Choice, Crisis, and Urban Endangerment

This chapter details the material and discursive reality that informs ABMS supporters’ anti-racist and gender-biased effort to address what ails black boys in urban schools. On the one hand, neoliberal educational reform and on on-going conversations about a transracial “boy” crisis inform these supporters’ contention that “law and order” in the classroom is key to ensuring that black boys, like all boys, grow up to achieve their “natural” status as patriarchs. On the other hand, the discourse that posits black males as nearly obsolete or as an “endangered” species in the systemically racist labor market, criminal justice system, and elsewhere shapes these supporters’ willingness and ability to challenge anti-black racism in the classroom and beyond.