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Including Gender and Sexuality in Identity Construction of Black Men

Looking Inside Dr. Chezare Warren's Research

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Published: Monday, 23 Mar 2020 Author: Emily Khan

Chezare presenting at his GenCen Colloquia, “Meeting Myself: Race-Gender Oppression and a Genre Study of Black Men Teachers’ Interactions with Black Boys.”
Chezare presenting at his GenCen Colloquia, “Meeting Myself: Race-Gender Oppression and a Genre Study of Black Men Teachers’ Interactions with Black Boys.” Photo credit: Rebecca Cox

Chezare Warren applied to the GenCen Faculty Fellows program in order to teach a women’s and gender studies course, and to bring more of a focus on masculinities to GenCen’s students. In Spring 2019, he taught the WS 202 (Intro to Contemporary Feminisms) course. Chezare presented his research, which is aimed at understanding how a single-sex high school supported their graduates’ persistence to and through college, at a GenCen Colloquia that same semester. 

There is a significant discourse emerging in the US about increasing the number of Black men teachers in order to decrease adverse schooling outcomes for Black boys. Additionally, single-sex schools for boys of color are becoming popular as an approach to improve the education experiences of Black boys. While both have the potential to significantly improve Black boys’ schooling outcomes, they might also have some unintended consequences such as the reinforcement of dominant, oppressive notions of gender and sexuality. 

At the high school where he taught, Chezare found that issues of manhood and masculinity were regularly shading the teachers’ interactions with Black boys. His analysis found that the general tendency is for education to fail at “productively confronting gender performance and its relationship to these boys’ emergent understandings of sexual identity during such a critical time of their gender, race, and sexual identity development.” 

“I was a Black boy who eventually became a Black man teacher who saw my work with Black boys as helping ‘make’ them into ‘men,’ not realizing I was likely reproducing problematic logics about gender and sexuality in my interactions with my Black male students,” said Chezare. “I pursued this project to add more nuance to what we know about Black men teacher’s interactions with Black (male) youth, and to offer a perspective through which the field can better imagine the centrality of these interactions to humanize Black boys in a school system established to sustain their persistent dehumanization.”

“I was a Black boy who eventually became a Black man teacher who saw my work with Black boys as helping ‘make’ them into ‘men,’ not realizing I was likely reproducing problematic logics about gender and sexuality in my interactions with my Black male students.”

Chezare determined that the Black men teachers give significantly more time to the young men’s understanding of race growing up Black and male than they do gender. His research found that the Black boys formed substantive relationships with adult Black men teachers, who held considerable weight in their self-identities. “It is very likely these relationships did almost nothing to disrupt the school’s cisheteropatriarchy [—a system of power based on the supremacy & dominance of cisheterosexual men through the exploitation & oppression of women and the LGBTQIA]. This story is one I think is really important for moving the field forward on the conversation of single-sex schools and the importance/value of Black men teachers for improving schooling outcomes for Black boys,” commented Chezare. 

As a GenCen Faculty Fellow, Chezare traveled to present this research at conferences around the US. “The Fellowship travel has proved my scholarship a broader audience as I continue to push scholars who conduct research on Black boys in education to more critically engage with both race and gender in our analyses of the factors that facilitate or impede their school success.” Chezare plans to publish his research during the next year.