Ann Arnett Ferguson - Bad Boys (Law, Meaning, And Violence)

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The scope of Law, Meaning, and Violence is defined by the wide-ranging scholarly debates signaled by each of the words in the title. Those debates have taken place among and between lawyers, anthropologists, political theorists, sociologists, and historians, as well as literary and cultural critics. This series is intended to recognize the importance of such ongoing conversations about law, meaning, and violence as well as to encourage and further them.

Series Editors: Martha Minow, Harvard Law School
Austin Sarat, Amherst College

RECENT TITLES IN THE SERIES

Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (with a new Foreword by Pedro A. Noguera) by Ann Arnett Ferguson

The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India by Jinee Lokaneeta

Keeping Hold of Justice: Encounters between Law and Colonialism by Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans, Mark McMillan, and Nesam McMillan

The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (with new Foreword and Preface) by Nasser Hussain

Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence by Stewart Motha

The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law: Unfinished Business by Leora Bilsky

Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political, by Stacy Douglas

Refining Child Pornography Law: Crime, Language, and Social Consequences, edited by Carissa Byrne Hessick

The First Global Prosecutor: Promise and Constraints, edited by Martha Minow, C. Cora True-Frost, and Alex Whiting

Hybrid Justice: The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, by John D. Ciorciari and Anne Heindel

The Justice of Mercy, by Linda Ross Meyer

Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison, by Benjamin Fleury-Steiner with Carla Crowder

Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty, by Paul W. Kahn

Punishment and Political Order, by Keally McBride

Lives of Lawyers Revisited: Transformation and Resilience in the Organizations of Practice, by Michael J. Kelly

Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Capital Punishment, by David Von Drehle

Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education, by William Lyons and Julie Drew

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PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MAKING OF BLACK MASCULINITY

Ann Arnett Ferguson

Foreword by Pedro A. Noguera

Ann Arbor

University of Michigan Press

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Copyright by the University of Michigan 2000, 2020
All rights reserved

For questions or permissions, please contact um.press.perms@umich.edu

Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

New paperback edition first published July 2020.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferguson, Ann Arnett
Bad boys : public schools in the making of black masculinity / Ann
Arnett Ferguson.
p. cm. (Law, meaning, and violence)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-472-11103-5 (cloth : acid-free paper)

1. Afro-American boysEducationSocial aspects.
2. Masculinity. I. Title. II. Series.
LC2771 .F47 2000
371.82996'073dc21 99-006950

ISBN 978-0-472-11103-9 (cloth : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-08849-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-03782-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-12696-5 (ebook)

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To Cole and Carly Rose

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Page viii Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11515236

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Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline by Responding to the Needs of Black Male Children with Support Rather than Punishment

Pedro A. Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education and Faculty Director for the Center for the Transformation of Schools, UCLA

The killing of Trayvon Martin accomplished something that numerous policy reports and research studies failed to achieve. The murder of the unarmed boy, carrying nothing more than soda and Skittles as he walked home, drew sustained public attention to the precarious plight of black males. There is of course tremendous irony here, because the killer of Trayvon Martin was not convicted of a crime. Like Emmett Till, the black teenager murdered by a mob for the crime of looking at a white woman, Trayvon Martin also became a symbol, and not because of the hoodie he wore. For those who mobilized for justice, the killing of Trayvon Martin was further evidence that black males occupy a stunningly vulnerable status in American society.

The vulnerability of black males is particularly evident in education. On all of the indicators of academic achievement, educational attainment, and school success, African American males, and in many cases Latino males, too, are distinguished from other segments of the American population by their consistent clustering in categories associated with subpar academic performance and failure (Schott 2010). Similarly, on indicators associated with successenrollment in honors or gifted classes and advanced-placement courses, matriculation to college and degree attainment, etc.black and Latino males are vastly underrepresented. With few exceptions, these dismal patterns are Page x evident in urban, suburban, and rural school districts throughout the United States, and even in communities with relatively small minority populations (Majors and Billson 1992). Nationally, black males are more likely than any other group to be suspended and expelled from school. (It is worth noting that Trayvon Martin was suspended at the time of his shooting. See Fergus and Noguera 2010 and Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010 for a discussion of racial disparities and school suspensions). This is even true for black males in preschool. A 2014 US Department of Education study found that one out of four black male four-year-olds had been suspended at least once.

In Bad Boys, Ann Ferguson explores the complex array of factors that contribute to the vulnerability of black males in school. Ferguson does this by examining how black male identities are constructed in schools, and by exploring why institutions ostensibly designed to help these students are so often the setting where problems such as labelling, academic failure, and excessive and frequent punishments begin. These issues are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published twenty years ago. Fergusons careful ethnographic research helps the reader understand how the preoccupation with order and control that is operative in many schools serving low-income children of color creates oppositional identities among black male students that schools generally find so problematic and difficult to contend with.

It is hoped that educators who find the social processes described by Ferguson familiar will become uncomfortable when reading her descriptions of them. More often than not, our schools disproportionately punish our most disadvantaged students. Too often, they do so through punishment practices that ostracize children and exclude them from learning. Rarely do such practices result in a change in behavior. Seeing them described in vivid detail should prompt educators to remember that their role is to provide support and guidance to students in need rather than allowing our schools to serve as launching pads for the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

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