As our country currently exists, racism and anti-Blackness via racial violence, police brutality, police shootings of unarmed Black people, race riots, and public shootings are commonplace. What is uncommon, is discourse surrounding race, racism, racialized and gendered experiences, and their impact on the lives of Black youth, specifically Black boys. The racial milieu in which Black boys exist, the meanings and stereotypes attached to their race and gender, and the racist encounters and racialized and gendered experiences they endure, deeply impact how they know, see and understand themselves. However, there is little inquiry into how these racial understandings and racialized and gendered experiences inform how and why Black youth see and understand themselves in the manners in which they do. This is notably evidenced among Black boys in middle school, who are rarely, if at all, given space to engage in conversations about race, racism, racial and gender socialization processes, and their overall identities and constructions of self.Real Talk examined how Black boys attending a predominantly white middle school made sense of and experienced race and racism and the impact that racialization and gendering had on their self-concepts. Using narrative research grounded in phenomenology, this study used qualitative interviews, student artifacts, and non-participant observations to highlight the role of race and gender in the daily lives of eight Black boys, illustrating how racism, anti-Blackness, and power operate within society and school settings. Guided by three theoretical and conceptual influences, Black boyhood, Critical Race Theory in education, and anti-Blackness in education, this study addressed three questions: (1) How do Black boys attending a predominantly white middle school understand and experience race and racism?; (2) How might these understandings and experiences inform their self-concept as they enter and move through the middle school grades?; and (3) What practices and structures create and maintain affirming experiences and supportive spaces for Black boys attending a predominantly white middle school? Findings in this study revealed that Black boys are indeed knowers, self-authors, and social and cultural actors in their racialized and gendered experiences. The boys in Real Talk demonstrated the ways they individually and collectively understood race and gender and their impact on their identities and perceptions of self. They spoke of the many ways their innocence, intellect, and truth were racialized, unveiling the implicit and explicit ways that racism and anti-Blackness operate in society and schooling contexts. Most importantly, this study uncovered protective factors and positive racial socialization processes that contributed to how these boys developed and maintained Black joy, positive racial, academic, and social identities, and promising outlooks on their lives in the face of racism, anti-Blackness, racialized and gendered stereotypes, race-based implications, and racist ideologies. In the end, the social and cultural space that Real Talk cultivated, proved to be critical for exploring and examining the myriad of factors that impact Black boys' life outcomes, opportunities, identities, and sense of self. In doing so, it highlighted the need to engage in critical dialogue, conscious raising, and real conversations about race, racism, gender, and the racialized and gendered experiences among Black boys at home, school, and other spaces. This research also emphasized the understandings and experiences that Black boys have that contribute to how parents, school practitioners, and educational researchers should engage with them.
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