ABSTRACT
Not all black boys are the same. This may seem a simple or common-sense assertion but in terms of teacher perception and the popular discourses that underpin ‘black masculinity’ there is evidence of an acceptance of cultural and ethnic essentialism (Dhondy 1974; Ofsted 1999). This chapter is written with data drawn from an ethnographic study of an inner-city boys’ school. It seeks to challenge the homogenisation of black (i.e. African-Caribbean) boys into one big lump of rebellious, phallocentric underachievers. We want to point to the differences between those who conform to the requirements of schooling and those who do not. Within this, we want to show the fluid, multifarious, shifting and hybrid constructions of black masculinities that operated in this school. We will argue that a more heterogeneous perspective of black boys has been missing from the literature which has failed to look at class, context and the complex intersections of masculinity and ethnicity. Emancipation from the canon of ‘black masculinity’ gives us a more sophisticated understanding of ‘underachievement’ and the survival strategies of these children. Those teachers who were most successful with African-Caribbean boys were aware that too many boys were tagged with the label of ‘Black Machismo’. Their success was not in the ignoring of masculinity and ethnicity but in realising the complex identities of the boys in a context where racism worked on a number of levels.
