Schooling and racialized masculinities: The diploma, teachers, and peers in the lives of young, African American men

This article contributes new understandings of masculinities through examination of the complex social circumstances of 2 working-class, African American, young men. The author considers the young men's differing meanings of the diploma, relationships with teachers, and relations with male peers in the production of their racial, masculine identities. Each of these sites serves as a lens through which to view the complexity of, and interconnections among, class, race, and gender relations and the ways these social processes are interwoven through experience. Though the 2 young men are from similar social locations, they develop different meanings of relationships and experiences in and out of school. This analysis explains these different meanings by examining the ways the men resist and experience race, class, and gender domination on three levels: the level of personal biography, the group level of the cultural context, and the level of social institutions.