Derrick R. Brooms

‘Building Us Up’: Supporting Black Male College Students in a Black Male Initiative Program:

Efforts to enhance the academic performances and educational experiences of Black males in college has exploded in the past 15 years, including institutional, state, system-level, and national programs, policies, and calls to action. Key among these efforts is establishing Black Male Initiative (BMI) programs, which primarily are structured as social cohesion programs and intended to increase students’ retention and graduation rates. Using qualitative interview data from a convenience sample of 40 Black male students at two different institutions, this project explores their engagement and experiences in a BMI program. First, I analyze students’ narratives regarding their participation and meaning-making of BMIs. I find that BMIs play a critical role in supporting students through increased access to social and cultural (sociocultural) capital while simultaneously honoring the cultural wealth students bring to campus. Second, I examine how engagement in the BMI community helped enhance students’ academic experiences and sense of self.

“It’s Simply Because We’re Black Men” Black Men’s Experiences and Responses to the Killing of Black Men

Given the recent attention to high-profile cases of unarmed Black men being killed by law enforcement officials and the subsequent #BlackLivesMatter movement, additional work is needed to more fully understand how African American men make meaning of their own personal realities and how they connect with and within the larger narrative of Black life in the United States. To contribute to this literature, the current study analyzes qualitative interview data from 25 Black men focused on their self-conceptions of race, stereotyping, and profiling. The findings reveal the men’s perceptions and experiences with racism and stereotyping, the strategies that they employ in response to being stereotyped and profiled, and their reflections on the recent killings of Black men. This research provides an opportunity to investigate how Blackmaleness—the combined impact of their racialized and gendered identities—connects and operates in the lives of Black men.

Being and Becoming Men of Character: Exploring Latino and Black Males’ Brotherhood and Masculinity Through Leadership in College:

This article advances knowledge on the significance of engagement and leadership for five Latino and Black male student leaders at a Hispanic-serving institution. By exploring their experiences in a male-centered initiative, identity and masculinity emerged as salient frames to understand students’ engagement on campus. Individual and focus group interviews yielded that relationships and male peer-to-peer bonding built on students’ cultural wealth by providing unique opportunities for learning and self-growth. Implications are offered as well.

Looking for Leroy: illegible black masculinities

primordialism and circumstantialism is pinpointed. By giving detailed accounts of respondents’ individual-level experiences, not only does the author show that those two identities are interwoven and contextualized in their self-descriptions but also that they touch pivotal identity controversies around being a Jew in contemporary Poland. Jewishness is reconstructed by a number of respondents in terms of the family ‘secret’ (83). Although combining Polishness with their píntele yíd elevates in the narratives of respondents to an arduous pursuit, giving them a ‘sense of mission’ (82), and communal Jewish involvement requires ‘first steps’ to be taken, they retain a certain level of sarcasm, mindful of their arguable status as the ‘real’ Jews. Making one’s Jewish heritance overt has raised some public interest in recent years and has appeared in the Polish mass media as either disclosure of the cryptic truth or just a ‘Jewish roots mania’. The respondents ‘stumble over’ their Jewishness – as Reszke describes, they struggle with uncertainties regarding the traumatic past of their progenitors, experiment with redefining their identities, make plans to pass on their fragmentary Jewish ancestry to the next generations, and develop interest in Jewish cultural patrimony. The author is fully aware of the allegedly goy-incited ‘Jewish renaissance’ in Poland ridiculed in the international press as quite a chutzpah, with a special focus on the articles published in the New York Times. She hits a raw nerve by confronting the topic of proving authenticity of being a Jew to oneself and others, then presents an interesting discussion on credibility of two major self-authentication strategies: conversion and circumcision. Due to idiosyncracies of Polish history, their identity confrontation with Israeli and American Jews is disquieting. In the eyes of the latter two groups, legitimacy of their Jewishness is highly tentative.

Black masculinity in the Obama era: outliers of society

tiate “their way through a new social terrain that they find difficult to adjust to and often hard to understand” (155). It is surmised that to make sense of their interactions, Guards employ and modify various discourses around race, culture, “the Other” and general difference as they attempt to transform “the Unknown, Strange, Other into a knowable object” (197). The next chapter demonstrates with examples the function of ‘Otherizing/ racialized discourse’ in processes of sense-making by the Guards. The creation and circulation of new sets of cognitive categories and labels within the police subcultural habitus are shown to be communicated and exchanged through ‘banter’, joking, storytelling and more formal conversation. O’Brien-Olinger continues by detailing inclusionary responses to diversification since the early 2000s, whereby some Guards’ newly adapted role is defined as ‘cultural integration brokers’, tasked with developing positive relations with ethnic minorities. Although biopower is touched upon, it might have been more explicitly linked to what is conjectured as a central part of Garda-minority relations; the reliance on ‘how Guards act as knowledge/integration brokers, by ‘educating’ non-Irish nationals about what is legal/illegal and what is considered socially acceptable/ unacceptable in Irish culture’ (227). Contrasting with the previous chapter, Chapter 8 evidences exclusionary practices by Garda Nation Immigration Bureau detectives with discussion on the intensification of border controls and the expansion of bureaucratic state surveillance. Concluding discussion combines dilemmas unveiled in the findings centring on discursive strategies with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. The Guards’ new function – though how novel begs further reflection – is ‘in reproducing the hegemonic dominance of the ethnic majority at and within the boundaries of the nation-state’ (266). The epilogue goes on to challenge the role of the Department of Justice and media particularly and details a replete abundance of advice and generalized recommendations.

“I Was Just Trying to Make It”: Examining Urban Black Males’ Sense of Belonging, Schooling Experiences, and Academic Success

This qualitative study investigated the schooling experiences of 20 young Black men who graduated from Douglass Academy, an all-boys public charter secondary school in a large urban city. Specifically, I explore how these students construct meaning from their school experiences and their efforts for academic success. The students articulated two critical components of their school experience that positively shaped their achievement and success: (a) school culture and (b) relationships. The student narratives provide a frame for promoting positive school culture that increases the sense of belonging, educational experiences, and academic aspirations of African American male students.

Military Migrants: Fighting for Your Country

native to Central Asia and the worldwide Yellow Peril tag. However, charting public opinion is hard, given the unenlightened systems. Russia enjoys more public trust than China in most Central Asian states, though not in Tajikistan. The popular phobias are echoed in academic studies, where the theory of a ‘civilizational difference’ (186) endures. The authors draw a parallel with China’s presence in Africa, where China’s mode of economic insertion is similar, while noting the differences. Although they treat Central Asia as a whole, the authors carefully distinguish between the ‘Chinese questions’ peculiar to each state, setting out the distinctions with clarity and precision. They suspect Sinophobia might gain the upper hand in future, among entrepreneurs fearing competition, Islamists and Central Asians determined to preserve their sovereignty and collective identity. This is superior scholarship and writing in every sense. The sources are chiefly Russian, the language of academic expression in Central Asia: sources in the region’s national languages are apparently not relevant. My sole caveat is the absence of Chinese sources. Here is an opportunity for China studies, to research the activities of the Chinese state and enterprise in Central Asia, and its burgeoning Chinese diaspora, from a Chinese angle.