Dueling Narratives: Racial Socialization and Literacy as Triggers for Re-Humanizing African American Boys, Young Men, and Their Families

Abstract

The life chances of black boys and men on many health indicators are so compromised that we take for granted that it's the contexts surrounding them that are risky, not their personhood or basic humanity. While we cannot turn a blind eye toward the data on health disparities, somehow the statistical comparison of black males to others becomes in and of itself a mechanism or lens of disparity-making. Like watching the visual examples of police shootings and black youth harassment, it's painful that the evidence of this inhumanity is in and of itself debilitating and traumatic. The very visual evidence of the tragedy contributes to the trauma of how maybe black lives really do not matter. But the absence of a frame in the research literature on black males that puts these tragedies into a humanity perspective is equally traumatic. In this chapter, I propose non-traditional influences on black male well-being and social interaction through a meta-lens of how the hidden narratives about their humanity directs the research we review, the questions we research, and the inhumanity we do not question or research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)