"Illegible Black Masculinities":
A Framework for Thinking about 
Black Masculinities and Literacies

This concept of "illegible Black masculinities" comes from Mark Antony Neal's book, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities.  In that text, Neal states: 

Herman Gray acknowledges that... 'black masculinity consistently appears in the popular imagination as the logical and legitimate object of surveillance' . . . there is a general underrepresentation of black males in mainstream corporate media; when black males do appear, they are often presented with exaggerated negative connotations; 'positive' associations are limited; black men and their issues are always already framed as problems.  Such general framing of black men leads to causal links in the public imagination that create antagonisms toward black males . . . As such, black men are seemingly bound to and bound by their legibility.

Let's use Neal's frameworks as our penultimate goal: 

1. make the dominant stereotypes and historical (mis)representations of black masculinities ILLEGIBLE in schools and other institutions
   
2. make those images, performances, and realities related to black masculinities that are continually marked as non-masculine/ queer/ "soft"  LEGIBLE in schools and other institutions

---

Other Central Texts for our project

1. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)
2. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Ferguson (2001)
3. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks (Routledge, 2003)
4. Black Male(d): Peril and Promise in the Education of African American Males by Tyrone Howard (Teachers College Press, 2013)
5. Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race and the Literacies of Urban Youth by Valerie Kinloch (Teachers College Press, 2009)
6. A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Black Men by David Kirkland (Teachers College Press, 2013)
7. Keepin It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric by Vorris Nunley (Wayne State University Press, 2011)

Sy Stokes and College Students
​from UCLA & Morehouse

Bell hooks, kevin powell, &Akala

MORE LINKS
WINTER IN AMERICA: a collaboration between Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi  

"Literature Review: Media Representations and Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys"

This page was created by Carmen Kynard.  
​Click here for more.