatred and race shame” (p. 213). In a
similar way, hooks (2003) points out that intelligent Black men “have learned to act as if

they know nothing in a world where a smart Black man risks punishment” (p. 33). In this

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way, publicly rejecting reading was a way for Sheldon to protect himself. Based on what,
when, where, and how he read, Sheldon’s very construction as a Black male would be
questioned. Choosing Blackness, Sheldon also chose to be critical of more school-

based/standardized reading practices, which he (and scholars like Heath [1983])

associated with Whiteness.
Me: What kinds of things do you guys like to read?
Keith: I don’t know. I read a lot of stuff, man . . . [interrupted]
Tony: As a Black man, I gotta read. What you trying to say?
Me: [Smiling] I just want to know what you read. . .that’s all.
Tony: But you trying to say that Black boys don’t read.
Me: I’m Black.

Here again, race is collapsed into literacy. Viewing themselves as raced, the Guys
have also constructed views of literacy that are equally raced. Within these views, there
are larger tensions at work (e. g., “As a Black man, I gotta read” . . . “you trying to say
that Black boys don’t rea ”). Implied in the example was an internal struggle, which
likely stemmed ﬂom external messages concerning the negative relationship between
Black males and reading. Hence, the external (or “other ”) notion of Blackness that
society perpetuates was at odds with the internal/personal understanding of Blackness
that Jose had appropriated.

Using race as both personal and social expression, the clearest way for Jose to
seal off negative connotations of Blackness was through what Bakhtin (1984) calls
parodic, or a deliberate displacement and subversion of the ideological constraints of the

system. In this case, Jose wished to displace and subvert the ideological system that

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mystiﬁes and constructs Blackness in the realm of illiteracy. Jose’s personal view of
race, then, built its own world versus the ofﬁcial world—a place in which Blackness
could both reject the ofﬁcial reading practices of schools and still afﬁrm its own
needed/required (e.g., “As a Black man, I gotta read”), valued, and meaningful reading
practices.

In some strange way, I became part (or coauthor) of Jose’s self-authoring. My
role was as the dominant “other,” which did not sit well with me. Disregarding my own
privilege and authority, Jose’s statement (“. . . you trying to say Black boys don’t read”)
reminded me that my authored self was quite different than theirs. Nonetheless, I tried to
reason, too, through our shared racial identity that we were not very different. After all,
“I’m Black.” My insistence on making my Blackness known to them was in concert with
Jose’s racialized personal discourse (e. g., “As a Black man”). I had, too, appropriated
Blackness to construct a self that I personally valued and eagerly wanted the Guys to

value too. Our conversation continued, now, with the focus on me.

Keith &

Sheldon: But you different.

Me: How am I different?

Keith: I bet you be reading all the time.

Me: I bet you be reading all the time, too. Is something wrong with
that?

Shawn: No. It ain’t nothing wrong with reading. I’m saying. It just the

stuff people be reading. Like in school, they want us to read this

book about some crazy ass White boy who live on a farm [talking

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about Of Mice and Men]. Personally, that ain’t gone do me no

good.
Me: Why?
Shawn: Because, I’m Black, and that shit don’t apply to me.

Here again an emphatic enunciation of Blackness is put forth. This time it was
Shawn (perhaps the most emphatic of the young men), who reasons—because he was
Black—reading Of Mice and Men did not apply to him. What was most important was
his construction of himself, he did not use being Black as a reason not to read (e. g., “It
ain’t nothing wrong with reading”). Rather, he argued that structures, like schools, made
literacy practices like reading foreign and socially uncomfortable. In this way, the Guys
did not always resist reading per se. They, instead, embraced Blackness, which found
little place in schools.

As our conversation continued, the Guys embrace of Blackness was made clearer,
as they revealed the things they did, in fact, read. Hence, text, though arbitrarily, are
raced and gendered. As such, there becomes acceptable norms of reading and writing
when one chooses (and is extended) Blackness as a social characteristic. In this way, to
be Black (and male) means to read things acceptable within that discursive ﬁeld. Further,
it means to reject texts that do not ﬁnd value and acceptance within the given discourse

community. Our conversation continued.

Me: Derrick, you are smiling, but haven’t said anything.
Jose: [with an X-Men comic book in his hand] I know I read.
Derrick: That’s the point. We all read. [Laughing] At least I hope we all

read. None of us want to be call a dummy ‘cause we can’t read. I

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Derrick:

Shawn:

Jose:

The Guys:

Jose:
Tony:

Jose:

Me:

know I be reading stuff all the time, stuff like magazines, the
newspaper. . . [interrupted]

What part of the newspaper?

[smiles] The sports section.

Do you read any other stuff?

Yeah. Comics and horoscope.

I be reading stuff like that too, stuff that interesting, like about
those dudes that got shot at 7-eleven. I think I knew one of them.
He use to go to my school.

I read Black magazines too.

Oh yeah. . . yeah. . .me too.

Like Vibe, Source.

I be on King.

They [not sure of who he is talking about] don’t get it. This the
stuff that makes us, us. It’s what we interested in. So we do be
reading, but y’all don’t call the stuff we be reading, reading.

I do.

Here, the Guys revealed a litany of texts that they engaged in their personal lives.

As their social worlds connected, their personal choices in reading intersected. In this
way, being was ever instilled in their reading selections (e.g., “I read Black magazines” . .
. “me too”). It was being Black that became an afﬁrmed choice, an identiﬁer, for the
Guys. Subsequently, being Black was at work in their self-authoring and in the ways that

they chose to practice literacy.

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For them, the practice of literacy was simultaneously a practice of personal and
racial negotiations, where even the body, while inscribed with ink and various shades of
brown pigmentation, acts as texts. Literacy gained intimacy in the writing of selves.

Conclusion

While intimately connected to and dependent upon the social landscape
surrounding them, literacy in the lives of the Guys offered a similar personal narrative,
which commented on their personal commitments and curiosities about rendered texts. It
spoke to how they saw themselves speciﬁcally in a narrow personal world and globally in
relation to larger social landscapes. Literacy products like tattoos, raps, magazines, and
newspaper articles about sports and violence bore witness to social innovations, involved
competitions, and personal struggles whose distinct and ever-evolving patterns,
structures, and meanings shaped the idiom of contemporary Black masculine cultures,
and by association, Black males like the Guys more generally.

In this way, the Guys were constantly striving for subjectivity (i.e., self-identity, a
sense of themselves, and their own individual possibilities for action), while society was
at work reproducing itself and its versions of valued literate practices. The body was a
site to transgress such pursuits. It became apparent that the body was no longer an
objective arena. It was the subject of great tensions, an object acted upon by self and
other, by the individual and the society. In keeping marginal certain acts of literacy,
society reproduced the self-other dichotomy that lies at the heart of most social
ﬂagrnentations (e.g., racism, nationalism). While literacy for the Guys facilitated the
entry of knowledge and information that had previously been suppressed or hidden in the

public domain, literacy in school became personal transgression, narrowly conceived,

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which took away the Guys’ ability to tell stories and write (about) themselves—a practice
of literacy I argue is of vital importance for marginalized student groups.
In the next chapter, I explore the implication of this research for future studies and

pedagogical practice.

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CHAPTER 6
Implications for Future Research and Practice

The ﬁndings presented in this research have offered a critique of reform initiatives
like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and curricula that embrace narrow notions of literacy
and neglect the situativity of literacy practice. Speciﬁcally, accountability and
standardization, which is the basis of such items, assume that all children are the same,
learn the same ways, and should learn the same things (McNeil, 2002). Writers and
advocates of such material also misinterpret issues of power, assuming that access to
academic literacy and holding students accountable for academic literacy practices alone
will even the educational playing ﬁeld.

However, literacy is deﬁned on a distinct social and cultural battleground, upon
which an ongoing war for equity and civic enﬂanchisement is continually waged.
Schools factor into this struggle signiﬁcantly, as questions about literacy teaching,
literacy learning, and literacy assessment are constantly debated. While the struggle to
deﬁne literacy more justly continues, literacy in the lives of the Guys gives us many
reasons to expand notions of literacy in ways that consider nontraditional forms of these
symbolic practices in our teaching and researching.

In this chapter, I brieﬂy summarize the study’s major research ﬁndings so that the
link to their implications is made clear. Following this summary, 1 offer implications for
ﬁrture research (complex literacy studies), teaching (a cooperative literacy pedagogy),
and teacher education. In doing so, this chapter also comments on the relationship
between educational researchers and teacher practitioners. In it, I argue that educational
researchers must collaborate more directly with teachers and teacher educators, as our

research seldom inﬂuence classroom teaching practices (Cuban, 1996; Cuban & Tyack,

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1996).
Summary of Findings

This study advances three key ﬁndings about literacy in the lives of the Guys. For
organizational reasons, I have divided ﬁndings consistent with three important levels of
literacy practice: sociocultural, socio-political, and personal. While I have disaggregated
ﬁndings along these seemingly simplistic lines, I acknowledge that literacy in the lives of
the Guys was a complex and dynamic practice, which took place on multiple levels of
literacy at once. This complexity made literacy in the Guys’ lives far more complicated
than the following summary can ever suggest. With this in mind, the following summary
is intended to act as a resource to help make the information reported thus far in this
study more immediately accessible to readers.
Literacy at the Sociocultural Level

A key ﬁnding of this dissertation exempliﬁes the social nature of literacy practice.
By suggesting that literacy is a by product of the social and cultural demands of the
group, I have argued that the Guys practiced literacy as a way to establish and afﬁrm
commitments to their social and cultural domains (i.e., to one another, to particular
aspects of popular and youth culture, and to the Black cultural heritage). The process of
establishing and afﬁrming commitments was indelibly complicated work, which usually
involved collaborative literate activities like joint story-telling, cultural reproduction
(which involved the veneration of popular media) and appropriations (which involved the
necessary use of popular media in peer play), and various forms of cultural production.
Within this process, literacy was practiced to generate group identities, produce shared

understanding/social contracts with the groups to which the Guys as a group belonged,

157

and render visible the wider social world. Hence, the practice of literacy was necessarily
tied to social bonds that were created as a result of the Guys’ symbolic performances. In
this way, literacy in the lives of the Guys was not only practiced to manufacture
meanings for communication. It was also practiced to manufacture deep social and
cultural comnritrnents and generative symbolic bonds (e. g., White Ts) for social
assignment.
Literacy at the Socio-Political Level

Another aspect of literacy in the lives of the Guys was its inherent political nature.
The Guys practiced literacy as a way to resist social and cultural domination, whereby
their commitments were strengthened. This form of “resistance” was evident in two
distinct ways. First, the Guys utilized literacy as a way to critique elements of society
they deemed inequitable. Second, they resisted forms of literacy associated with
dominant culture as a way to protest the malignancy of the uneven distribution of
relevance to tasks like classroom reading and writing. It must be noted as they wrote
their own “narratives of resistance” (sometimes penned in the quiet stains of ink and
silence), the Guys too were being read as objectionable texts and, as a result, resisted by
virtue of their masculine Blackness.
Literacy at the Personal Level

Finally, this study reveals the personal nature of literacy for the Guys, which was
as much about ﬁnding one’s self and having the power to write one’s own story as it was
about afﬁrming social and political commitments. This personal aspect of literacy is
important as it gives the individual some place in her or his practice of literacy. Hence,

while the Guys were evolving within their social groups (as their social groups too

158

evolved), they were also writing (about) themselves in ways that rendered them visible,
capable, and most importantly human.
Complex Literacy Studies: A Direction for Future Literacy Research

Literacy in the lives of the Guys expands at least two popular literacy paradigms:
new literacy studies and critical literacy studies. Speciﬁcally, the ﬁndings of this study
suggests that the focus which new literacy studies gives multiple literacies may be
limiting in that it fails to account for other complexities involved in the practice of
literacy. While the contexts and contents of literacy practices have been rightly
complicated within the multiple literacy paradigm, this study suggests that individuals
blur both context and content in their practices of literacy. That is, the separation of
literacy practices (i.e., for home/ for school) might be misleading because literacy (as
evidenced in the lives of the Guys) is a ﬂuid practice that involves a
dynamic/interdependent interplay of situations and events.

The Guys expanded “literacies ﬂom school” into their home lives and carefully
weaved literacies ﬂom other places into their school lives. Further, the contents of
literacy (i.e., literate forms) were also made complex in the lives of the Guys. For
example, some of the Guys’ writings sent messages that blended the sacred and secular
(e. g., Denick’s poem in Chapter 3).

There seemed to be a collaboration/symphony of literate resources at work when
the Guys practiced literacy. This made literacy more than multiple (conceived as sets of
isolated practices). Literacy in the lives of the Guys was composed of intertextual/hybrid
practices that ﬁnely wove into singular places the complex symbolic strings of multiple

contexts and forms. It was a place where multiple literacies met and coalescenced,

159

joining forces to construct complicated texts far more complex than how we currently
conceive of literacy.

The multiple literacies paradigm allows us to discuss literacy with regard to forms
(e.g., digital literacy) and contexts (e.g., school literacy) alone. This uncomplicated view
of literacy is misleading because alive within these isolated descriptions of literacy are
other forms of literacy and active in our description of the isolated contexts of literacy are
understandings of literacy derived ﬂom other contexts. In order to account for this
messiness, scholars must move toward a more complex study of literacy, which takes into
account the complex ways in which literacy is practiced.

Literacy in the lives of the Guys also offers a critique of critical literacy
paradigms based on deﬁcit assumption of the individual. From this point of view, critical
literacy is something to be given to the poor and distorted masses, to the oppressed, who
themselves need access to a way/method for thinking and rendering the inequities of
society visible. Further, the oppressed are so because they lack critical literacy and are,
therefore, disempowered to serve their own personal, social, and political interests.

While this view has seemed ﬂattering to many as a benevolent attempt at redressing
centuries old mechanisms of social oppression, as the Guys’ literate stories suggests, it is
perhaps as problematic and misleading as more traditional notions of literacy. With this
said, I must note that the Guys practiced literacy in critical ways without the assistance of
some “benevolent” aide.

Freire's (1970) concept of conscientization is useful for critiquing a certain aspect
of critical literacy. According to Freire (1972), conscientization emphasizes the social,

political and economic conditions (and contradictions) of oppressed individuals. Its goal

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is to help them better understand themselves and their potential to initiate action and
redress social inequities (F reire, 1972; Marjoribanks, 1991). By exploring literacy in the
lives of the Guys, we learned that the Guys were “conscientious,” as they used literacy,
actively to shape themselves and their social groups and to critique abounding social
inequities. In a sense, literacy gave the Guys some agency over their shared cultural
space, identity, and place in society. De Charms (1976) work on people as either
“origins” or “pawns” supports this notion that people would rather look at themselves as
controllers of their own behavior than as social puppets. In this way, the Guys practiced
literacy not as social puppets, but as “conscientious” performers, capable of responding to
inequities in society.

Freire's (1970) model of a critical pedagogy is helpful in understanding how to
operationalize these ﬁnding for classroom practice, as it is rooted within social praxis,
reﬂection and political action working together to break down oppression and the
structures and mechanisms of oppression. It must be noted, however, that oppression is
not exclusive to individuals alone. To be oppressed, individual’s (or groups’) interests
must be suppressed as well. Practices like literacy must at the same time favor the
cultural practices and work in the interests of the social elite. It must also project the
narratives, beliefs, and values of this “elite” group in a way that simultaneously takes for
granted the sociocultural contributions of the oppressed.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) ﬁercely critiqued what they depicted as
a school system which served to justify and perpetuate inequality. Bowles and Gintis
argued that schools (in addition to other institutions) ﬁrnctioned to validate preexisting

economic inconsistencies in society. By making certain forms of knowledge legitimate

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(and thereby making other forms illegitimate), schools got students to buy into an unfair
and fallacious “meritocratic” school system and accept asymmetrical social positions.

In a similar way, Freire (1970) questioned the role of literacy in school and
society and sought to promote a (critical) literacy pedagogy that could help oppressed
individuals become empowered and think critically about schools and the hidden
consequences of their own actions. For F reire, the key to promoting education was in a
practice of teaching literacy that gave individuals a process for (ex)posing problems and a
method for working toward real and liberating solutions.

While Freire believed that individuals needed access to the technologies (i.e.,
method) of social critique and cultural criticism through direct instruction, (as mentioned
earlier) literacy as practiced in the lives of the Guys suggests that individuals already
have access to such technologies without having direct instruction. The Guys’ literate
stories suggest that many of the critical literacy practices advocated by Freire are being
performed daily in the lives of “oppressed” individuals. To their beneﬁt, these practices
occur constantly without the explicit help of schools. The Guys’ literate stories suggest
two important things. First, they are not lacking literacy, but respect. Second, they are
not lacking critical literacy, but formal opportunities to practice it. To construct them as
lacking reiﬁes deﬁcit assumptions about Black males that work to reinforce existing
social hierarchies and power structures.

Another problem with this form of dialogue is that educators run the risk of taking
the stand that they are empowering students. Empowerment does not emanate ﬂom the
educator to the student. This is a paternalistic view of teaching perpetuates another form

of oppression, which Freire calls "colonizing." The educator/oppressor assumes to know

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what the student/oppressed needs and provides it for him or her. But what is actually
being provided is a benign form of oppression.

The Guys were never passive objects of their oppression. They not only practiced
literacy to critique social inequities, but to establish a view of themselves that drastically
differed from the predominant view of Black males prevalent in society (see Chapter 1).
It is not that oppressed individuals need to learn critical literacy. Rather, they must be
allowed to practice literacy critically in schools and classrooms. The way that they have
learned to participate in literate communities must also be afﬁrmed and validated by
schools, who are key sponsors of literacy (Brandt, 1999). Such revisions of literacy
pedagogy are important. “Sponsoring” the ways that the Guys practiced literacy will not
only be encouraging, but potentially transforrnative.

This speaks to another point that I have tried to make in this dissertation. That is,
the Guys were being prevented from practicing literacy in mainstream settings as
themselves and on their own terms. Signiﬁcant issues of race and racism also played an
important role in how the Guys practiced literacy. Speciﬁcally, race factored into the
literacies the Guys practiced. In their practice of literacy, the Guys continually defended
their choice to “be Black.” Racism, I argue, prevented other people from seeing the Guys
as literate/human. Further, racism was the basis for social opposition to the Guys and
their preferred practices of literacy.

In order to improve literacy education, literacy classrooms must become
cooperative places, tolerant and respectful of racial differences. They must also act
against racism by embracing an activist philosophy of determined and sustained social

struggle and accommodate multiple literacy practices, including those literacies practiced

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by the Guys. This need for reform is the basis for my Cooperative Literacy Pedagogy
(CLP). Hence, CLP is vastly needed in literacy education because there is little evidence
suggesting that standards and skills based literacy curricula are working to improve
literacy learning among the most disadvantaged groups in our society. Instead, standards
and skills based literacy curricula I contend help to reinforce narrow deﬁnitions of
academic literacy that exacerbate the achievement gap. In this way, now more so than at
any other time in history, the deﬁnition of literacy and the direction of literacy education
must change. Literacy classroom must be amended to become more inviting places for
students who have traditionally struggled in such settings (Cochran-Smith, 2004).
Reforming Literacy Education: A Tale of Two Classrooms

During this study, I spent considerable time in two English classrooms at the
Guys’ high school. One was a tenth grade American Literature class, and the other was
an eleventh grade British/World Literature class. Because of my interactions with them, I
have distinguished the classes by their teachers. The tenth grade class was taught by Mrs.
Crankshaw, an older White woman who had taught in the school for almost forty years.
The eleventh grade class was taught by Mr. Kegler, a young White male who was in his
ﬁrst year of teaching. The following vignettes offer glimpses into their classrooms.
Ms. Crankshaw Classroom

I will never forget the day that I walked into Ms. Crankshaw’s tenth grade English
classroom. It was a clumsy day. I arrived to her class about ﬁve minutes late.
Helplessly organized, somewhat frigid, and severely unaware, I reeled into the shrinking
room, which seemed to become more crowded with my every move. About a week

before my coming to her class, I had spoken with Ms. Crankshaw, who assured me

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during our brief conversation that I could slip into her second hour class at any time
without being noticed. Yet, when I stumbled through the constricting door, I felt the
nwdles of over sixty eyes piercing through my skin. Derrick’s stare perhaps penetrated
me the most. He sat deﬁantly yet comfortably in the back of class, where, after a few
visits, he and his friends would reserve a seat for me.

As I entered the classroom that Monday morning, I passed a cacophony of
assorted scenes. As I ventured along the front of the room, the anticipation of learning
was alive in many of the students’ faces. However, as I drew nearer to the back of the
classroom, to the secluded place where the Guys had sat since the beginning of the school
year, the joy of fervent faces gradually faded away. The path leading to the rear of the
room gave way to a gallery of images, which were displayed on the classroom walls. The
walls had been comfortably decorated with quotations ﬁ‘om “great” American authors,
many of which featured the faces and biographies of dead White men, and goofy cartoon
caricatures, which illustrated the “eight” parts of speech and other popular rules for
English grammar. Mrs. Crankshaw’s classroom, you can say, was a small world in itself,
enriched by its own scenery. It was a pervasive and overpowering space, which created a
highly intriguing landscape—one that privileged a narrow set of cultural ideas steeped in
western tradition and Eurocentric ideologies.

In every way, Mrs. Crankshaw’s English classroom embraced tradition. A
slender White woman in her mid-ﬁfties, Ms. Crankshaw had taught high school English
for ahnost thirty years. Before moving to the high school, she brieﬂy taught reading at
one of the local middle schools, where she began her teaching career. Colleagues who

worked with her described Ms. Crankshaw as “energetic” and as “someone who knows

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how to teach English well.” Others thought that over the years Ms. Crankshaw had “lost
her way with the students.” Many of her students even admitted that she was “not cool,”
which meant she was somehow “out-of—touch with them.”

Nevertheless, Mrs. Crankshaw defended the English literary tradition and
afﬁrmed the English literary canon as if they were gospel. Her argument was that
“students needed to be familiar with ‘great’ works [of literature] so that they could be
successful in school and in life,” for success in Ms. Crankshaw’s eyes was deﬁned by the
acquisition of a narrow set of English language skills and through familiarity with
classical texts.

In addition to holding traditional views, Ms. Crankshaw espoused a dualistic
interpretation of students, which to me seemed blisteringly simplistic. She explicitly
labeled students who performed well in her class as “good” and those like Derrick, who
struggled, as “bad.” In her words,

You have good students, children who come from good homes where they are

taught to love to learn and value hard work. You also have bad students. These

students don’t want to learn. All they care about is taking the easy route and
getting by. It’s not their fault though. Their parents are involved in their
education. Like other students, they do what they learn at the home.
For Crankshaw, the “bad students” seemed somehow culturally or at least socially
predisposed to resist learning. Simply put, they were lazy and indolent and came from
impoverished backgrounds. By contrast, students who did well in school and in her
classroom were viewed as value-driven and hard-working.

Mr. Kegler Classroom

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A year aﬂer sitting in Mrs. Crankshaw’s classroom, I followed Derrick, Jose,
Tony, and Sheldon into Mr. Kegler’s eleventh grade English classroom. Mr. Kegler is a
new teacher at the Guys’ high school, only a year removed ﬁ'om student teaching. While
his lack of experience poses practical dilemmas, his newness to the ﬁeld invites energy
and surprised creativity. Denick thinks he’s “cool.” In his words, “Mr. ‘Keg’ listens and
tries to make class ﬁm.” To his credit, Mr. Kegler reﬁrses to blame the Guys for their
difﬁculties in his class. Instead, he searches diligently for ways to engage them in the
city-mandated curriculum.

Another interesting trait of Mr. Kegler is his awareness of what he does not know.
Because of this, the two of us developed a collaborative relationship, where my research
ﬁndings inﬂuenced his pedagogical decisions. For example, I remember the day that Mr.
Kegler came to me for help. He felt that he was not reaching his Black male students.
He had several of them in his classroom and all but Sheldon was failing. He wanted to
try new and exciting things that would hopefully engage them but was somewhat
restricted by the city-mandated curriculum, which did much to restrict teacher autonomy.

Such curricular menus had become attractive in Lansing because Lansing, like
other cities, struggled to uplift its failing students—many of whom were Black males. In
the wake of NCLB, achievement became a lucrative affair and, in some ways, tended to
count more than learning. NCLB placed a huge amount of pressure on schools to
compete. This competition meant privileging narrow conceptions of language and
literacy that could be easily measure by standardized tests.

I arrived at Mr. Kegler’s class during the second nine weeks of school. Mr.

Kegler was teaching out of the second quarter of the city-mandated curriculum. The

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schedule dictated that the class read and discuss “with understanding” Homer’s Iliad.
Fearful that the Iliad would bore his students, Mr. Kegler asked me for suggestions for
making the text more relevant to students, especially the Guys. He knew that I was a
certiﬁed English teacher, who had known the Guys now for over a year. He had hoped
that, because of the time that I spent with them, I would have ideas on how to teach them.
He was also committed to teaching for social justice, which meant disrupting traditional
approaches to English language arts and afﬁrming the cultural heritages of his students in
his classroom.

To offer assistance to Mr. Kegler, I peered deeply through my notes and thought
even more deeply about the relationship between literacy and the Guys. It was through
my collaboration with Mr. Kegler and my being uncomfortable with Mrs. Cranksaw
pedagogy that my CLP emerged. For me, Mrs. Crankshaw, while a good-intentioned
teacher, represented the stagnation of the teaching enterprise.

Researchers have long lamented how teaching as a ﬁeld has been resistant to
change and how research has rarely inﬂuenced how classrooms are taught. Mr. Kegler,
on the other hand, represented possibilities for transformative classroom adjustments.
That is, researchers could work with teachers, as an ongoing part of practice, and teachers
interested in social justice could work with students, using research ﬁnding that serve
students’ interests. Thinking about ways to bring this relationship to life in the stubborn,
unarnusing classroom situation has been a complex but enlightening. It has, for me,
marked a pedagogy in which a text like the Iliad would no longer be as foreign and
irrelevant to Derrick and his peers as Beowulf once was.

Researcher-Teacher Collaboration: Toward A Collaborative Literacy Pedagogy

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Researchers for social justice in education have dual duties. First, they must
produce knowledge and insight, which interrogates social inequities, serve the interests of
liberty and democracy (as both equal representation), and challenge an unfair status quo.
The second duty is to translate this knowledge into language that practitioners can
understand and employ in their teaching practices.

As mentioned earlier, the duties of teachers are also multiple and complex.
Teachers are charged with planning and delivering instruction, managing classrooms, and
reporting achievement outcomes to students, parents, and administrators. Teachers
interested in social justice are also charged with three other things: 1) evening the
educational playing ﬁeld by helping disempowered students transform their social
situations, 2) working against discrimination and social injustice by making classrooms
more equitable places, and 3) developing practices that serves the interests of all students.
Since researchers and teachers work for social justices from different angles, their duties
instantiate a commitment to cooperative practice, which I am deﬁning as a fundamental
aspect of CLP. By cooperative practice, I refer to researchers and teacher working
together as allies for social justice.

CLP combines two qualitative research methodologies: critical ethnography and
action research. CLP employs critical ethnography and action research to capture the
complexities of development, which I argue are social, cultural, and political. In this
way, CLP stresses the notion that all education and, by extension, educational spaces are
fundamentally contested. Action research, by association, provides a systematic, inquiry-
based, scientiﬁc process conducted by participants (mainly instructors), who follow a

process of examining existing practices, implementing new practices, and evaluating the

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results all in collaboration with a researcher. The goal of CLP is to gain insight into
students’ localized social spaces and develop reﬂective/representative teaching practices
to help transform those spaces and challenge existing barriers to improvement (Mills,
2003, p. 4).

Through collaboration, researcher-teacher teams will be able to navigate complex
roles in research that is reﬂective of students’ interests and teaching that is reﬂective of
research. As such, CLP advocates for research and teaching which: (a) document and
respond to the nature of student oppression; (b) document and build upon students’
processes of empowerment, deﬁned by their journeys away from oppression; and (c)
interrogate and disrupt the historical, political, economic, and educational factors that
violate human rights, especially the students’ right to learn.

Below I provide two examples of CLP, which grew out of my
interactions/collaboration with Mr. Kegler. The aim of the examples is not to deliver
programmatic advice on how to implement CLP in English classrooms. Rather, the focus
is to examine ways in which CLP theorizes literacy for the secondary English classrooms.
The articulation of student voices is a primary goal in CLP theorizing of literacy
education, as it permits students to inscribe their own values onto academic literacy
practices.

The Comic Book Unit
Mr. Kegler and I, seeking to engage the Guys in classroom literacy activities,

developed a comic book unit’. Recall from this study’s ﬁndings that comic books were

 

' Prior to our collaboration on the comic book unit, Mr. Kegler’s class painfully read Macbeth within the
ﬁrst four weeks of school, followed by a consortium of poetry written during the Elizabethan era. Derrick,
Jose, and Tony failed the unit exam for Macbeth and hadn’t read any of the pery or short stories in their
British literature textbooks.

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key texts that the Guys used to practice literacy. Mr. Kegler and I reasoned that the
difference between the comic books that the Guys read at home and the texts they did not
read in school were at best minimal. The diﬁ’erence could be summed up in a single
phrase: comic books as opposed to classroom literature were responsive, if not directly
relevant, to the Guys’ interests.

We further agreed that comic book texts are literary texts that can be used to
stimulate critical classroom dialogue (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2004). Comic books
are rich in story lines that reﬂect contemporary issues. As such, comic books could be
analyzed for social issues, character traits, and other sophisticated literary tropes. It is
possible to approach comic book texts from a variety of literary angles (i.e., apply anti-
racist, feminist, Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytic or postmodernist critiques). As
Morrell and Duncan—Andrade (2004) have argued, “Once learned, these analytic and
interpretative tools developed through engagement with popular cultural texts can be
applied to canonical texts as well” (p. 89).

Mr. Kegler agreed to adapt the class’s reading of the Iliad using a comic format.
As such, we designed an entire comic book unit, in which the students would read a
variety of comic book texts to become familiar with reading comic books, analyze and
write comics themselves, and ﬁnally read the Iliad in comic book format. Upon hearing
about the comic book unit, the students expressed rare excitement about participating in
the project.

Using the Iliad as the central text, the comic book unit had three objectives:

(1) To utilize our students’ interest in comic books to produce student interest in

reading the Iliad;

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(2) To allow students to perform sophisticated/familiar literacy practices within
the classroom; and

(3) To improve students’ exam scores in Mr. Kegler’s classroom.

Following the above objectives, we brought comic books (X-men and Batman)
into the classrooms. Students read these comic books as serious literature and discussed
issues from the texts that dealt with human intolerance to difference (in X-men) and
human’s preoccupation with revenge (in Batman). The classroom discussions led to
more thoughtful analyses of racism and the role of revenge in the US invasion of Iraq.

By reading X-men and Batman comics in class, students became more familiar
with how comic books were written, as they presented an accessible template for writing
stories. We had students use this template to re-write the Iliad in comic format. Students
were grouped, and each group was given a section of the epic poem to translate and
illustrate in comic form. Aﬁer the sections had been converted into comic book texts, the
sections were collected and compiled into a larger comic book text of the entire epic
poem, the Iliad. The completed comic was, then, distributed to the entire class, read, and
discussed, again, as serious classroom text.

A few of Mr. Kegler’s Black male students, including Derrick, found ways to
participate in the classroom activities associated with the comic unit. Because of the
level of concentration translating the Iliad involved, the Guys read and comprehended not
only his section of the Iliad, but the entire text. At the completion of the project, the
Guys read the entire epic poem the Iliad, though in comic book format.

Derrick’s reading of the text, in particular, was sophisticated. He critically

responded to the text in language consistent with his peer world. Prior to this project, I

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never saw Derrick participate in any classroom discussion, but during a class discussion
about the character of Paris, he participated.

Derrick: I don’t think Paris (in Homer’s Iliad) is right. He sold his whole

family out for a female and then acted like a punk when
Agamemnon and Menelaus came for her [Helen].

Derrick’s rendering of the character of Paris from the Iliad is striking, not because
it reveals a level of unacknowledged complexity, but precisely because it acknowledges
Paris’s known complexities in language that is accessible to the Derrick’s vernacular
imagination. He understood the text, personally connected with it, and was able to make
valuable meaning out of (evaluate) it in ways that explored human ethics in textual
experience.

When I stepped outside of Mr. Kegler’s English classroom to observe the Guys, I
noticed how Derrick and some his classmates used the Iliad for interactions outside the
class.

Denick: [Bragging] Nigga, I’m Achilles.

Tony: [Objecting and teasing] Nigga, you ain’t Achilles. You a ho like

Paris.

Outside of the classroom, the Guys—some of who sat quietly and seemingly
inattentive inside the classroom—effortlessly quoted the Iliad as part of their verbal play,
making use of its characterizations. While the Guys certainly practiced literacy outside
the classroom, some of them, in particular Derrick, found rare interest in a canonical text,

which is a big deal to me. If we recall, academic reading was not appealing to the Guys.

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And this failure to appeal to the Guys created great distances between academic literacy
and the Guys.

While I agree with premise of the comic book unit, I must point out some its
limitations, which link to the projects limitations more generally. There are critical issues
laced in the fabric of what it means to be literate. Outside of the classroom, the Guys
talked candidly about engaging a school-related text (Remember, reading academic
literature, for them, had been tantamount to “actin white”). Hence, reading and writing
were ways of “actin.” For the Guys to approach the Iliad, they had to operate within a
discourse of extreme maleness.

This discourse alone set up fences around possible literate activities that the Guys
could otherwise engage, like reading romance novels (Gilbert, 1996). The Guys could
talk about the Iliad only as long as they discussed it in Black Talk and as long as
everyone around them agreed that “Paris was a ho” and Achilles, “da man.” Hence, there
were certain gender and racial rules that governedhow they practiced literacy and other
social activities. These rules work with other sociocultural rules to limit literacy to lines
of race, class, and geography, both sanctioning and denying literate opportunities.

Notwithstanding, our desire with the comic book unit was 1) to make Mr.
Kegler’s classroom’s experiences more relevant to students, 2) to meet the demands of
the city-mandated curriculum, and 3) to motivate students in critical discussions of
themselves and others. We also wanted students to critique characters and themes in the
texts and connect their readings of the texts to larger readings of the world. In this way,
the unit was consistent with the basic tenets of CLP in that it was collaboratively

constructed, based upon research ﬁndings and situated in the experiences of students. The

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Guys not only engaged in a familiar and sophisticated reading of canonical texts; they
also were able to ﬁnd themselves in a relevant classroom experience that had been
uniquely adjusted to suit them.
The C C W Unit

Mr. Kegler and I designed the Classroom, Community, and the World (CCW)
unit to build upon the Guys interest in Hip Hop. The unit dealt with various theories of
Hip Hop (Kitwana, 2003; Morgan, 1999; Pugh, 2004), speciﬁcally theories related to the
unit’s theme, “The Classroom, the Community, and the World.” In it, we approached
Hip Hop as a Black cultural aesthetic, which commented on the human experience from
multiple scholarly perspectives.

The conceptualization of the CCW unit was not conﬁned to Hip Hop theories
alone. The unit employed other critical literacy frames, which Appleman (2000)
maintains “can help secondary literature classrooms become sites of constructive and
transactive activity where students approach texts with curiosity, authority, and initiative”
(p. 9). In particular, the unit employed three approaches to literature that Appleman
outlines: Rosenblatt’s (1968) reader-response theory, feminist literary theory (Showalter,
1989), and Marxist literary theory (Appleman, 2000). In bringing these perspectives to
bear on Hip Hop texts, students made meanings that dealt with multiple aspects of our
humanity. Speciﬁcally, they were able to build understandings of the texts, of
themselves, and of others. Not only did the critical analytical lenses make visible what
the students brought to the texts, it gave them language to articulate this interaction,

which was rooted in a familiar literacy practice: cultural and social critique.

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Hip Hop texts, it seemed, were far more amenable to critical analysis, perhaps,
because they presented a textual genre itself rooted in critique. Along these lines, Morrell
and Duncan-Andrade (2002) contend,

Teaching Hip-hop as a music and culture of resistance can facilitate the

development of critical consciousness in urban youth. Analyzing the critical

social commentary produced by [Hip Hop] may lead to consciousness-raising
discussions, essays, and research projects attempting to locate an explanation for
the current state of affairs for urban youngsters. The knowledge reﬂected in these
lyrics could engender discussions of esteem, power, place, and purpose or
encourage students to further their own knowledge of urban sociology and
politics. In this way, Hip hop music should stand on its own merit in the academy
and be a worthy subject of study in its own right than necessarily leading to

something more “acceptable” like a Shakespearean [sic] text (pp. 89-90).

M. A. K. Halliday’s (1980) “three aspects of language study” also helped Mr.
Kegler and I shape the CCW unit. According to Halliday (1980), a child learns language,
through language and about language. Hence, the process of learning is as much about
learning context as it is about learning content. Then, to teach Hip Hop content divorced
from the context to which it belongs diminishes its educational value. In this way, the
CCW unit required students to learn Hip Hop by reading lyrics and listening to music
from several artists. Texts ranged from Run DMC’s “Walk This Way” to NWA’s
“Expression,” from “Queen Latifa’s “U-N-I-T-Y,” to Lil’ Kim’s “Heavenly Father.”
They also learned about Hip Hop’s contexts by exploring its linguistic heritage, social

and political history, and it cultural evolution in general.

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Learning Hip Hop. While they were exposed to several Hip Hop texts, the
students in Mr. Kegler’s class more closely examined two songs (“Dear Momma” and
“Changes”) by posthumous rap artist Tupac Shakur. These texts were looked at closely '
to answer the question, “what is Hip Hop?” To do this, students looked at the Hip Hop
texts to determine what things in the texts did. For example, they identiﬁed a list of
literary concepts ranging from metaphor to alliteration, and from chiasmus to irony. As
they analyzed the texts, students used their knowledge of such terms to assess the texts’
literary merit. In addition, students developed their own “rules for writing raps.” Based
on these “rules,” they also composed their own raps.

Student raps varied in style and in substance. In spite of their differences, all
student-produced raps emanated ﬁom known Hip Hop traditions. Some student-
produced raps were overtly political like the raps of KRS-l, Public Enemy, and Mos Def.
Other student-produced raps were comical like the raps of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh
Prince and, more recently, Kanye West. Still others were a sober reﬂection of city-street
life, reminiscent of the raps of N.W.A., Notorious B.I.G., and the Game. The objective
here was not to use rap to scaffold academic literacy skills. Rather, the objective was to
have students learn Hip Hop by having them practice it. Listening to, reading, and
writing raps was our way of accomplishing this.

Learning about Hip Hop. The CCW unit also promoted students’ learning about
Hip Hop—its history, its language, and its culture—by introducing them to texts that
encouraged these perspectives. To learn about Hip Hop’s language, students read
Smithennan’s (1999) “The Chain Remain the Same: Communicative Practices in the Hip

Hop Nation” (pp. 268-283). Our objective was not to dismiss the importance of learning

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Standard English, but rather to present material that might help students appreciate their
own languages and the linguistic franca of Hip Hop music. According to Snritherman
(1999), “It is critical to keep in mind that the racialized rhetoric of rap music and the Hip
Hop Nation is embodied in the communicative practices of the larger Black speech
community” (p. 271). Hence, the language of Hip Hop has deep roots, especially for
urban students, many of whom are Black. Since Black language has been devalued and
viliﬁed in our society, it was important for us to establish the legitimacy of Black
language in Hip Hop so that students would not feel that they were reading “inferior”
texts.

In addition to language study, students read excerpts from Light’s (1999) Vibe
Magazine ’s History of Hip Hop and Kitwanna’s (2003) The Hip Hop Nation. These
texts were used to help students explore Hip Hop’s evolution over time and to help
introduce them to the cultural and historical study of Hip Hop. In this way, students
learned that, just as it has legitimate linguistic roots, Hip Hop also has legitimate
historical and cultural roots. By exploring the deeper characteristics of Hip Hop, students
gained contextual knowledge about the Hip Hop texts they were exploring. This
knowledge was crucial in helping reform students understanding of themselves, which
was vital to getting them to engage in more sophisticated textual analysis. As such,
students began to understand how they could learn through Hip Hop about the world. As
they learned about it, students began to associate Hip Hop with other valued products that
they consumed, appreciated, and critiqued.

Learning Through Hip Hop. Finally, the CCW unit encouraged students to learn

through Hip Hop. In the course of the unit, we explored, analyzed, and evaluated many

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themes related to human experience. In this way, students built understandings and
interpretations of the many dimensions of human experience and developed an awareness
of how texts, including Hip Hop texts, speak to one another and to various conditions that
deﬁne individuals and the world.

In a class discussion, Derrick and Jose commented on the Black mother/son
relationship, comparing Tupac’s “Dear Momma” and Hughes’s “Mother to Son.”
Sheldon explored femininity in popular Black literature and songs, deconstructing beauty
in Walker’s “Everyday Use,” TLC’s “Unpretty,” and Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” In this
way, Hip Hop was used to sanction ideas that relate to much more than Hip Hop.
Speciﬁcally, the Guys were learning how to critically analyze texts, through which they
could make sense of their world.

During the course of the CCW unit, the Guys produced texts and participated in
classroom discussions as experts. Not only did they read a wide-range of texts, they were
also able to demonstrate an understanding of these texts, of themselves, and of others.
The following examples illustrate this point:

Tony: I can relate to what Tupac feels in his rap ‘Dear Momma.” It
come[s] from the same place that make[s] Hughes write his
poem—the heart. This is where we all share a universal love for
momma She [is] the same to all of us. She [is] momma. No
matter where she is, who[se mother] she is, she got [has] the same
name: Momma.

Mr. Kegler: But Hughes does not call the mother in his poem Momma.

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Tony: They [are] still alike . . . (stutters), re-related. Hughes’s poem
[has] a mother talking to her son, you know, giving him some
advice. [Tu]Pac is a son, saying thank you for what his mother
[has given] him. Don’t Hughes got a poem called “Thank you”
too?

Mr. Kegler: That’s a short story, “Thank you, M’am.” Go on.

Tony: I don’t know. . . (Pauses) Whether your momma is like Langston
Hughes’s mother or like Tupac’s momma, she [is] a symbol of
love to us all.”

What is distinctive about this example is that Tony was making observations
about a perceived relationship that he believed existed between two texts. While I had
seen him do this outside the classroom, I had never seen Tony do this within the
classroom. This might have meant that by using familiar texts in the classroom, Tony
was able to practice familiar textual practices that he did otherwise use in school. Even
when challenged by his teacher, Tony maintained that the texts were “still alike.” His
insistence that his interpretation of the texts was valid is telling. It suggests that Tony
was able to identify a relationship between the texts as real, support it, and label it (e. g.
“She got the same name: Momma”).

Much of scholarly analysis is about authority in making truth claims about texts
and supporting such claims with evidence. The text did not serve as a source of
information for Tony. His was not an efferent read. Rather, Tony used the texts as a tool
for thinking about and examining the Black mother/son relationship. According to Wade

and Moje (2000), these kinds of connections and interpretations of texts constitute

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engagement. According to the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts
(1996), this level of engagement represents learning.

In his essay, Sheldon provides an interesting interpretation of the mother character
in the texts “Mother to Son” and “Dear Momma.” According to Sheldon’s essay.

The symbol of the mother in both of the texts [“Mother to Son” and “Dear

Momma”] has a lot of importance for how we think of women today. There is a

hidden tension: she is a savior and a survivor . . . but a sinner and a saint.

Women in our society have usually been boxed up between paradoxical extremes,

which never allow us to see who she really might be—always more than what we

think she is—more than a ﬁiend, more than just a mother, but, like Lil’ Kim
said—a woman, a phenomenal woman.

For Sheldon, the description of mothers as saviors, while celebratory, was
restricting. His analysis of the mother character was similar to the feminist literary
criticism of hooks (1992) and others, who ﬁnd it limiting to describe women as sinner or
saint, Mammy or Jezebel. As such, there was enveloped sophisticated analysis alive in
Sheldon’s writing.

Taken together, these examples describe the meanings that the Guys were capable
of making when given an opportunity to seriously read familiar texts. In this way, texts
become meaningful for various reasons and, indeed, we derive meaning from texts based
upon the connections that we share with them. The issue here, then, is about the
relationship, the explicit connection, between the reader and the text. Divorced of this
connection a text can render little meaning to a reader. Hence, the interpretations that the

Guys produced were as much about their relationships with Hip Hop as it was about their

181

ability to read and comprehend Hip Hop texts. Because it was relevant and because they
were able to connect to it, the Guys produced meaningful reﬂections and engaged in
critical discussions about “the word and the world.”

Following the unit examples provide, we can view CLP as responding to “many
dimensions of human experiences,” speciﬁcally the oﬂen neglected experiences of
young, urban Black men. However, the messy politics of literacy persists. We live in a
culturally and linguistically intolerant world were everyone is pressured to bow to narrow
notions of literacy and English. Notwithstanding, this work suggests that CLP is
effective in helping students meet both social and cultural goal and in helping teachers
practice pedagogies that are committed to the promises of research. Using CLP, Mr.
Kegler and I redeﬁne academic literacy in a way that incorporated literacy in the lives of
the Guys. As such, the Guys learned academic literacies in ways that we desire for them.

Conclusion

Based on this research, literacy research needs to continue in the lives of urban
adolescent Black males. In my own work, I observed the Guys using digital technology
such as cell phones, computers, video games, mp3 players, and pop-cultural texts such as
comic books, movies, and song lyrics to mediate communication and foster participation
in a very sophisticated social network not always valued in classrooms. These uses of
technology do not factor very much into this work.

In witnessing the pedagogical potential of these often unacknowledged sources of
literacy, I have encouraged students and teachers alike to think critically about how such
sources might be used to enhance urban teaching and learning. My goal has been always

not only to promote intellectual engagement with critical texts and issues of urban

182

education but also to help others become more discerning readers of and transformative
teachers within the world around them.

I close this dissertation with a brief summary of points. Literacy in the lives of
the Guys was informed by three things: speciﬁc African American cultural traditions, the
human vocation to make known their personal struggles and stories, while struggling to
secure a sense of self, and the subcultures to which we all ascribe. From this, I locate the
debates about literacy within a dialogic theory of literacy practice that enables us to
understand the complex dynamic between power and resistance to which critics’
responses to Black males and literacy learning call attention.

By operationalizing literacies in more inclusive ways, I do not mean to deny that
some Black males often become complicit in their own containment via resistance to
academic purposes for literacy. But I do mean to promote hearings of literacy, especially
those rarely heard, which—when practiced by the Guys, work to resist co-optation by the
keepers of literacy who would use literacy standardizations to further the project of
constructing Black males as delinquents, rather than as politically and intellectually astute

agents for positive social and cultural transformation.

183

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