Identity Construction Amidst the Forces of Domination

Abstract

Dominant group hegemony, and the discourses it generates, preserves its own privilege by carving its perspective and will into the minds of young people over time as powerful waves shape coastlines. This has particular consequences for those gendered as male and racialized as black. The negotiation of black masculinities, especially for those black males who are non-heteronormal, becomes a struggle against exclusion and resistance and being located at the bottom of a socioeconomic hierarchy determined by hegemonic masculinity. Caught between conceptual hegemony that streams the dominant’s discourses of hierarchical stratification through countless images, media, advertising, historical accounts, schooling, and society’s interminable dominant group messaging and the message itself of hegemonic masculinity, black masculinities are challenged with forces that threaten exclusion, dropout, trauma, and imprisonment. Whether or not this constant stream of indoctrination can be absorbed or resisted in a way that does not obliterate genuine being or necessarily require that black masculinities be relegated to the lowest levels of society is uncertain. Yet, some scholars posit that resilient self-conceptions can be scaffolded through interventions born of a critical race conceptual framework, which focuses on identity construction and which can improve self-conception and, through that, academic achievement as well.