(KL=Katelyn Lusher DB=Derrick Brooms)
KL: Dr. Brooms, thank you for joining us here. So, you are a Taft Center Fellow this year for 2019-2020. Uh, so I just want to ask you a few questions about your research. So, I see that your research primarily focuses on how Black boys and men make meaning of their experiences regarding race and masculinity. So, can you tell me a little bit more about the specifics of the project you’re working on and why you chose this specific population to focus on and work with?
DB: Yeah, so my project is looking at how a select group of Black boys uh not only experience education, but their pathways to and through college and so it’s a longitudinal study that looks at twenty young Black men and I started interviewing them the summer or so early first year of college, and I have followed them through college graduation and some of them are in or just have finished graduate schools, some of them are early career professionals, and a few others are still persisting in college so what I’m really interested in as we think about race and gender and masculinity is how do they think about themselves at different points and junctures across the educational pathways so what do they think about themselves and kinda their early years and just transitioning to college, what does it mean to be Black and male and where they specifically came from, the neighborhoods, the family dynamics etc., and then looking through their college experiences so through that lens of what does it mean for them to be thinking of themselves as young Black men in the college setting trying to pursue some of the educational and personal goals that they set out for themselves, and because the project is longitudinal then I’m really able to see in very real time what they’re thinking and compare that to where they were a year ago, two years ago, four years ago, or how some of the things they offered and thought about in those early years of colleges have manifested at least in these later adult years in terms of being middle twenties and later twenties and they’re into a professional career. So, you know, part of what led me to this project is the narratives that are out here about young Black boys and men, you know, when we think about education discourse, we think about kinda popular discourse, one of the overwhelming messages is that Black boys don’t care about school, and what I wanted to try to figure out, number one is, let me look at a group of young Black boys who have matriculated into college, they were on their way, or had just gotten there. So part of my work really looks at how they think… What do they do to get there? And that’s literally do in terms of academic and educational effort, and then what supported them to get there? Right? So that we can try to identify some of the gaps in their schooling experience that they identify as potential traps or potential things that might undermine or deny them educational opportunities and then how do they make sense of that as they are then trying to navigate higher education so part of my project is about the prevailing narratives and wanting to kind of trouble and challenge that to say that, you know, clearly those narratives might apply to some Black men, young Black boys, but it can’t apply to all of them. So as opposed to looking at this majority of students or the number of students who don’t do well or who don’t graduate college, what can we learn from the guys that do go who achieve against the odds, who achieve despite, who achieve and garnish successes of their own accord, not what we say as success. So that’s what’s really driving me to really literally learn from their experiential knowledge what we can learn from young Black men.
KL: Awesome. That sounds really fascinating and honestly something that like I think a lot more people need to know about. So I have another question here, when people think of education, they typically think of it as the great equalizer since students are in theory getting the same course content and gain the skills and knowledge for different fields. Why does your research matter? Why should people care about how Black males and boys go through high school and college?
DB: So in many ways, right, as you mention the prevailing narrative is that if you just get a college degree, right, we’re in this era of college for all so that if you’re a student in K through 12, you’ve got multiple individuals telling you that you gotta go to college, you gotta go to college, you gotta go to college, and the reality is that that is a narrative that doesn’t have a lot of teeth depending on which schools you go to so that as one of the guys in my studies says, ‘Yes, I was constantly told that I was supposed go to college, I have no idea how to get there.’ So that if we’re just following the message of people telling us that we should go to college, is that actually putting us in position to be prepared to do well once we get there? Because as we know, there are very vast gaps between what we’re asking students to do during secondary education and then what we’re asking them to do in higher education. And so, part of it is, is to, part of it is, you know, reason that research as this matters is we need to just trouble and challenge this idea that everybody has to go to college. Part of it, you know, one of the guys in the study talked about how his family didn’t have any money so he started looking at the military cause he said, ‘Look, listen, I didn’t like the military, I didn’t necessarily want to go to the military, but I didn’t know what other options I had, and so, I’m looking at the military as an opportunity so that I can get a job and if I stay long enough, I can go to school and I don’t have to pay for it.’ Whereas, what we’ve seen in recent reports over the past several years is that the student debt amount has just exponentially increased. So are we pushing a message to go to college, go to college even when students can’t literally afford it? And what does that mean for how they might compromise a future when they’re saddled with debt and they’re not able to identify jobs that are well paying that helps pay out? So the research matters because it gives us these kind of micro lenses into people’s lives and how they’re making decisions about what’s attainable, what’s accessible, how they’re making sense of the messages prior to college, during college, and then how do they try to activate those once they get out of college as well?
KL: Absolutely, yeah. That hits the nail on the head. Pretty well. Another follow-up question. So why not look at other settings or institutions that impact Black boys and men like say the criminal justice system?
DB: So I have a different project.
KL: Oh, okay!
DB: That project looks at that because to me that social institutions are very much critical to how we make sense of ourselves and our own possibilities. It obviously matters to the environments that we navigate, the neighborhoods that we live in, and the ones that we have to cross through etc., so even as I, as an example, even as I talk to these guys about their college experiences, I’m still asking them questions about what do you think about Trayvon Martin? Right? Because they are in college at the time that Trayvon Martin, who is seventeen, gets killed never makes it to college. How do you make sense of young Black men very much in your same age bracket of not having the opportunities that you have, and we don’t have to be fatalistic about it, they’re just other young Black boys who don’t go to college because they’re connected to the criminal justice system in some kind of capacity where they don’t have access to college going support etc., so I would argue that my work, this education research supplements our understanding of social institutions and in the same time, it’s very much in proximal distance to or space to other social institutions such as criminal justice. So because I know the ways in which Black lives are connected to various social institutions as I mentioned, I have another project that looks at how young Black men and older men are making sense of racial profiling and stereotyping and the killing of Black boys and men given the ways we see it and its prominence and ongoing nature.
KL: Yeah, I like how you kind of implicitly invoke Black Lives Matter into this because I don’t think you can really talk about. I mean, obviously I am a White Cis. Het. Woman and my experiences are very different, but I know that you cannot talk about Black educational experiences without also considering other horrible misconceptions that people have about the Black community. You can’t talk about that without talking about Black Lives Matter.
DB: Yeah, and one of the guys says something to the effect of ‘Don’t act like those things that are happening outside of campus don’t affect us on campus.’ Right? So they’re talking about in specific reference to the killing of Walter Gray or the shooting of Tamir Rice or the killing of Michael Brown and so, even though that’s not me and it didn’t happen to me personally, it still affects us. Right? And so then, what we’re asking questions about is if we have to grow up and live through those types of environments, if we have to navigate those types of environments and experiences, is college still appealing even when with a college degree if I’m Jonathan Ferrell and I’m walking down the street in North Carolina in Charlotte because I’ve been in a car accident and I’m discombobulated and I knock on a door and the person who answers the door call the police, and I’m relieved when the police show up until they shoot and kill me. So that, a college degree doesn’t save you. Right? People aren’t asking for your credentials when the police show up in respect to, where did you go to college. One of the guys in my study said one of the things, this is an indirect quote, but one of the practices that I’ve made is always have my two IDs out, my driver’s license and my school ID, and I’m hopeful that when the police, not if, when the police look at this school ID, hopefully, they’ll separate me from some other wrongdoing, stereotypical individual who they may have had in mind, who may have committed this crime, and I fit the description because I’m Black, male, and I’m driving a car or I’m in the car. So even as they’re trying to navigate college and achieve their college or educational goals, they’re still very conscientious to your point of the ways in which their lives matter only partially. Right, depending on which social institution, which social environment, and which context they’re in because they know that their Black maleness can be used against them even in college settings.
KL: Yeah, absolutely. Sad truth. So how do experiences of Black boys and men also affect Black girls and women and the Black community at large?
DB: It’s all connected and we also need to nuance it. Right, so if we talk about the education or if I look specifically at the education of Black boys and men then in many ways that contributes to Black communities. Right? And I use that in plural right, cause there’s no necessarily homogenous Black community, but it also impacts and is relative to Black girls and women when we start thinking about the numbers and the proportions of women and men, boys and girls going to college attaining high school diplomas, college degrees, graduate degrees etc., and we know that if you look at it from a college by college standpoint, there are some colleges where Black women outnumber Black men three to one, four to one, five to one, and there’s others where there’s a little bit more parity. I think one of the things we really have to be cautious of and I’m very sensitive to this is that our narratives and stories and retelling of experiences of young Black boys and men should not ever dominate, overpower, diminish, or undermine the experiences, lives of Black girls and Black women, and so, I think about my research in a lot of ways as complementary to the larger body of research about Black youth and their educational experiences and I argue that if we can improve the educational environments for young Black boys then that ought to give us some gravity and some weight in improving if a young Black girls, I’m just thinking about it through one racial identity group, right, and at the same time, if say things such as, we have to be mindful of the school to prison pipeline, well, that’s not just single-gendered. There’s a high percentage of young Black girls and women who are connected to the prison industrial complex, and so we have to make sure that our research is not exclusionary in the sense that it overpowers and dominates a particular focus that we ought to offer to others. So one of the arguments that I make is that, oftentimes, young Black girls and womens’ educational successes are actually used against them.
KL: Yeah, I’ve seen it.
DB: Right. Because we invoke things such as crisis about Black boys, and that’s often used as or in comparison, as you will, to Black girls who aren’t in crisis. So if you’re not in crisis, you don’t need help. And I think that’s problematic. Right? I think that a crisis clearly requires attention, and I still have critiques about things that we need think about and unpack about even the notion of crisis. Because crisis should be temporary. What we’ve seen in the education of crisis is that it has been centuries long. Right, ways in which Blacks, in general, both men and women, boys and girls, have been denied education and we know that manifests til today. There are experiences where Black women experience racism, sexism, homophobia. I mean every ism that you can think of that just because we’re having a conversation around Black boys and men doesn’t mean that it’s at the exclusion of Black girls and Black women and so we need to make sure that we’re creating space for all of the stories to be told for Black youth who are nongender conforming, for Black youth who may not be Christian or Catholic, so we know that there’s very particular experiences that Black youth have who might identify as Muslim right? So that we have to think about all of these layers of our social identities and the ways they intersect and interconnect and complicate our experiences and I use complicate intentionally because it’s not always negative. Right, it just means that my identities show up and matter in this space a little bit differently than maybe somebody who is heterosexual right? So I think that we have to hold space for all of those because I think the end goal for me is improving educational opportunities and that’s not just for Black boys, it just happens that my research primarily focuses on that, but I am also an advocate of a quality educational opportunities and experiences regardless of how we identify.
KL: Right, yeah. I like that you have this very intersectional approach because it’s necessary. But actually along that same vein, I have another question that you kind of were hinting at, but I want to bring it out more. How does your research help others in the Black community who do not identify as cis-gendered Black men or assigned male at birth?
DB: I think it’s limited in some aspects because all of the guys in this study are heterosexual Black boys, Black men and so it’s limited in the aspect in that sexual identity, that gender expression performance, there’s not the overlap right so that although they might identify as Black and male, their performances and expressions of their maleness looks different than somebody who identifies differently. And so I say it’s limited in that aspect and at the same time, it also shows the need for more of the narratives and experiences to come to light. So that, as an example, these guys who participated in and contributed to my study are sharing these experiences about their Blackness and maleness, then what does it mean for another individual who may also be Black and male and they gender identified this, but in their sexuality, express differently. So then that means that we’ve got to create space for them as well, so I think that, again, it’s limited because those individuals are not in my study, but it’s not exclusive of those individuals because I didn’t go in saying I’m only looking for folks who identify. The inclusion criteria were Black and male and going to college. Now they’re gender expression and gender performance, I didn’t really try to put any expectations in that. So that’s where the limitations are in it, but also the possibilities as well.
KL: Most people think of academics as sitting in an ivory tower writing as many articles as they can just to publish which has been an interesting debate I’ve seen on Academic Twitter lately, but I see that you also do other work outside of Crosley Tower and UC, which is where the Sociology department is housed, you do things like keynotes, community involvement. So can you talk a little bit about your advocacy and community work and how does your research relate to this work?
DB: I’m in a very privileged position to be a faculty member and the main thrust of the privilege in the way that I’m thinking about it is access to information and opportunities and so what I try to think about is how do I use my privilege for the betterment of the greater good and so that and being invited to be a keynote, you know, I don’t have to be a keynote, being invited to be a speaker is an honor in terms of people thinking that you have something to come and say and contribute, but for me, it’s also a responsibility right so that, my teaching, research, and service have all been informed by the communities that I’ve been engaged in and that was before I ever became a professor, during the process of graduate school and even continued into my years as a professor and so because my research is grounded in community, it’s because a lot of my off-campus work is grounded in communities, I don’t think about myself as not in the community and so I want my research in many ways to speak to people in the community even if they’re not reading academic research so that me being involved in the community is to bring the research voice if you will to the community and help them and support them in their self-advocacy or point them in direction of some resources to help them make their case or to use my privileged position to amplify their voices potentially through research or through non-Academic writing. From a service standpoint, I also think that it’s a critical role to play across institutions and so in addition to, speaking if you will, we kind of think about that as I come and give a talk, I also do a lot of trainings right so I’m working with K through 12 educators, I’m working with higher education professionals and literally learning how to do the work to improve the educational environments for young Black boys and Black men, excuse me, males of color actually, in a specific sense, most of my invitations have revolved around that, but then, at the same time, for all students. How do we create better learning education environments so that our students thrive as opposed to survive, and so, for me, it’s in a lot of the like I mentioned community work that I do, but then also working with different colleagues, constituencies, partners, community members across different educational institutions, so I think we, to your question, I think we’ve got to situate and nestle ourselves across multiple domains because if our research is just to publish a journal article that’s just going to sit on the shelves then we need to think hard and long about why we’re doing the research. I come from that DuBois ideology that our research ought to improve the lives of the people in the community. And if our research isn’t doing that especially from a sociological standpoint, again, and I’m not trying to speak for every discipline, but from a sociological standpoint and then in particular, a Black sociology standpoint, then I just firmly believe even before I became a professor that my work has to contribute to my communities and then so research becomes another arena that I can do that.
KL: I absolutely agree and that’s actually something I’m trying to do in my own research so.
DB: Keep it up.
KL: Yeah. So it’s good to hear this from a professor who has been doing this for a lot longer than I have, you know, by which I mean research obviously. Just a couple final questions here. What do you think is the most important takeaway that you want people to learn from your research whether your current research or your research corpus and this can be academics or just the general.
DB: I’ll answer this in a couple of different ways.
KL: Sure.
DB: So the first way I’m thinking about this as I process your question, I think about my education research and from an education research standpoint, I think the main thing that I just love, I mean I find it, I don’t have to find it, it’s there. It’s apparent. It’s are we willing to listen to it? Black boys are capable. Right. They’re beyond capable. Right. They’re exceptional in so many ways right, so I had this paper that’s going to come out pretty soon that’s about, the main title of the paper is We Had to Stick Together and it’s talking about how these young boys navigate this particular neighborhood in going to school and coming home from school and so one of the things that’s just fascinating to me is that the social and cultural capital that they have to acquire and activate to understand the various nuances of the neighborhood effect just to get to and from school. Some kind of way, that brilliance doesn’t get appreciated if they score, as an example, a 13 on the ACT. As an example, if they have a 2.2GPA because all too often we look at test scores and GPA as a marker of success or as a marker of ability and there’s little to no appreciation, almost a dismissal of all of the other things that are going on in their lives that they had to deal with in addition to trying to prove, demonstrate, and show their proficiency in school so the first thing for me is that these guys are amazing and so I’m just humbled and honored to share parts of their story that they shared with me and I do a lot where I accidently read it before I publish it, before I submit it, you know, did I get it right? If I tell this story and I tell it this particular way, is that aligned with what it is that you experienced? So it’s not just read your transcript and I typed it correctly, but here’s the story I constructed out of the experiences you all shared with me. I need you to read this and just give me some feedback. Tell me and the beauty of being invested and connected with folks that you’re doing research with, again, not on, people that you’re doing research with is when they affirm what you have right so that I’ve had a couple of guys who I’ve sent the paper when it got published and they said, ‘Hey, when’s the next one coming out?’ cause they’ve read that one and they’re excited ‘Hey, can we do a follow-up?’ They asking me can I follow-up study with them. And to me, it’s like how much more honorable can it be than when you put work out into the world and, again, these guys are not in academic spaces anymore, the ones that I’m specifically referring to here and they’re saying we need your work. ‘Hey Doc,’ you know, so like that to me, that’s the reciprocal relationship of it so that would be the second thing that I point out so you know not only their brilliance and capabilities, but the importance of relationships. And so if we think about, again, and I’m still on education, but if we think about again about the things that matter to their educational successes plural, one of the things that have shown up in every facet of the interviews that I’ve conducted and the conversations that I’ve had that weren’t interviews, but they were conversations, was the importance of relationships. And I think that in many ways, you know, folks in education, we need to really honor that, re-center that, think about that, and figure out ways to re-focus that because if you took away students, I couldn’t be a professor.
KL: Absolutely.
DB: Period. I might be a researcher, but I’m not a professor. And so, being a professor means that a great bulk of my work is students. Working with students. So those are a few things that percolated when I think about the larger research corpus is really geared toward the humanity of Black folks. And I have research that looks at Black Latinos, but just the humanity of people at large or writ large and then as it speaks to the specific populations that I’m connected to and that I’m speaking about in my research, it’s really about their humanity. So that when I look at the testimony of a Darren Wilson and he refers to Michael Brown as an ‘it’ or a Hulk Hogan like figure or these other ways in which he’s dehumanized really. My research speaks to their humanity. It is intended to uplift their humanity, it’s intended to respect their humanness and so, in doing so, as my colleague Roger Carey talks about is that we have the thing in not just mattering in a static sense, but in a comprehensive sense, that they matter when they show up to school. That they matter when they don’t show up to school. They matter when they are entangled within the criminal justice system. They matter when they complete whatever requirements they had to do because it was connected. So wherever they are, whatever station of life they’re in, at the end of the day, they always matter. And because they matter, their voices are valid. Their experiences are valid. We need to listen and learn and hear from them so that we can make our institutions, our organizations more humane places so that people can accomplish the things they set out to accomplish.
KL: Absolutely and like as I said earlier, this is such a good moment for this. I mean it’s always, it’s always a great moment to talk about the humanity of people that are especially of the Black community because time and time again as you were saying with Darren Wilson, with the way he described Michael Brown, that happens over and over again. This complete dehumanization so I think that is just a really, it topped it off really well. So one final question, so as a Taft Research Fellow, how has your Fellowship benefitted your research in the future and how has it already benefitted you in some ways?
DB: So I’m still early. So I’ll speak about early experiences and within that I’m projecting to the rest of the year. One of the things and I’ve shared this with a couple of people across different conversations and primarily sharing this to folks who are earlier in their careers as they’re starting to navigate that tenure track process, trying to figure out the push and the pull and the demands etc., or even working with graduate students as they’re embarking on dissertation work, right, the larger kind of research project that looks very different than all the other things you’re asked to do in graduate school. I think one of the most beneficial things is time to think. I think that in many ways, it’s underappreciated if you’ve never had it, right so, I started off teaching at a community college, time to think, I was thinking about what I was teaching, I was thinking about the needs my students shared with me and the different ways that our lives were connected and entangled and I didn’t have a research expectation, but then when you start talking about ‘You need to write,’ I think people put a primacy on the literal process of typing words and you’ve got a word document and it’s a page and then there’s two pages etc., I don’t think they understand or appreciate or censor the thinking part of writing. And so, early on the Taft Fellowship has actually given me time to just look at my data or parts of data around a particular topical area and just think about it. And so, I don’t feel rushed cause I gotta do something in thirty minutes cause I had class and I gotta transition or I better just write what I can today because the next four days I’m gonna be teaching and I’ll be grading papers and so that the kind of the tug and the pull of teaching and the demands of teaching doesn’t exist in the same ways now cause I still have students that I work with, but it’s liberating in the sense of I can censor much more of my attention, much more of my energy, much more of my effort in both the writing aspect of research and the thinking aspect of it obviously then to it also provides time to read right. I’m reading all the time, but I’m trying to fit it in along with everything else that you’re doing so then being on a research fellowship, I can print out an article and say ‘I can shut everything else down, push everything else back, for the next hour I’m just going to read this paper’ and doing that percolates ideas and has ideas that you’re able to connect with other than things that you’re kind of working on. As I think about it, obviously for the duration of the year, my goal is to have made quite significant progress, I’m working on a book project, so my goal is to make quite significant progress on the book, and so, the year allows me time to work on that. I have a couple of articles that I’m working on, and it’s not necessarily a singular focus, but it’s a main focus, but my articles are also related to all of these things so it’s not ‘I’m writing an article all the way on the right and then I’ve gotta come back to the left’ if I just use those as directions. So the fellowship, I believe I’ll benefit in that regard and then the other kind of component of that is the other fellows as well, and so, I don’t know what that’s going to look like, we’re still kind of in the formative process of figuring that out for ourselves, but I imagine, I anticipate, I’m hopeful that there’s ways that I benefit from being in fellowship literally. I’m a fellow in fellowship. Being in fellowship with some of my colleagues from different departments, but we’re all housed in the same center so I’m looking forward to that as well and I know that being able to, as an example, knock on Leila’s door and say, ‘I had this thought and I just wanted to bounce it off you and get feedback’ or have somebody listen to it. I know it’ll matter.
KL: Right. Well, excellent. Thank you so much for being here today and I look forward to all of the awesome awesome work that you’re doing at the Taft Center.
DB: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me and thanks for the interview.