The Educational Experiences of Street-Life-Oriented Black Boys: How Black Boys Use Street Life as a Site of Resilience in High School

• DOI: 10.1177/1043986210368646
• Published date: 01 August 2010
• Date: 01 August 2010
• Author: Tara M. Brown,Yasser Arafat Payne
• Subject Matter: Articles

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
26(3) 316 –338
The Educational
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Experiences of Street-
DOI: 10.1177/1043986210368646
http://ccj.sagepub.com
Life-Oriented Black Boys:
How Black Boys Use
Street Life as a Site of
Resilience in High School
Yasser Arafat Payne1
and Tara M. Brown2
Abstract
This Participatory Action Research (PAR) project worked with four active street-
life-oriented Black men to document how a community sample of street-life-oriented
Black boys between the ages of 16 and 19 frame and use “street life” as a site of resil-
ience inside schools. Qualitative data were col ected in the form of written responses
on 156 surveys, 10 individual interviews, and one group interview. Data were primarily
collected inside the street communities of Harlem, New York City and Paterson, New
Jersey. Qualitative findings reveal the young men, overal , hold positive views of formal
education and its significance in their lives. Yet they hold negative attitudes regarding
previous and current educational experiences. Also, results demonstrate the young men
ultimately position their street orientation as an adaptive identity to have inside schools.
Keywords
Black men/boys and crime, Black boys and school, school violence, participatory action
research (PAR), street ethnography
A core variant of Black boys in many low-income urban K-12 high schools identify as
street-life-oriented. These boys participate in a street culture that includes a variety of
illicit activities like gang involvement, interpersonal violence, and selling narcotics to
1University of Delaware, Newark, DE
2Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Corresponding Author:
Dr. Yasser Payne, 424 Ewing Hall, Black American Studies Department,
University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
Email: ypayne@udel.edu

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Payne and Brown
317
survive in the harsh impoverished communities in which they reside. These boys often
bring illicit activities into schools and, for many school personnel, these students represent
the most difficult of the “hard cases”—hard to reach, hard to teach, and hard to control.
The primary means for responding to the “problems” they pose inside schools has been
disciplinary action, which has increasingly relied on more rigid and punitive disciplinary
policies, law enforcement, and surveillance equipment (Ayers, Dohrn, & Ayers, 2001;
National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2009c). Low-income Black boys are
suspended, expelled, and arrested in school at comparatively high rates and for those
who are street-life-oriented, these rates are undoubtedly higher (NCES, 2009c).
Ironically, growing rates of disciplinary action and prison-like security strategies
have not increased overall safety in large low-income urban public high schools (NCES,
2009a). Such measures do, however, exacerbate the difficult life circumstances of
street-life-oriented Black boys. This has dire consequences for the boys and society at
large. As increasing numbers of street-life-oriented Black boys are equipped with little
means for educational advancement and gainful employment, they will likely be among
the chronically unemployed, continue to engage in illegal street life activities, and be
incarcerated at increasingly alarming rates. Research strongly suggests that punitive
disciplinary actions as the primary and, often sole interventions, has been largely inef-
fective in alleviating the challenges that street-life-oriented Black boys grapple with
inside schools (Ayers et al., 2001; NCES, 2009c). In general, such interventions are
based on mistaken interpretations of these boys’ behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes—which
lead to poor conceptual framings of these boys as nonresilient, maladaptive, disaffected,
and defiantly troubled (Ferguson, 2000; Payne, Starks, & Gibson, 2009).
The present community-based phenomenological study examines the educational
experiences of street-life-oriented Black male high school students by focusing on the
young men’s relationships with school personnel, preparation for economic and educa-
tional opportunities, and the use of “street life” as identity and activity inside schools.
Also, we argue that street-life-oriented Black boys very much want a good education and
some of their activities inside schools, though often interpreted otherwise, are functionally
adaptive within the contexts of their lives. Better contextualizing how street-life-oriented
Black boys experience schools, and rethinking notions of anger and resistance among
these boys, from their perspectives, will help researchers to conceptualize and create more
effective interventions. Specifically, this study examines the educational experiences of
street-life-oriented Black boys by way of (a) attitudes toward education, (b) experiences
with educational officials or authorities, and (c) the young men’s attitudinal and behavioral
responses (i.e., street identity) to such experiences.
Theoretical Framing
This study conceptualizes street life as a “site of resilience” in street-life-oriented Black
boys (Payne, 2008). A sites-of-resilience theoretical analysis argues that the streets offer
particular psychological and physical spaces that operate in tandem to produce a site

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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 26(3)
of strength, community, culture, and ultimately resilience for street-life-oriented Black
men. Resilience in the context of sites-of-resilience theory is understood in terms of
how the streets organize meaning around feeling well, satisfied, or accomplished as well
as how the young men choose to survive in relation to adverse structural conditions.
Street life is a phenomenological term essentially viewed by the young men as an ideol-
ogy centered on personal and economic survival (Payne, 2001, 2006a, 2006b, 2008;
Payne et al., 2009; Payne & Gibson, 2008). In addition, street life is also conceptualized
as a spectrum of networking behaviors that manifest through bonding and illegal activi-
ties. Bonding activities include such interpersonal acts as joking, “hanging on the block,”
or playing basketball, to organizing and sponsoring local events in the community.
Illegal expressions, for instance, may include burglary, interpersonal violence, or selling
drugs. It is important to note that a central assumption of the theory is that low-income
Black boys acquire a street life orientation primarily as a means for economic survival,
given most have experienced little access to quality economic and educational oppor-
tunity. In addition, a sites-of-resilience analysis theorizes resilience in the context of
(a) race and racism, (b) sociohistorical patterns, (c) the intersection of concentrated
economic poverty (capitalism) and resiliency, as well as (d) phenomenology to under-
stand personal constructions of resilience.
Literature Review
Social scientists have a rich legacy of examining the educational experiences of street-
life-oriented Black boys. Theoretical and empirical work in this area of inquiry has
been conducted in the fields of education, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and
criminal justice and has addressed many school-related issues, including Black boys’
attitudes towards education (Ferguson, 2000; Ogbu, 1991, 2004; Payne et al., 2009),
their relationships with school personnel (Gibbs, 1988; Noguera, 2008; O’ Connor,
1998; Ogbu, 1991; Payne et al., 2009; White & Johnson, 1991), their behaviors (and
misbehaviors) in school (Devine, 1996; Gibbs, 1988; Patton, 1998; Young, 2004), and
the disciplinary practices used to respond to them (Ayers et al., 2001; Brown, 2007;
Noguera, 2008; Peterson, 1998) as well as Black boys’ strategies for coping with adverse
schooling conditions (Dance, 2002; Carter, 2005; Ferguson, 2000; Ogbu, 1985, 1991;
Payne et al., 2009).
Attitudes Toward education
Black male K-12 students, particularly those who attend low-income urban schools,
consistently demonstrate comparatively low levels of academic achievement “on every
known measure of academic performance” (Noguera, 2008, p. 189). Nationally, the
high school graduation rate for Black males is about 50% and this statistic is signifi-
cantly lower in many large cities: as low as 31% in New York City and 20% in Cleveland
(Schott Foundation, 2008). One way that Black boys’ academic and disciplinary troubles

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319
with school have been explained by both researchers and educational practitioners is
as a result of presumed poor attitudes and dispositions toward academic learning. The
perception that street-life-oriented Black boys do not care about succeeding in school
is supported by the “acting White” theory, which posits that due to historical racial
oppression in the United States, some Black youth develop “oppositional identities”
(e.g., street identity) in which formal education is rejected as a prerogative of Whites’
and as culturally incompatible or even hostile to Black youth (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986;
Fordham, 1996; Ogbu, 2004). Indeed, some Black boys do resist and reject aspects of
formal schooling. However, as argued by Carter (2005, pp. vi, viii), what has been
misinterpreted as rejection of learning and education or “opposition to conventional
formulas for success” among Black boys is actually “contestation of the schools’ cultural
environment, especially when they perceive that educators ignore the values of their
own cultures.” This argument is reflected in...