Bad Boys: Public education for Black boys is often characterized as a school-to-prison pipeline. Why is it that these kids are so poorly served by our schools? Book Mole, Patricia Kullberg, reviews the ethnography, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, by Portlander Ann Ferguson, Professor Emeritus of Afro-American Studies, Smith College. In her classic and ground-breaking text Ferguson reveals the mechanisms by which schools sort Black boys into a social hierarchy that exacerbates, rather than diminishes, the ill effects of a racist society. Rather than passive victims, however, the so-called bad boys devise strategies for negotiating and maneuvering within structures of power that enable them to preserve a sense of self-worth, as something other than man-boys headed for prison.
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