ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Black masculinity politics position Black men in the nation's teaching ranks. It argues that popular discourses on Black male teachers have relied on a saviorist Black manhood to define expectations for and justify the recruitment and retention of Black men in teaching. Despite Black women's invaluable labor in raising and supporting Black boys, the sidelining of single mothers and other women makes sense when calls for more savior-like Black men are understood as part of a larger cultural project to allow Black men to properly—and perhaps even exclusively—masculinize Black boys. Black male teachers are not only assumed to have Black boys' best interests at heart, but they are accorded the power to save Black boys from the debilitating grips of educational systems that have failed them, fatherless families that have neglected them, and a larger society that has demonized them.
