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Introduction For decades, scholars and pundits have been calling on the American public to act on behalf of boys. Christina Hoff-Sommers issued one of the first such clarion calls in her provocatively titled book The War on Boys, when she charged that boys were the real “second sex” and blamed feminists for redirecting attention from the problems boys faced in school to issues of equality in girls’ schooling.1 Posing the issue as a zero-sum game where girls’ academic gains were made at the expense of boys, feminism was the apparent culprit for whatever educational disadvantages that boys were encountering. But, as I hope this book will show, the most significant issues that boys encounter in school are not artifacts of feminism but rather a consequence of inadequate and punitive schools, poverty, race, ethnicity, and cultures of masculinity that emerge as an antidote to oppressive social structures.2 Rather than a contemporary “war on boys,” as Hoff-Summers termed it, we are dealing with a phenomenon that was present from the genesis of compulsory education. Recently, scholars have begun making more weighty and complex claims about the threats to the well-being of boys of color, especially African American boys—who have been classified as “at risk,” “imperiled,” “in trouble,” and “bad,” even described as an “endangered species” in many contemporary writings . Although this language is hyperbolic, it speaks to some real disparities in the academic achievements and social success of boys of color, even in contrast to their disadvantaged female counterparts. The relative weakness of boys of color in school has surfaced in an era of accountability, when education has come to be seen as “the civil rights issue of our time.”3 We are also finally coming to grips with what Michelle Alexander has termed the “new Jim Crow”: the deplorable overrepresentation of young black males in prison. Studies of what has been termed the “school-to-prison pipeline” demonstrate how such contemporary 2 The Boy Problem disciplinary practices as suspension and expulsion are leading many young men down the path to prison.4 We are in the midst of what might be called a “moral panic” about the fate of boys, especially African American and Latino boys. Usually, the term moral panic suggests an overinflated moral indignation in response to highly dramatized events that portray a particular group of people as a threat to the social order.5 In this case, the cause of this indignation has not been centered on events but on alarming statistics about the fate of boys of color in our public schools and prisons. What the moral panic masks is that all youth of color, including boys, have actually been making some progress in terms of dropout rates, high school completion, and college attendance.6 But so has everyone else; thus it is the sizeable gap between boys of color and their female and white counterparts that has been most troubling. At the same time, the moral panic may draw attention away from the racial inequities that place black girls in a better position than black boys but leave them at a disadvantage compared to their white counterparts. After decades of attention to improving the academic prospects of girls, we are finally grappling with what it means that so many boys of color are floundering in our schools and languishing in our juvenile justice system. Obviously, this is not simply a matter of gender but of race, ethnicity, poverty, and class. Reducing the problem to biological differences between male and female students obscures these significant factors and serves to reinforce peer cultures of masculinity that may ultimately disadvantage boys in school and society. Of course, not all boys of color are endangered or imperiled, and many girls are also struggling in school and society because of racism, poverty, and sexism.7 And white children, both girls and boys, are far from off the hook when it comes to “trouble.” Nor are these troubles new. Many boys of color were at risk, endangered , and imperiled well before the turn of the twenty-first century. Why, then, the sudden attention to this problem, which is neither new nor unique? With few jobs available for unskilled males, zero tolerance policies in the schools, and a societal preoccupation with college degrees, the academic failures of many males of color has become impossible to ignore, calling out for both analysis and policy interventions. And the soaring numbers of boys of color whose lives have been...

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