Abstract
Social-emotional learning (SEL) is important for academic and social success, yet responsive SEL for Black youth remains underexamined. The current study analyzed focus groups to investigate how Black boys (N = 10) in an urban middle school think about emotion and its regulation. Results revealed that participants negotiate tension between emotion expression and control; they argued that inhibition of emotions in public was essential, but they desired greater emotional freedom. We interpret these patterns through the developmental framework of accommodation and resistance. We discuss implications and the need for transformative SEL in urban schools serving Black boys.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) includes, in part, the process through which “children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills [to] . . . understand and manage emotions” (Weissberg et al., 2015, p. 6). Over the past 20 years, the implementation of SEL instruction has increased in PK-12 schools due to its connection to positive academic and psycho-social outcomes (Durlak et al., 2011). While agreeing that SEL is valuable, scholars assert that current conceptualizations of SEL and associated curricula and implementation require reform (Jagers et al., 2019). The current article responds to two gaps that need to be addressed in the reform process. First, while research indicates that SEL is equally meaningful to middle school students when compared with more widely studied elementary school students, current measures do not properly attend to their developmental needs (Roeser et al., 2000; Yeager et al., 2018). Second, SEL rarely addresses macro-level processes such as discrimination and marginalization and their effects on student outcomes. Thus, it may be unresponsive to the needs of Black students. SEL in its current form may be especially lacking for Black boys given the context of racialization, hypermasculinity, and adultification that these students uniquely experience (Dumas & Nelson, 2016). The current article focuses specifically on middle school Black boys in urban schools to understand how they make sense of emotion and its management—a key SEL competency.
Literature Review
Middle school is a meaningful context of development. Students’ successes or failures in middle school often predict how they will fare in high school (Alspaugh, 1998). During middle school, students experience a marked decline in academic motivation and often have an increase in adverse behavioral and psychological outcomes (Goldstein et al., 2015). Thus, researchers and practitioners are interested in the ways SEL may be a source of support during the middle school years, but this is understudied (Rosenblatt & Elias, 2008).
During middle school, the early adolescent (age 10–14) experiences cognitive, physical, and social changes at a pace second only to infancy (Williams et al., 2019). Peers are particularly important during this process; they provide guidance and reference. Ultimately, early adolescents’ exploration of social identities alongside cognitive growth and physical changes contribute to overall social competence (Bornstein et al., 2010). Considering middle school students’ developmental changes and the high valuation of social competence during this time, SEL is even more relevant to ensure student success.
A student’s regulation of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, the management of stress, and the control of impulses are components of emotion management, a key tenet of SEL (Domitrovich et al., 2017). SEL programs generally intervene at the student level, focusing on individual skill development to enhance social-emotional competencies (Durlak et al., 2011), without addressing cultural pressures or relationships across contexts. Yeager et al. (2018) assert this approach is particularly problematic for middle school students, as it does not consider developmental needs such as the value of socially mediated factors like status and respect and the increasing influence peers may have on individual choices. Furthermore, middle school SEL programming that maintains focus at the student level misses an opportunity to unpack how racism and sexism affect interpersonal relationships. As middle school students become increasingly independent from parents and more embedded into social networks, dominant (and negative) cultural ideologies can be communicated, often resulting in challenges to positive development. A student’s successes and failures are equally dependent on and responsive to the school’s culture as they are to a student’s attributes (Eccles et al., 1991; Eccles et al., 1993; Way et al., 2007).
The school context continues to reproduce systematic discrimination and injustice. For many students, it is one of the first social contexts in which they experience marginalization, racism, classism, and sexism. In U.S. schools, for example, teachers judge Black students more negatively and discipline them more frequently and severely than their peers for identical infractions (Skiba et al., 2011). One thesis is that teachers misread, or more explicitly racialize, the emotional expressions of Black students (e.g., Roderick, 2003). Compared with their interpretation of other students’ behaviors, teachers are more likely to view Black students’ emotions and behaviors as defiant or dysfunctional (Neal et al., 2003). Thus, there is an urgent need for researchers and educators to know more about how Black students understand, manage, and express emotions in school.
Cultural misunderstanding and sustained inequity in U.S. schools particularly harm Black boys. Black boys often have poorer academic outcomes and lower social competence ratings than female and White peers (Davis, 2003; Goldsmith, 2004; Yarnell et al., 2018). Instead of interpreting these differences as evidence of Black boys’ pathology, researchers must examine the dehumanizing nature of the school context and its contribution to Black boys’ development (Howard et al., 2012). For example, Nelson (2016) demonstrates the importance of positive student–teacher relationships for Black and Latino boys’ academic and social-emotional outcomes. However, most school personnel fail to nurture the relationships possibly due to their endorsement of the dominant negative ideology of Black masculinity (Nelson, 2016). Likewise, Carey (2019) points out Black boys are sidelined to marginal roles in school that position them as disposable. As adolescents construct their social identities by drawing meaning from experiences, these implicit and explicit messages about their lack of value can make their way into Black boys’ sense of self (Carey, 2019).
Black boys’ emotional development is not well researched. Cultural constructions constrain the ways all boys communicate their emotions, and this is particularly true for Black boys (Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Shepard, 2002). Norms restricting emotional expression have the potential to lead to dysregulation and affect long-term well-being (Johansson & Olson, 2013; McQueen, 2017; Shepard, 2002; Way et al., 2014). Ferguson (2000) notes the adultification of Black boys (in which Black boys are perceived to be older than they actually are) and argues that Black boys’ development emerges from and through adults’ misinterpretations of their behaviors. This bias extends even to young Black boys’ play behaviors. Bryan (2020) found as early as preschool, teachers interpret Black boys’ play behaviors, such as interacting with peers on the playground, as acts of criminality rather than reflecting normative social-emotional development. Gilliam et al. (2016) asked preschool teachers to review videos of Black and White preschool students playing together and to identify misbehaviors. Despite the videos being largely absent of misbehavior, teachers disproportionately labeled Black boys’ behaviors as negative when compared with White peers. “Rigid gender norms and the unimaginability of Black boys as children compound to delegitimize these boys’ right to experience fear or anger or sadness, to be anything but ‘tough’” (Dumas & Nelson, 2016, p. 34). The consequences of Black boys’ violation of these expectations can be severe. For example, teachers are more likely to treat negatively Black boys who express anger in high school (Thomas et al., 2009).
A few studies on social and emotional development have included Black boys among their participants (Langa, 2014; Oransky & Marecek, 2009; Rose et al., 2016; Way et al., 2014), but none has focused exclusively on Black boys in the urban school context. This paucity forces scholars and practitioners to draw from studies conducted with other populations (i.e., emerging adults and non-Black boys), erroneously assuming transferability and generalizability. Black boys occupy an intersectional social position in which they are simultaneously desired and privileged (gender) and despised and marginalized (race; Stevenson, 1997). Compared with other students, urban Black males are among the most victimized; they are heavily policed in their communities (Alexander, 2012), most likely to receive harsh and exclusionary discipline in schools (Skiba et al., 2011), and least likely to thrive academically (Goldsmith, 2004). As they struggle against a society that views them through a lens of racism and masculine hegemony, their experiences will shape, and likely corrode, a sense of inherent value and skew their self-expression. Black boys’ emotional management cannot be understood independently of the intersectional pressures and expectations they experience. Research examining their understanding and management of emotion, particularly in urban settings, can inform innovation in transformative SEL.
Theoretical Perspectives
This article examines the ways Black boys attending an urban middle school resist and accommodate master narratives about emotional distress, emotional management, and vulnerability in interpersonal relationships. The goals of transformative SEL alongside the resistance and accommodation framework (Rogers, 2018; Rogers & Way, 2018; Ward, 1996) provide a motivation and means to understand how Black adolescent boys think about emotions and how SEL programs may support them.
Jagers et al. (2019) assert that a reimagined, transformative SEL can mitigate the educational, social, and economic inequities that derive from interrelated legacies of racialized cultural oppression in the US and globally . . . SEL researchers and practitioners can . . . seek to effectively address issues such as power, privilege, prejudice, discrimination, social justice, empowerment and self-determination. (p. 163)
Rather than suggesting that issues of equity and justice are ahistorical and culturally void, transformative SEL (T-SEL) challenges education stakeholders to think deeper about continuing issues of inequity and their role sustaining it within the school context. Moreover, T-SEL acknowledges the often-overlooked complexity of social justice and aligns itself with transformative resistance, emphasizing critical consciousness, promotion of youth voice within democratic processes, and valuation of previously marginalized and underrepresented groups. The authors highlight the different ways transformative SEL can be integrated into current formulations through avenues of identity, agency, belonging, and engagement. Of particular interest is the assertion that resistance and accommodation strategies can be a theory, process, and outcome of T-SEL and practice.
Rogers and Way (2018) offer a framework for understanding children’s and adolescents’ social and emotional development as acting on and responsive to specific ecological pressures. They define resistance as “the ways individuals consciously and unconsciously reject or push against dominant ideologies” (p. 314). They view accommodation as adoption or incorporation of dominant ideologies into identities and relationships (Rogers & Way, 2018). Importantly, they point out acts of resistance and accommodation are not conflicting forces but rather they “coexist . . . Due to the clash between human nature and culture” (p. 314). For example, as boys living in the U.S. context grow older, they are more likely to endorse masculine stereotypes, and this is often viewed as an inevitable product of maturation (e.g., Petersen & Hyde, 2009). An alternative conceptualization views this as accommodation, that is, the child’s internalization over time of the dominant cultural view of masculinity. By viewing children’s and adolescents’ thoughts and behaviors through the lenses of accommodation and resistance, the focus shifts to their active participation in their learning and development but does not ignore the influence of dominant ideologies.
Children’s and adolescents’ increasing adoption over time of the cultural narratives that surround them is well documented, but there is less discussion on how they resist some narratives and the types of resistance they employ (Rogers & Way, 2018). Rogers and Way (2018) applied two types of resistance to their study of Black boys: resistance for survival and resistance for liberation (Robinson & Ward, 1991). Resistance for survival refers to actions a marginalized student may take for immediate relief from dehumanizing practices, without a consideration of the long-term implications of their choices. For example, a middle schooler’s decision to disengage from the learning process as an act of self-preservation against threats like teacher bias will likely provide short-term relief but will harm him in the long term. Alternatively, through resistance for liberation students define themselves by willfully rejecting dehumanizing narratives and intentionally redefining positive ones as inclusive, acting to serve themselves and the greater good (Ward, 2018). Given the highly racialized and gendered experiences of Black boys in schools where their bodies and emotions are carefully monitored, Black boys need such strategies to navigate successfully and maintain their sense of self. For example, freely expressing anger or acting like one does not care at all (apathetic) in the face of teacher bias may be justified but is likely to result in harsh disciplinary action (Skiba et al., 2011) that ultimately reinforces the very stereotype the young Black boy wishes to avoid. In contrast, resistance for survival might look like Black male students asserting the fullness of their emotional vulnerabilities and sensitivities, claiming their own humanity.
Rogers and Way (2018) applied this framework to years of data on relationships and friendships among boys of color and found, contrary to common narratives, boys often resist dehumanizing narratives predicated on race and gender. Rogers (2018) also noted that some Black boys accommodated a harmful gender stereotype but resisted a harmful racial one, demonstrating the complexity of intersecting identities. These findings suggest that both resistance and accommodation are at work in Black boys’ social and emotional development.
Current Study
As Nelson (2016) points out, much of the narrative and analysis concerning the issues Black boys must confront focus on the structural forces in their lives. Far less attends to the voices of Black boys themselves. Our analysis holds the structural realities in view while foregrounding Black boys’ perspectives. Two main questions guided our work:
What meaning do middle-school-age Black boys attribute to emotions and their expression?
How do middle-school-age Black boys resist and accommodate dominant ideologies about how Black boys “should” (or “should not”) express and manage emotion?
Method
The data in this article are drawn from a multiyear culturally sensitive preventive intervention for Black youth attending an urban charter school in the Southeastern region of the United States. The present study examined the data collected from the second year of the intervention with a group of eighth-grade boys. The overall goal of the intervention was to support the social-emotional development of Black middle school youth. Researchers strategically created single gender groups and tailored the intervention materials to address the unique positionality of Black boys and girls. Therefore, sessions explicitly focused on dominant ideologies related to Black boys and Black girls and how these expectations affected their emotion management and interpersonal engagement.
The participatory culture-specific intervention model (PC-SIM; Nastasi et al., 2004) guided the development and implementation of the intervention curriculum. In PC-SIM, researchers and community stakeholders, including participants themselves, contribute to the development, implementation, and ongoing revision of the intervention. Importantly, the intervention grounds itself within the unique culture of the community at multiple levels, including neighborhood, school, peer group, and family. Unlike other intervention models in which uniformity and fidelity are often key, with a PC-SIM intervention, lesson plans are flexible and responsive to participants’ expressed needs. With PC-SIM, preventive intervention sessions simultaneously function as focus groups to ensure the curriculum is responsive and adjusted as needed. This particular intervention gave participants an opportunity to unpack and discuss dominant ideologies about their racialized gendered identities, how these messages may negatively affect their relationships with peers, and what they can do to disrupt that pattern.
Each session began with a journal writing prompt that reflected what was discussed in the prior session (sans the introduction session). A sample journal prompt question is “What is the difference between strong and powerful?” At the end of each session, participants were asked to write down any reflection on what was discussed or what they wanted to discuss. In accordance with PC-SIM, researchers and facilitators met weekly after each session to review upcoming lessons and make adjustments to subsequent sessions to be responsive to issues raised by participants during the sessions. Students’ writing responses from the sessions were used to guide the adjustment and development of the following week’s lesson plan. There was one lead facilitator and one to two note takers who acted as participant observers during the sessions. Sessions were also audio recorded when possible. Data sources included audio recordings (which were transcribed at a later date), facilitator notes, and participants’ writing responses from the six intervention sessions.
Setting
Achievement Now for Everyone (ANE) is a public K-8 charter school which serves a majority Black community in a large metropolitan area in the Southeastern region of the United States. It is located in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods whose residents struggle against neglect and marginalization engendered by local and state policies. Like many urban areas throughout the country, this one also grappled with gentrification; while the community began to show improvements in safety, food access, and livability, students began to be displaced. Some students could no longer live in the area but still had close ties to the community.
A priority of the school was to maintain small class sizes; therefore, K-5th grade classrooms ranged from —six to eight students per class and students stayed with the same cohort for 2 years, with their classroom teacher looping up with them to teach the subsequent grade level. These priorities shifted with the sixth-grade cohort. Middle school was structured to be a qualitatively different space from the elementary school despite the fact the two schools shared the same building. Similar to traditional middle schools, ANE middle school students rotated between classes, were given more autonomy than elementary school students, and had middle-school-specific activities like an eighth-grade dance.
The most meaningful difference between ANE middle school and other middle schools was the size of the student body. Due to the small class sizes of the elementary school, which fed into the middle school, there were less than 60 students in the middle school. Some of these students had been in the same class together for several years. Other students who began at ANE in sixth grade entered an environment where many social ties were long-standing. School administrators were intentional in creating class rosters with heterogeneous groupings.
ANE administrators’ and teachers’ primary focus was to provide urban students with a high-quality education that developed the whole child through student-centered learning across grade levels. Students’ voices were highly valued, and they were encouraged to advocate for their academic and socio-emotional needs. The school staff and student body were majority Black. In consideration and appreciation of school racial demographics, ANE unapologetically celebrated Black culture and identity. The walls and bulletin boards often reflected great Black activists and thought leaders, and teachers implemented culturally responsive practices into their classroom routines. The school administrators prioritized teacher training that focused on culturally responsive pedagogy and learning about implicit bias.
Equally important, school staff encouraged middle school students to engage with current events critically. For example, teachers and administrators provided emotional and logistical support to middle school students when they rallied to march in their community to protest police brutality. Phrases like “Black Lives Matter” were spray-painted in the hallway at students’ insistence. ANE, at every level, celebrated Black people’s triumphs (i.e., positive racial/ethnic socialization; Hughes et al., 2006) and also emphasized the structural forces that often impede Black youth’s success (preparation for bias socialization; Hughes et al., 2006).
Participants
Our analysis is based on the 10 eighth-grade boys who self-identified as Black or African American and participated in the intervention the second year; this number constituted 71% of male eighth-grade students at the school. Eight of the 10 participants had attended the school since its inception, entering as second graders, and all participants had been attending the school since sixth grade. In addition, teachers at this school followed in a 2-year loop, so students had the same teacher and classmates for 2 years. Therefore, not only were participants well acclimated to the school culture, they also knew each other quite well. Three of the 10 participants were related to each other; two were cousins, and the third was an uncle to the cousins. Taken together, these participants were literally and figuratively family to one another. Within the sessions, they often engaged with each other like siblings rather than classmates, sometimes using session time to air prior grievances or volunteering other participants’ experiences when probed for examples of topics. While this dynamic presented challenges to management at times, more importantly there was a rapport among participants from the onset that allowed them to share their thoughts about sensitive topics. Moreover, all participants had also participated in the previous year’s intervention, so group norms and expectations needed little review.
Positionality
I, the first author, acted as a secondary facilitator and participant observer during the second-year sessions. I was previously a lower elementary school teacher at the school site for one semester in spring 2013. While I had never taught any of the participants and only worked at the school for one semester, many of them were quite familiar with me as they had seen me on the school campus and/or I had taught a younger sibling or cousin. Therefore, from the onset of sessions they were quite comfortable sharing their thoughts with me. At the same time, however, my positionality as a Black woman contrasted with their positions as adolescent Black males. This did not appear to be an impediment to rapport or engagement. The majority of the teachers and support staff at the school identified as Black women. Participants were quite familiar with the dynamic of a Black woman in a position of authority.
As a Black woman who has taught in various educational spaces and was pursuing a PhD in educational psychology during the study, I (the first author) was well aware of the centrality of race within the schooling process. Therefore, race was a central topic within the curriculum and accompanying discussions with the participants. The second author’s research background on social-emotional development further shaped the questions that were asked and how the data were analyzed. The second author identifies as a White female and a senior faculty member in educational psychology. She contributed to the research questions, design, and analysis, but did not interact with participants. She was the research advisor to the first author at the time the study was conducted. That being said, as women, we could not fully relate to the participants’ gendered experiences. Fully cognizant of this limitation, we employed PC-SIM to ensure there was “engaged reflection and representation” (Milner, 2007, p. 396). Therefore, while we had our own assumptions about experiences the participants shared, we often deferred to participants’ interpretations and analysis of their experiences.
Data Analysis
For the current study, we focused on the data in which the boys explicitly discussed emotions and their management. We were specifically interested in instances of resistance and accommodation related to coping with feelings like worry, anger, stress, and sadness that stemmed from interpersonal relationships. In line with “shifting from self to system” (Milner, 2007, p. 397), we wanted to situate the themes that emerged from the sessions within the larger social, political, historical landscape. By analyzing data through the lenses of resistance and accommodation, we identified dominant ideologies emerging from macro-level processes and traced their influence in young Black boys’ narratives about everyday emotional experiences.
Data were analyzed using modified induction analysis, a type of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). Unlike grounded theory, with modified induction analysis, prior findings, themes, and/or hypotheses are used to create codes (Suizzo et al., 2016). Therefore, the qualitative coding and analysis that took place did not start from a blank slate but instead was built from a preexisting finding or framework. Drawing from similar research on resistance and accommodation, we looked for links to specific gender and racial stereotypes (Rogers & Way, 2016). Examples of gender/masculine stereotypes participants may have resisted or accommodated are emotional apathy, callousness, and exerting control over others (Alfieri et al., 1996). Examples of racial-gendered stereotypes included ideologies that suggest Black men are promiscuous, aggressive, and unreliable (Ferber, 2007; Kelly & Floyd, 2001). We were primarily interested if and how participants’ discussion of emotions demonstrated resistance and accommodation in the context of these stereotypes.
The first and second author coded and analyzed the data. Data included transcripts, audio recordings, facilitator notes, and participant journal entries. We relied on a wide array of data sources to ensure we had a rich understanding of participant thoughts and feelings. We independently coded the first session using focused coding and came together to review notes to ensure we had adequate interrater reliability. Once established, we coded the remaining data sources for examples of resistance and accommodation in the boys’ discussion of emotions as well as noting any other emergent themes. We came together to compare what we independently found. We worked to come to a consensus regarding any areas of disagreement by returning to the participant voices and examining our point of disagreement in the larger context of the data. The first author acted as a participant observer and facilitator during the session, and the second author would, at times, defer to her interpretation of the data. Notes highlighted the nonverbal communication and engagement taking place during each session. Not every session was tape recorded, and participant commentary reported here without quotation marks was from the real-time notes taken during the session; direct quotes indicate the source was a transcript of audio recordings. Inclusion criteria for data coding encompassed any transcripts, journal writings, or notes in which participants thought about emotions and how they related to those around them. The total data set was rich and produced three studies focusing on different themes. Data not related to emotions were not included in this analysis.
Results
T-SEL implores one to think about emotional management within a cultural and historical context which shapes the various challenges one must confront—including racism and stereotypes. How one thinks about emotional management will be culturally informed and the challenges one must confront will reflect their social positioning. Three themes related to participants’ emotion management emerged: inhibiting expression, cultivating control, and craving freedom. We present each theme in turn.
Inhibiting Expression: “She Won Once You Did That”
One program session focused on stereotypes of Black boys and how they might affect the participants’ thoughts, behaviors, and relationships with Black girls. The conversation quickly shifted to their current romantic partnerships (no same-sex relationships were discussed). Participants began to discuss the romantic dilemma of a fellow participant, Amir. Amir, a soft-spoken student, fidgeted in his seat as he retold the story of the betrayal he had experienced at the hands of a girl attending another school. Laughing nervously and glancing around as he spoke, he shared what many of the participants already knew: His former girlfriend cheated on him with a different classmate. The fellow group members chimed in to assure him it was her fault that she was unfaithful, but they also were quick to point out something that Amir did not initially mention. Amir’s great mistake, according to participants, was his openness in sharing his pain, not only with his peers but with the girl herself. According to participants, Amir reached out to tell her how much her actions hurt him, at one point openly crying.
The participants explained to Amir that while it was understandable that he may be hurt, he should not have shared this vulnerability with the young lady, as that was the ultimate sign of weakness. As Eric put it, “she won once you did that.” The boys’ admonishment of Amir demonstrated their accommodation of a stereotype that males cannot be open with their emotions. Indeed, Eric’s comment suggests a male adolescent should view control of emotions as a battle tactic in addition to a masculine stance. During this exchange, Amir nodded eagerly in agreement, although his eyes carried a heaviness, suggesting he felt a conflict between emotions he would like to express and emotions he is allowed to express when dealing with stress. He responded with a weak smile. It seemed his choice to share his feelings with the girl was authentic but too costly. The social sanctions that followed were greater than the gain.
I (first author) asked the other participants if they had ever found themselves in a similar situation and, if so, how they felt and how they expressed their feelings. All mumbled yes and began to nod along with Rob, a more talkative member of the group, as he shared, “I would never let a female get me messed up like that, though.” Eric, emerging leader of the group, elaborated on these sentiments providing a more nuanced response to what might happen. He stated, “Amir messed up when he cried in front of her. I’m not gunna lie, I’ve been messed up over a girl before, but I’m not finna let her see me be upset.” The other group members nodded in agreement, allowing that while girls make them upset, they would never express that in front of them. When probed about where they express these emotions, the general consensus was in their bedrooms or other solitary spaces. Rob shared that if he was going to cry, he would just do it in his room by himself, never in front of his friends. Together, the participants’ responses demonstrate how they accommodate a stereotype about masculinity that requires them to be stoic in their relationships and suppress their feelings. While they did not explicitly state that their gender dictated their response to females, their multiple references to girls and showing weakness suggested they viewed this through a gendered lens (e.g., Way, 2013).
Interpersonal vulnerability and honesty, essential ingredients for healthy relationships, were off limits to these participants. Yet, in their conversation with Amir, their cajoling of him and trying to “correct” his emotional responses, there was gentleness. They did not attack or insult Amir, and possibly as a result, Amir shared his emotionally charged story. When explicitly telling Amir not to trust anyone with emotions, they were encouraging him to trust them, so they could help Amir make “better choices” in the future. Ultimately, while their language implied accommodation of stereotypes about how men should deal with their emotions, their actions demonstrated a resistance against even their own advice and larger ideologies that suggest males should not rely on others for support.
In later sessions, it emerged that inhibition of emotional expression did not apply to every circumstance. In a different session discussing media imagery of Black males as violent and depraved, participants began to share concerns for their personal safety in different contexts, including their school, home, and community. They were particularly concerned about the gun violence that occurred in their communities. In the process of sharing their feelings about this, Eric shared how he cried when he lost a family member to gun violence. Participants, many looking down, nodded in agreement, suggesting resonance with the loss.
Later in the conversation, I probed further about this, asking directly if a shooting warranted public displays of emotions. The participants’ immediate nonverbal expressions spoke volumes. As they all shared that it was acceptable, their facial expressions relayed they thought this was the most obvious answer in the world. Rob put it frankly, when he stated, “It’s ok to cry when a loved one gets shot.” Thus, emotional expression was acceptable when in response to brute violence rather than inward pain. If one considers the social space young Black males occupy in which they are the most likely of any demographic to be a victim or perpetrator of gun violence (Alexander, 2012), their approval of emotional expression when prompted by violence speaks to the ways they reshaped expectations of dominant ideologies (i.e., masculinity) to fit their unique experiences. Their specific resistance to some norms about public of displays of emotion seems directly related to their experiences grappling with the consequences of violence in their lives.
The experience of emotion is not solitary (Denzin, 1985); emotions arise from relationships with those around us. Many of the emotion narratives the boys recounted occurred outside of school, but it could be argued that their emotional distress seeped into how they engaged with their fellow classmates and teachers during the school day. For example, the participants had prior knowledge of Amir’s breakup that caused him such distress; although the breakup happened outside of school, it is likely they shared and worked through these complicated feelings together while at school. Yet, in the participants’ conversations they did not mention school staff. Even when dealing with something as weighty as the loss of someone to gun violence, the participants did not discuss the ability to communicate feelings about such loss with members of their school community.
Cultivating Control: “You Gotta Keep Your Cool When People Come for You Cause You Can’t Be Fighting Everybody”
From the beginning of the program, the boys spoke of their desires to be powerful and strong. To be mindful of their concerns, we created a session that focused on the meaning the boys attributed to those concepts. They began by writing down which trait they wanted to emulate more and why. The following are responses from their notebooks, all addressing power:
Participant 1: “Something that can make you powerful is when you have money and can enforce the laws. I also believe you can have power as a president, teacher, student etc. Like Thug say first you get that money, then you get that power.”
Participant 2: “To be in charge, to rule something, control who’s around you, be the King of the boss.”
Participant 3: “Powerful means to have leadership, to have control, he or she is well known.”
Participant 4: “If you are powerful, you have control.”
During the session, we discussed the differences and similarities between the concepts of “strength” and “power.” We began by simply asking what each word meant to them. Interestingly, the examples they provided regarding strength and power related to emotional competencies rather than physical ones. Rob began by explaining that someone who is strong can control their own emotions “even when people are trying them.” The other boys nodded quickly in agreement, with Shawn noting, “You gotta keep your cool when people come for you ’cause you can’t be fighting everybody.” Ultimately, all the boys agreed that a strong person can control their emotions in the face of conflict. A powerful person, they argued, controls their own emotional responses and subsequent actions as well as others’. They excitedly said that they wanted to act out a skit to illustrate the points they were trying to make, imploring the adults to leave the room to give them full creative license.
Upon our return, the participants presented two skits illustrating the differences between strength and power. In the first skit (each part portrayed by participants) depicting strength, a boy is hanging out in his neighborhood, and someone asks him to sell drugs. He was “not trying to do all that,” so he declined the offer. The person tried to appeal to his emotions, including his desire to “get money,” and at one point became aggressive in making his point. Despite these appeals, the young man walked away unbothered and unresponsive to the other person’s attempts. This, to participants, represented strength as the young man showed no emotion despite the blatant disrespect and potentially lucrative but risky job opportunity.
In the skit that represented power, the same premise applied. However, in this new scenario, the individual who tried to get the young man to sell drugs goes back to his boss when unsuccessful. The boss, not as easy deterred, decides to go and find the young man and address him directly. The young man again states that he does not want to sell drugs. However, this time the boss pulls out a gun and, pointing it, demands that the young man reconsider his offer. Seeing the weapon, the young man concedes to the boss’s pressure. As the participants looked to us with excited eyes at the conclusion of the skits, Eric explained, “You see, when you can control your own emotions you strong, but when you can control other people’s emotions you got power.” In the first skit, the young man is strong and does not allow another to control him. In the second skit, the boss is powerful because he uses the threat of violence to control another. The unanimous desire for power and to control others, even by violence, accommodates the master narrative about aggression in the Black community, even though they had earlier expressed concern and fear about gun violence, a response that resists the stereotype of young Black men as ruthless and fearless. However, when asked which trait they would prefer to have if they could only choose one, almost simultaneously, they said powerful.
In their understanding of both power and strength, control is at the center. This demonstrates an accommodation of the dominant gender ideology that being a man means being in control and controlling others. While they never explicitly stated that manhood was connected to control, when I asked them to list figures who represented strong and powerful people, their initial list was comprised completely of men. When I inquired if only men can be powerful, they quickly said no and began giving names of women they deemed powerful. Again, while their conversations and scenarios do not center on the school, their emphasis on control seemingly replicates language that is heard throughout PK-12 urban schools; the need to “control oneself.” This also speaks to the need to understand what controlling oneself means to Black boys. Is this an operation of self-management as outlined by SEL curricula, or rather a key part of manhood in general, Black manhood in particular?
Craving Freedom: “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Girl ’Cause They Do Shit Like Cry”
During different sessions, all participants laid out strict rules for emotional expression. During one session in particular, they began to again specify what boys can and cannot do when it comes to emotions. In the midst of all these rules, I asked the boys, “Well, are you ok with this?” They looked around at each other, and Eric said, “Naw, man, sometimes I wish I was a girl ’cause they do shit like cry when they get emotional.” The surrounding boys nodded in agreement. Eric went on to explain, Like . . . we just can’t be crying like that cause we men, and people would look at us crazy. Girls can be mad and emotional about all types of shit, and nobody saying nothing to them. Like even teachers will just listen and stuff, but it’s not the same for us. Like sometimes I wish I didn’t have to be by myself when I get emotional, but it is what it is.
All of the other participants nodded along quietly as he spoke. I asked the group if it was hard to not be able to share emotions with others. Malik spoke up and said, “Well, yeah, but it is what it is.” Damien and Eric went on to assert that teachers were more welcoming of their female classmates expressing emotions such as crying and believed teachers would show kindness and compassion to females.
I asked if they never showed emotion, how could they be sure their teachers would be unwelcoming of it? They assured me they knew that the teachers would not be receptive to them. As I pushed back again, asking how they could know for sure, Rashad cut me off and said, “I just know, man.” As he spoke, all of the boys nodded in agreement, suggesting it would be simply unfathomable to show emotions at school. Eric went on to say, We just not emotionally safe here. I feel safe at home, but not here. A lot of these teachers only care about us doing the homework and not acting up. I’m not finna talk to them about how I feel about some personal shit and how I might be sad over it. I just keep that shit inside.
Tariq added to the conversation, drawing on the earlier discussion about powerful versus strong and said, “A lot of these teachers be abusing they power and doing too much. I’m not finna talk to them about my stuff when they act like that. Ima just act like nothing’s bothering me.” In plain language, the data suggest that Black boys do not feel “emotionally safe” at school or with their teachers. When I asked who they could show their emotions to when they just could not bear to keep them inside any longer, all participants cited their mothers. Mothers were the only ones with whom they could show vulnerability.
This conversation demonstrated the ways accommodation and resistance coexist. The boys desired to be emotionally free like girls. They resisted the narrative, at least in part, that it is good to be stoic, yet they would not risk engaging in self-expression. They accommodate to the stereotype, upholding the “norm” of how boys handle emotions. Notably, however, the masculine ideology of stoicism did not extend to the safety of the mother–son relationship, again showing that adolescents exercise agency in where and how they accommodate or resist.
It is telling that within a school that was taking steps to develop students’ social-emotional competencies, the boys felt unsafe to express their emotions and did not have the tools to resist the dominant ideology in that context. They noted how they felt that their emotional safety and expression came second to the academic expectations of the school and this resulted in their avoidance of teachers as sources of emotional support. Together these themes indicate that boys prize stoicism and interpersonal control, even as they yearn to express themselves, because they fear such vulnerability will not be welcomed in school. In response, the boys distance themselves emotionally from peers and adults in accommodation to rigid beliefs about masculinity. This prevents them from processing and thinking through emotional challenges with others, potentially limiting the development of more sophisticated insight and coping.
Discussion
This qualitative study analyzed data from an intervention aimed at improving interpersonal relationships among eighth-grade students at an urban charter school. In our analysis, we were interested in how Black boys attending an urban middle school thought about emotions and the ways they resisted and accommodated dominant ideologies about emotions. Three major themes emerged related to the ways participants thought about emotions. First, inhibition of emotions was central. They did not deny they had feelings but argued they must present a stoic, cool stance to the world (Stevenson, 2004). Second, Black boys recognized the need for and sought to cultivate emotional control. They desired strength (defined as control over one’s own emotions) and especially power (control of one’s own emotions as well as the emotions of others). Control as a core masculine trait was present throughout the sessions. Last, and arguably most importantly, participants expressed a desire to show a wider range of emotions in general, especially in the school context, but felt limited because of their relationships with teachers and their assumptions about teacher responses. Participants’ narratives that shaped each of these themes demonstrated how they resisted and accommodated dominant ideologies related to race, masculinity, and emotionality.
These results shine a light on the ways participants resist and accommodate emotions in romantic relationships and relationships with peers. The participants’ response to Amir’s romantic dilemma demonstrated the ways they accommodated notions of how boys can express emotion in romantic relationships; one must remain apathetic at all cost. This was juxtaposed against their assertion that violence toward a loved one justified open displays of emotion. These conversations were interwoven with their demonstrations of understanding one another through soft smiles, gentle nods, and mutterings of “I’ve been there.” Together, this indicated that the participants were in the throes of developing their scripts on how to “do” emotions with peers, romantic or otherwise. While they had the language that represented accommodation of dehumanizing scripts, their actions demonstrated their resistance.
Our results reaffirm the complexity of the developmental process they are undergoing and the need for guidance during this process. It was quite clear this was not the first (or second) time they discussed this dilemma, yet during our conversation, they did not reference any adult guidance in sorting through this problem. The absence of adults in their accounts aligns with the literature that asserts that peers are important sources of feedback during this developmental period and often supersede the voices of adult figures in the student’s life (Williams et al., 2019). Nevertheless, despite peers’ authority, it would seem adults within the school context could subtly intervene and provide guidance on how to manage and express emotions within peer relationships.
Participants’ willingness to open up to me during the sessions and responsiveness to my suggestions demonstrate they were not immune to sharing their thoughts and feelings with adults. Per the guidelines of PC-SIM, though, I made it quite clear I was learning from them. Providing them with respect and status by actively listening to their positions created a dynamic in which they were receptive to my suggestions even if it contradicted a stance they took. Moreover, the sessions occurring during afterschool (at the same school site) suggest an informal approach to these weighted topics can be conducive to productive conversation. This aligns with Yeager and colleagues’ (2018) assertion that adolescents need to feel they are respected and their knowledge is valuable for SEL programming to be effective.
Gender expectations were used to explain constraints on emotions. They accommodated problematic notions of masculinity that required males to be stoic and in control at all times but were quick to dismiss dehumanizing expectations related to their race. This confirms prior research that found that adolescent boys are more likely to resist stereotypes about race and accommodate stereotypes about masculinity (Rogers & Way, 2018). We argue this is also a result of their middle school context. They attended a school that prioritized confronting and dismantling negative views about race at the structural and personal level. A Black student would not have to go far within the school to have their Blackness reaffirmed and uplifted. However, affirmations related to healthy masculinity or messages about the different ways to be a boy were notably absent. These participants’ accommodation of emotion control is a reflection of the unaddressed and often rigid expectations for boys.
One cannot divorce the social systems Black boys inhabit from how they relate to those around them within the urban school context. For example, the participants’ discussion of the emotional ramifications of dealing with rampant gun violence is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of living within the American context where Black bodies are treated as disposable. Young Black males’ development is inextricably connected to the social systems, and the marginalizing messages they receive from them shape who they think they can or should be (Swanson et al., 2003). Urban schools are notorious for failing Black boys. Research has noted how Black boys who attend PK-12 urban schools struggle against systematic discrimination and heartbreakingly low expectations (Noguera, 2003). To ignore these realities is naive at best, dehumanizing at worst. It is particularly problematic considering the ways these participants are, at times, trying their best to resist the truncating of their social-emotional development. For example, despite their general accommodation of how guys are “supposed to act,” the boys’ generosity and caring for each other, their exceptions to the expression rules in response to violence, and their yearning for freer expression revealed resistance. Such coexisting accommodation and resistance reveal an interesting point of tension in the students’ lives and suggest a point of entry for SEL practices to promote resistance for liberation.
The intervention was led by a former teacher and took place within their school building, with the school bell ringing intermittently throughout sessions. Nonetheless, the participants never cited school staff as a source of emotional support or guidance when dealing with emotional stress. Just like with any other skill, teacher scaffolding can enhance emotion management. Considering the demands and advances of early adolescence, it stands to reason, middle school Black boys are in an ideal intellectual and social position to receive support and guidance to strengthen their social-emotional competencies.
However, for these participants, teachers were not a viable option. Indeed, when they briefly discussed their teachers, they lamented the perceived lack of support, asserting that teachers were mainly concerned with academic success rather than emotional well-being. This is ironic as school administrators commissioned us to help students develop their social-emotional competencies. Furthermore, the faculty were committed to supporting students to learn and about their social identities and structural inequity. The disconnect between educator intentions and student perceptions calls us to consider what kinds of professional development opportunities are needed for teachers to bridge that gap and become welcoming and supportive resources for their students.
Interestingly, participants’ concerns about teachers are like more extensive critiques of current formulations of SEL; that SEL is more concerned with students’ behaviors and its connection to academic success than students’ humanity and well-being. Participants’ feelings that teachers cared more about grades than their emotional well-being are arguably another manifestation of the social inequity facing Black youth attending urban schools. Urban schools serving students of color face a range of penalties, including school closure, if students’ test scores are not deemed up to par (Nichols & Berliner, 2007). Rather than providing more support to struggling schools, we live in a system where they are given less, creating an environment where teachers and students are stressed as a result of relentless high stakes testing (Jones et al., 1999). Perhaps it was this stress that prevented students from relying on teachers as sources of emotional support.
Implications and Future Directions
Despite the daily risks of life for these boys, including feeling unsafe and fearing violence, they say they must act as if they are not bothered. A cool stance instead of a fearful one may be adaptive in dangerous contexts (Majors & Billson, 1992; Spencer et al., 2004; Stevenson, 2004), but in a place like school it can be misunderstood as defiant or challenging, and in most settings it can disrupt meaningful connection with others. Future researchers’ close study of marginalized students, listening to their narratives, and discerning their agency in accommodating and resisting master ideologies will advance our understanding.
Despite the challenges urban schools may pose, they can also be spaces of liberation. A critical piece of this liberation is the understanding that school continues to be a salient context for development for middle school students. While many middle schools are addressing issues of racism, there needs to be an equally intentional conversation about gender norms (e.g., Rogers & Way, 2016). Sexism is often discussed in the ways it affects girls’ experiences and outcomes. This narrative must be expanded to include the ways rigid racialized gender norms prevent Black boys from reaching their fully realized selves. Alongside explicit conversation regarding these issues, schools can highlight the stories of Black men who have resisted dehumanizing notions of masculinity in a range of different outlets, including curriculum materials, bulletin boards, and school-wide events. The participants’ resistance to racism aligns with their school’s multitude of messages related to race, equity, and justice. Therefore, widening the scope to include gender could make a significant difference in Black boys’ emotional management.
Emotional awareness and management are core competencies in SEL. The boys described here were aware of their emotions and worked hard to display apathy instead, to stay “in control” of emotions. In this way, they accommodated the narratives disdaining the “angry Black man” and avoided what they anticipated to be teachers’ negative reactions, an expectation that evidence supports (Thomas et al., 2009). A superficial assessment would lead one to say that the boys are doing all right; they are aware of and managing their emotions. But with a closer look, all is not right; the boys yearn to resist some expectations; and their current enactment of societal expectations can be maladaptive. As Way et al. (2018) point out, we are currently in a crisis of connection; the voices of these boys make clear their struggle with connection and their desire to resist. SEL can be reformed to build connections and support honesty in relationships between teachers and urban Black boys. Ultimately, transformative SEL should and can support the development of these students’ authenticity, as they are and where they are in our classrooms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank the participants who shared their thoughts with us. They did not have to but they did and for that we are grateful.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
