ABSTRACT
The explosiveness that race has held for African Americans and their experiences in this country have been well documented. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has proven to be an instrumental framework, a methodological and analytical tool to shed even more attention on the way that race and racism shapes the experiences of racially marginalized populations. What is less understood, researched, and theorized is the manner in which race is understood among adolescents in general, and Black male adolescents in particular. Despite a growing number of studies that have tried to capture the voice of Black male youth, their continued academic and social marginalization raises a number of critical questions about how race shapes their experiences in pursuit of academic success. The nexus of the multiple layers of Black male identity merits the development of a framework that we term Critical Race Phenomenology, which centralizes consciousness, reality, perceived reality, and the phenomenon that are constructed by race and place.
