EDUCATIONAL STUDIES

2022, VOL. 58, NO. 4, 458–473

https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2022.2096454

(Un)Natural Saviors and Motivators: Analyzing the

Pathological Scripting of Black Male Teachers in
Hollywood Films
Daniel Thomas IIIa , Marcus Johnsonb , and Anthony Brownc
a
University of Kansas School of Education; bTexas State University; cThe University of Texas at Austin

ABSTRACT
This article explores how Black male teachers in Hollywood films
continue to be encoded with meanings derived from deficit social
science discourse generated through a white-controlled epistemic
order. Drawing from the framework of critical public pedagogy and
utilizing the critical visual cultural tradition, we contend that the rep-
resentation of Black male teachers on film is rooted in longstanding
conceptual narratives of Black men and boys. Findings indicate that
cinematic films both develop their scripts around and contextualize
the necessity of Black male teachers within deficit sociological tropes
of absent Black fathers and their endangered sons.

Introduction
From the 1930s through the 1980s, Black men were cast as absent fathers and Black
boys as oppositional to societal norms, mainly due to their fatherless upbringings. As
scholars note, there were few places where the idea of father absence was not used to
signify the leading cause of Black boys’ underachievement (Brown, 2011a; Young, 2011).
Implicit to this narrative was the idea that Black boys would learn social development
through a form of surrogate manhood. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, middle-
class and college-educated Black men were called to serve as role models and mentors.
By the 1990s, advocates for Black male immersion schools often referred to the peda-
gogical benefits of Black men educating Black boys.
However, since the early 2000s, scholars made clear that while Black male teachers
possess a unique set of culturally relevant pedagogies, not all Black men are the same
(Brown, 2009; Lynn, 2002, Thomas, 2022). Furthermore, scholars found that particular
enclosures delimited Black male teachers’ work. This paper draws from literature con-
cerned with the discursive construction of Black male teachers. We argue that movies
provide a powerful mechanism to anchor in place flat and simplistic ideas about the
pedagogical capacity of Black male teachers. Brown (2011b) found that movies from the
1970s to the 1990s tended to mirror the existing depictions of Black male life found
within social science thought. In this context, movies were the purveyors of dominant
social science thought. Similarly, we found that movies tended to reproduce ideas that

CONTACT Daniel Thomas III djthomas2089@gmail.com University of Kansas School of Education, Lawrence, KS
66045-3101, USA.
ß 2022 American Educational Studies Association
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 459

were already formed within social science and policy discourse. Drawing from the the-
ory of critical public pedagogy (Giroux, 2000, 2011; Hall, 1997), we illustrate how perva-
sive tropes about Black men and boys resurface in the context of U.S. movies.

Theoretical entanglements: Literature on the construction of Black males in

societal and academic thought
In this section, we offer a brief overview of literature on the construction of Black males
by tending to bodies of scholarship related to image production, manhood, film, social
science, and teachers. This literature provides the foundational component parts of
Black male image production.

Black male image production

It is vital to note the constructs that generate and stabilize durable tropes of men and
boys of African descent. Films are powerful because Hollywood is a global economy that
has the power to dictate and distribute distorted narratives of Black folks that saturates
global markets. This form of cultural production is particularly lethal for its ability to
repeat itself through multiple mediums such as streaming, cable, movies, plays, and boot-
legging. The struggle for control over the Black image within a complex structure of dom-
inance (Hall, 2000) has been a never-ending battle since the sixteenth century (Kendi,
2016). Within this anti-Black epistemic order of knowledge (Mills, 1998; Wynter, 1997),
aspects pertaining to the production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and repro-
duction of the Black image-making process have been produced within a hegemonic
order in which the Black body became ontologically disfigured and reinscribed with an
anti-Black ideology of the scripter (Hall, 2000). The production of such images that
placed Black folks at the distal end of rational humans was taken up in popular culture
via theater. For example, in Ben Johnson’s 1605 play, The Masque of Blackness, Queen
Anne of Denmark and “eleven court ladies played the African princess in blackface, inau-
gurating the use of black paint on the royal stage” (Kendi, 2016, p. 35). Later comment-
ing on the proliferation of blackface, Frederick Douglas (1848) took to the The North
Star stating, "the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion
denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of
their white fellow citizens.” The same old stories remained intact well into the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries as a White-controlled, dominant hegemonic position utilized cur-
riculum to produce images of Blacks as subhuman through children’s picture-books like
William Kemble’s Ten Little Niggers and A Coon Alphabet (Kemble, 1972).

Black manhood
Issues of manhood differ across racial identities. As such, examining conceptions of
Black manhood raises larger questions concerning the construction and legibility of
Blackness within society and its various mediums. Enduring discourses about Black
manhood reveal historical links between race, gender, and representation. Distinct from
ancient Africa and Black indigeneity, prejudices and limitations have habitually shaped
460 THOMAS ET AL.

Western, Eurocentric understandings of Black manhood (Hall, 2009). The United States
first accepted European Enlightenment political ideologies, equating "rights of man”
with the rights of all citizens (Estes, 2005). Consequently, the demand of Black man-
hood was not simply a desire for the recognition of Black masculinity but of Black
humanity. This campaign continues as the undoing of Black male bodies and masculin-
ities continues to be “disproportional, systematic, sanctioned, and sensationalized”
(Carey, 2019, p. 371). Yet, Black men have established multiple forms of masculine
expression despite impediments to criticized patriarchal structures of power, wealth, and
status associated with traditional forms of manhood—including educational achieve-
ment. Black men have used education as a space to reconceptualize both manhood and
personhood with roots in the era of Reconstruction (Gates, 2020). Early efforts sought
to accomplish this educational task of revisionist ontology through civic clubs that
sought to shape cultural self-identity, impart cultural knowledge, and contest the U.S.
legal system to secure an equitable education for their children (Johnson & Nicol,
2020). This tradition of race men and race women carrying out such revisionist acts of
Black representation through spaces of education remains, albeit through modern
mediums, a fervent endeavor. Recent studies (Carey, 2019; Givens, Nasir, Ross, & de
Royston, 2016) have examined how to establish new renderings of Black manhood
within education. Through (re)presentations and opposition to the prevailing gaze
toward Black male deviance, contemporary critical approaches look to generate a pos-
ition that does not originate with damage or lack but rather presents a nuanced narra-
tive of Black manhood.

The imagery of Black males in film

From the licentious Moor in English theater circa the sixteenth-century as seen in
Shakespeare’s Blackface characters from Titus Andronicus (1594) and Othello (1604) to
D.W. Griffith’s (1994) portrayal of a Black rapist in a major movie production during
the Woodrow Wilson presidency, to contemporary antiblack film narratives like the
“white savior” (De Oca, 2012) and the “magical negro” (Glenn & Cunningham, 2009),
White-authored narratives have structured the perception of Black folks on film. In an
early analysis of 100 films from the early 1900s, Reddick (1944) found that “seventy-five
of them must be classified as anti-Negro” (p. 369). Stereotypes of Black folks on film
manifest in characters known as toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, bucks, and magical
negroes (Bogle, 2001). By 1967, however, moviegoers saw, for the first time, the emer-
gence of a Black character heretofore unseen—the Black male teacher. Despite the pres-
ence of a Black male teacher on film, a feat that, by all accounts, is seemingly a victory
in the enduring struggle to remove Black images from a “complex structure of domi-
nance” (Hall, 2000), we argue that Black male teachers in Hollywood films continue to
be encoded with stereotypes generated through a white-controlled epistemic order.
Scholars refer to such forms of racial representation in the media as “cultural projec-
tion” (Pimentel & Busey, 2018) and “scripting” (Agosto, 2014; Jackson, 2006). Pimentel
and Busey (2018) described cultural projection as “the method by which Black culture
is presented to others that sorely fails to represent the entirety of a group’s culture,
struggle, and agency” (p. 4). Alternatively, Jackson (2006) troubled how Black bodies
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 461

became discursively rearranged (i.e., scripted) to quench America’s thirst for patho-
logical representations of Blackness. Research shows that there are several implications
for this deficit scripting of Black bodies on film. First, Black actors are reduced to
stereotypical, ready-made characters of extreme essentialism (Bogle, 2001). Second, the
naturalization of these stereotypes have projected a distorted perception of Black exist-
ence to both Black and non-Black film consumers. This moment of defamiliarization
with the Black body is heightened for White viewers who, with an already limited sense
of Black existence, come to believe they have encountered an “authentic” Black experi-
ence (hooks, 2009). Thirdly, by drawing on stereotypical tropes that have become so
naturalized as “authentically Black” to have distorted reality, we have entered into an
essentializing moment (Hall, 1993). That is, efforts to reveal a stereotypically “pure”
Black experience via film is to not only detach Black characters from reality, but it is to
tear them from historically embedded significations within an antiblack milieu.

Black males in social science

Social science has played a prominent role in shaping the imagery and construction of
Black males in the present. The origins of this construction trace back to the nineteenth
century, when ethnologists and anthropologists conjured up erroneous theories about
the sub-humanity of males of African descent (Brown, 2018). However, the growth of
sociology in the early 1900s marked a defining period in the literature on Black men
and boys. In that era, the idea of father absence was the central feature of social science
thought related to Black men and boys. In the 1930s, E. Franklin Frazier characterized
Black men as hapless wanderers (Brown, 2011a), disconnected from family responsibil-
ities. According to this scholarship, the changing social context of urban cities made
Black men more likely to shirk their responsibilities as fathers due to their decreased
inclination to be engaged in forms of serial monogamy. Over time, social science
thought helped to produce a narrative about Black boys as fatherless children incapable
of functioning in social and educational settings. This idea of the absent father and dys-
functional sons would remain as the most pervasive societal narrative to explain the
social and educational development of Black men and boys. As scholars note, the absent
father syndrome was positioned as a central social phenomenon of Black male life
(Young, 2004), including the necessity of Black male teachers (Brown & Thomas, 2020;
Johnson, Brown, & Harrison, 2020).

Black male teachers

The subjectivity of Black maleness continues to enclose Black male teachers within a
stereotypical discourse of theological, scientific, and social science-based subhuman tropes
(Brown, 2018). Brown (2012) argues that Black male teachers have become constructed
as pedagogical kinds—“a type of educator whose subjectivities, pedagogies, and expecta-
tions have been … situated directly in the context of … the unruly Black boy in school”
(p. 299). Subsequent scholarship shows that Black male teachers are expected to function
as the following pedagogical kinds: the surrogate father (Brown & Thomas, 2020), the dis-
ciplinarian (Brockenbrough, 2015), the patriarch (Woodson & Pabon, 2016), and the
462 THOMAS ET AL.

superman (Pabon, 2016). Little scholarship has tended to the representation of Black
male teachers on film. Williams (2017) analysis of Black male teachers on The Steve
Harvey Show found that the primary Black male teacher, Steve Hightower, fit the lacka-
daisical, anything goes, one-of-the-guys teacher media-teacher stereotype. While the extant
literature on Black cultural projection has sought to illuminate antiblack portrayals on
film, previous research has not addressed how these forms of representation are con-
nected to an anti-Black discourse within social science research. We argue that Black
male teachers in Hollywood films continue to be encoded with these conceptual tropes.
Drawing from the framework of critical public pedagogy we utilize the critical visual cul-
tural tradition (Giroux, 2000, 2011; Hall, 1997; McKee, 2001) methodology to analyze
how Black male teachers are represented in the following films: To Sir, With Love (1967),
Cooley High (1975), Hard Lessons (1986), Lean on Me (1989), House Party 2 (1991),
Menace II Society (1993), Major Payne (1995), Higher Learning (1995), To Sir, With Love
II (1996), Nutty Professor (1996), and One Eight Seven (1997).

Framework
This study employs critical public pedagogy (Giroux, 2000, 2011; Hall, 1997) as its the-
oretical framework. The last twenty years has seen a substantial growth in the theoriza-
tion of public pedagogies. While there is no definitive definition, Burdick and Sandlin
(2010) described it as “spaces, sites, and languages of education and learning that exist
outside schools” (p. 349). Public pedagogy recognizes one’s historical and sociocultural
environment as an active and profound educational force (Rossing, 2016). Public peda-
gogy operates from a stance that learning and education takes place in formal public
arenas such as museums and informal public sites such as social media and popular cul-
ture (O’Malley, Sandlin, & Burdick, 2020). Public pedagogy addresses the ways in which
power, knowledge, images, discourse, and meaning are constructed. Theories of public
pedagogy have been useful in addressing the processes through which images correlate
to meaning and can improve our knowledge of how individuals and institutions engage
certain messages.
The “critical” of public pedagogy resides in its attention to disrupting hegemonic and
taken-for-granted normalcies. Critical public pedagogy suggests reexamining ourselves,
our relationships with others, and subjectivities within a political and social milieu
(Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011). In doing so, detournement—negation of the ideo-
logical conditions of artistic production and sociopolitical awareness is possible (Sandlin
& Milam, 2008). Still, central to Giroux’s (2000, 2011) and Hall’s (1997) work is the
importance representation plays in the public exchange of meanings. Given the critique
of critical public pedagogy for being overly abstract, our specific application to film
broadens the possibilities of “address[ing] the central, urgent, and most disturbing ques-
tions of a society and culture” (Giroux, 2000, p. 356) as it relates to Black male teachers.
In essence, what are films teaching the public about Black male teachers?
Because film is moving to more technologically mediated spaces and digital environ-
ments as opposed to being confined in theaters and homes, its “pedagogical reach,”
repetition, and presumed legitimacy has expanded. Analyzing Black male teachers in
film entails considering the medium’s esthetic, historical, and political legacies including
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 463

the cultural context in which it is generated and distributed (Harris, 1999). Utilizing
critical public pedagogy foregrounds the “possibility of interpretation as intervention”
(Giroux, 2008, p. 10) needed to interrogate embedded racial logics. We see investigating
film as a viable pathway for complicating how Black male teachers are socially presented
and “read” on screen along with how their representations can be enacted in
school settings.

Methodology and methods

The results of this film analysis involving the images and representations of Black male
teachers was conducted in the critical visual cultural tradition (Brown & Kraehe, 2011;
Hall, 1997; McKee, 2001). From the performances of various actors playing Black male
educators in eleven movies, we developed our interpretations (Rose, 2001). Studies have
countered one-dimensional readings of Black male teachers (Thomas, 2022; Pabon,
2016) yet there remains a lack of research looking at how this collective is represented
in film. We understood Hall’s (1980, 1997) encoding/decoding method of analysis as a
constructive model to understand Black male teacher’s representation on screen contri-
buting to greater sociopolitical discourse. Film is understood as a major social and polit-
ical entity which distributes and reinforces mainstream ideologies and representations.
In alignment with Hall’s process, we agree that audiences are not passive, desolate
receptacles but in fact “speak back” to messages presented in movies.
Hall (1980) contended that media cannot fully transmit or determine its intended,
preferred meaning. Though groups in power seek to keep encoding (producing) and
decoding (receiving) in sync to generate consensus, critical perspectives look to disrupt
this process toward alternative means or visions to include dissenting perspectives.
Nonetheless, our film analysis does not aim to locate or quantify the “right” reading of
representations and images, but proposes contextual significations producing alternative
meanings. Principally, our analysis highlights how various meanings within film involv-
ing Black male teachers are circulated. As Steiner (2016) contends, “meaning making is
not a function of individual psychology but rather socially governed cultural codes
shared by community; [which] are multiple, contradictory, [and] dynamic” (p. 108). To
decipher encoded meanings of Black male teachers in film, we first applied Hall’s
(1980) analytic decoding modes of: (a) the dominant or hegemonic code—which is in
full agreement with the envisioned message, and then, (b) shifting to a negotiated pos-
ition, we were able to articulate diverging codes yielding alternative meanings.
Operating from the decoder position, new or disparate meanings can be produced tak-
ing cultural frameworks of knowledge, relations of production, and technical infrastruc-
tures into account (Hall, 1980). By doing so, we were able to accentuate the tension
existing amongst and within competing discourses.
To begin, we recalled from memory then searched online for movies that featured a
Black male teacher. Next, we divided the movies to watch individually (n ¼ 11). As we
observed movies, we considered the intended meaning of casting a Black male teacher
and the movie’s characterization of such a role. Then, each researcher presented con-
trary ways of thinking. We compiled relevant timestamps that exemplified significant
instances or “moments of the circuit” (Pillai, 1992, p. 221) highlighting the characters’
464 THOMAS ET AL.

portrayal. Data was kept in a single, shared Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. Throughout
the process of data collection and analysis, we exchanged viewpoints on developments
arriving at a consensus of explicated meanings. Ultimately, we utilized the theoretical
framework of critical public pedagogy and encoding/decoding as a methodology to
draw out what movies attempt to “teach” us about Black male teachers and how what
we are expected to learn can be contested with alternative meanings based on sociocul-
tural context. In the following section, we illustrate our four thematic findings.

Findings
We found that films featuring Black male teachers serve as a form of public pedagogy
by reinscribing the “governing of culture” which contorts and constrains the imagined
capacities and possibilities of these men. Black male educators on film remained con-
fined to the following recursive tropes of pathology—absent and wandering, impotent
and powerless, soulful and adaptive, and endangered and in crisis (Brown, 2011a). In this
section, we thematically present our findings as follows: (1) there’s no script without
absent or powerless Black fathers, (2) taking their (un)natural place, (3) saviors from
death and deviance, and (4) motivating the lazy and irresponsible.

There’s no script without absent or powerless Black fathers

Within ten out of the eleven analyzed films, the trope of absent or powerless Black
fathers was consistently tethered to the endangered narrative of Black boys. Black
fathers were presented as absent or wandering by being rendered plainly visible as such
or by using elements of character dialogue and plot development as organizing princi-
ples to spotlight their invisibility. Only Menace II Society and Hard Lessons showed
Black fathers on film. Within the opening scene of Menace II Society, the main charac-
ter, a high school teenager named Caine, self-narrates the connection between his
endangered status and his absent father. As a little boy peering from his bedroom,
Caine witnessed his father kill a man while his mother fulfilled her heroin addiction on
the couch. By the age of 10, Caine’s father would be murdered in a drug deal, and his
mother died from a heroin overdose which resulted in him being raised by his
grandparents.
Hard Lessons also visibly portrayed another father, Mr. Jackson, whose son, Ethan
Jackson (EJ), is a gang leader and subsequent murderer. When Principal McKenna gath-
ered signatures for a new school contract, he looked forward to gaining the support of
EJ’s parents upon learning that he was a gang leader. At EJ’s home, McKenna saw a
group of middle-aged Black men heavily drinking and gambling. After announcing that
he is looking for EJ’s parents, his father, drunkenly gazing up with a smirk, says, “his
momma’s at work but his daddy’s home.” Although he hastily signs the contract, the
drunken father pays no mind to the principal’s concerns about his son. McKenna
appears disgusted by the way this group of men have seemingly abdicated their respon-
sibility as fathers. McKenna also intervenes on behalf of Mark Rodgers—a Black male
student who appears to be avoiding school. Upon learning that Mr. Rogers has been
using physical abuse to forcibly remove his son from school to go to work, McKenna
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 465

demanded an explanation. Swelling up with both tears and a powerless sense of shame,
the father says, “no Black man is gonna make it in the White man’s world with no
books. The boy is only going to get heartsick trying.” While these two films use visible
characters to present the conceptual narrative that absent and powerless Black fathers
are tethered to endangered Black boys, eight other films produced the same message
without showing any Black fathers
Albeit physically absent on screen, the causal relationship between absent or power-
less Black fathers and endangered Black boys was seemingly magnified via their com-
plete invisibility. This trope manifested in three forms across eight films. First, Cooley
High, To Sir, with Love II, and Lean on Me utilized scenes that reinforced antiBlack
social science tropes of disorderly, matrifocal households and the proliferation of a
criminal milieu in which they lived. Cooley High’s main characters are Cochise and
Preach—high school seniors in the inner-city of Chicago. Early in the film, the boys
fake a bloody nose with some friends to sneak out of school and run into a group of
adult Black men playing basketball in the middle of a workday—a subtle signification of
Black men, again, abdicating their familial and communal responsibilities. These minor
forms of mischief escalated throughout the film as the boy’s deviance encompassed:
drinking in dark alleys, gambling with gangsters, riding in stolen cars, sexual promiscu-
ity, and befriending a pimp. Though never seen or spoken of, the film showed dis-
orderly matrifocal scenes of both boys’ homes. Cochise’s mother was shown eating a
meal she prepared for her nephew whom she just bailed out of jail. Meanwhile,
Cochise’s little brother wanders across the room in a diaper absent from his mother’s
attention and throws a letter in the toilet which held his brother’s basketball scholarship
offer to Grambling University. Similarly, in To Sir, With Love II, Mr. Thackery visited
the home of a student with an arrest record and gang affiliation. The trope becomes
complete when a single Black woman opened the door and reaffirmed the notion that
she was unable to control her Black son’s due to their absent father. The second way
the causal trope between absent fathers and endangered boys was affirmed even when
they were not present on-screen was through narration.
In Lean on Me, House Party II, To Sir, With Love, and Major Payne, scripted narra-
tives emphasized the intersection between Black boys’ risky behaviors within school and
the absence or powerlessness of Black fathers. Scripted dialogue, then, served as the
second way in which these absent and powerless Black fathers were mapped onto the
screen when physically absent. Early in Lean on Me, for example, Principal Joe Clark
expelled numerous students deemed the most incorrigible and deviant. One of the
expelled was Thomas Sams—a Black boy who was suspended for smoking crack and
skipping school. When Sams arrived early before school the next day to plead his case,
Mr. Clark asked if he told his father that he was expelled. Whimpering with tears roll-
ing down his eyes, Sams said, “no sir … My father doesn’t live with us anymore … I
can’t go home and tell my mom I got kicked out of school.” House Party II similarly
utilized scripted narratives to insert invisible Black fathers into storylines to explain the
endangered status of Black boys. The beginning of the film revealed that the father of
the main character, a soon-to-be college freshman named Kid, passed away leaving his
son to be an orphan. Without the presence of his father’s strict discipline shown in the
original House Party, which seemingly kept him away from sexual and criminal
466 THOMAS ET AL.

deviance, Kid is now susceptible to the cadre of compulsive masculine behaviors dis-
played by his friends Play and Bilal.
Finally, Higher Learning is demonstrative of the unspoken but understood association
of invisible Black fathers to endangered boys. According to Brown (2011a), these com-
mon-sense conceptual narratives of absent and wandering Black fathers “implicitly guide
all explanations for why African American males are not doing well in school and soci-
ety” (p. 2071). Thus, films showing Black boys in crisis do not have to explicitly narrate
the Black fathers causal role; instead, it already exists as the naturally scripted dominant
hegemonic position. In Higher Learning the main character was Malik—a first-year
track student-athlete at a predominantly White university who struggles with his aca-
demics. While unstated, it is understood that Malik came from an inner-city context,
and he never calls home nor does anyone call him. Malik is completely alone, leaving
the only visible Black man—Dr. Phipps—as his guide. In keeping with the notion of
public pedagogy, absent Black fathers established the narrative for viewers to make
sense of Black boys’ crises in schools vis-a-vis their redeemers—Black male teachers.
This struggle over culture is reflective of how “notions of difference, civic responsibility,
community, and belonging are produced in specific historical and institutional sites
within specific discursive formations and practices” (Giroux, 2000, p. 352). While ten
out of the eleven films constructed storylines around the production of endangered
Black boys due to absent fathers, our second thematic finding demonstrates how Black
male educators in these films were subsequently positioned within this ready-made
social science discourse.

(Un)natural saviors and motivators

With the exception of The Nutty Professor, where Professor Klump’s primary student
was an academically inclined White lab assistant, we found that all Black male educators
across the other ten films were constructed as a pedagogical kind as they were consist-
ently “enclosed within the pedagogical project of Black boy redemption” (Brown, 2012,
p. 311). By casting Black male educators as those who answered the call to stand-in for
absent fathers by taking their (un)natural place to govern unruly Black boys, the endur-
ing deficit conceptual narrative remained intact. In answering this call, we found a vari-
ation between the five films in which Black male educators were recruited into a role
that was initially unnatural and those who were naturally self-anointed to carry out the
task of Black boy redemption. In Major Payne, To Sir, with Love, Lean on Me, Hard
Lessons, and To Sir, with Love II, all the Black male teachers were purposefully and
solely recruited to serve in schools dominated by the proverbial bad boy, yet the pairing
was quite unnatural. In Major Payne, the self-proclaimed trainer of “20,432 combat kill-
ing machines” settled for an ROTC position at a military school. Similarly, To Sir, with
Love showed how Mr. Thackery, a British Guiana native with an engineering degree,
settled for a teaching position in London where he struggled to control unruly students
until he could obtain an engineering position. While initially quite out of place, the
Black male educators in these films were eventually shown to be naturals at their jobs
for being able to dispense discipline and command control of the unruliest of students.
In Lean on Me, Mr. Clark first appeared as a Black nationalist sporting a dashiki and
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 467

afro while engaged in antiracist pedagogy at a predominantly White school and later
emerged as the principal at another elementary school that was mostly White. While he
appeared at peace, pedagogically effective, and receiving merits worthy of advancement
in these spaces, he was framed as being out of place where he appeared quite natural.
Rather than working in these White spaces, the film showed how Mr. Clark was
recruited to serve where he was presumed to naturally belong—a predominantly Black
inner-city school rife with criminality and deviance.
Hard Lessons also reproduced this trope in a scene where Mr. McKenna was at his
parents’ middle-class, suburban home. McKenna’s dad told him to put on his jacket
and tie so they could go for a walk and said, “You could have been a doctor like your
brothers, or a lawyer, engineer. Anything you wanted to. You decided to be a teacher.”
In taking his place to govern unruly Black boys, Mr. Mckenna, like the previously men-
tioned characters answering the call, developed in such a way that he shifted from hav-
ing an initial presence that was unfamiliar, forced, and unnatural to one that was so
natural one could not imagine the school without their presence. The ways in which
these Black male teachers were forced into their essentialized roles was reflective of
what Hall (1997) referred to as the limitations of the “governing of culture.” In this
sense, the films reflected a “struggle over the control, regulation, and distribution of
resources that mediate the range of capacities and possibilities that enable individuals
and social groups to choose, inhabit, and transform particular notions of identity,
desire, and agency” (Giroux, 2000, p. 352). These films put Black men back in their
place when they sought to exist beyond the “governing culture” of the pedagogical kind
(Hall, 1997). Alternatively, Cooley High, Menace II Society, House Party II, Higher
Learning, and One Eight Seven all showed self-anointed Black male educators who nat-
urally took up the call to grapple with unruly boys under their own volition.

Saviors from death and deviance

Upon taking their place in the void created by absent Black fathers, the pedagogical
project to redeem Black boys was germane to the specificity of their endangerment or
crisis. When Black boys exhibited traits that social scientists deemed as self-destructive
or compensatory behaviors to buffer their damaged psyches (Brown, 2011a), Black male
educators were constructed as engaging in the project of saving Black boys from death
and deviance. Hard Lessons and To Sir, with Love II showed how Black male educators
attempted to save Black boys from gang-related deaths. In the former case, Mr.
Mckenna expended most of his efforts to keep Kelly and EJ—two members of the same
gang—from dying. Kelly was eventually murdered, and EJ became imprisoned after
avenging his friend’s death. Alternatively, Mr. Thackery had better luck saving a gang-
affiliated student, Wilsie, from an early death as seen in To Sir, with Love II. Mr.
Thackery thwarted Wilsie’s attempt to sneak a gun into school and convinced the young
man to turn it over, promising not to notify security about what happened. When
Wilsie later found himself outnumbered in a shootout with a rival gang, he was sur-
prised that Mr. Thackery arrived to save him from dying. Once the rival gang saw Mr.
Thackery walking toward them, they suspected that they were being set up and fled. In
addition to saving Black boys from death, Black male educators were seen saving Black
468 THOMAS ET AL.

boys from jail and drugs as seen in Cooley High and Lean on Me, respectively. In the
former film, Mr. Mason bargained with a detective to get his students, Preach and
Cochise, released from jail after being arrested during his history class for grand theft
auto. In the latter film, Mr. Clark explained to Sams that smoking crack is equivalent to
killing himself and implored the boy to commit suicide by jumping from the roof of
the school rather than slowly delaying the inevitable. This, however, was done as a scare
tactic to get the self-destructive boy to stop using the deadly drug.
Finally, Higher Learning and Menace II Society offered examples of Black male educa-
tors who were deft at providing self-destructive Black boys with survival tactics to avoid
death. A scene from Menace II Society showed Caine and Sharif in the classroom of
Sharif’s father, Mr. Butler, who was encouraging both of the boys to relocate to another
state so they would not die in their current neighborhood. Toward the close of this
scene, Mr. Butler pointedly said, “Being a Black man in America isn’t easy. The hunt is
on, and you’re the prey! All I’m saying is survive!” Both boys never had the chance to
heed Mr. Butler’s advice as they were both murdered in broad daylight by a drive-by
shooting. When Black boys were framed as self-destructive with risky compensatory
behaviors, Black male teachers engaged in the pedagogical project to save them from
death and deviance. This trope is reflective of how the discourse of public pedagogy is
bound to particular historical processes that shape their production. As Giroux (2000)
notes, “[C]ertain meanings under particular historical conditions become more legitim-
ate as representations of reality and take on the force of common-sense assumptions”
(p. 335). Here, viewers learned that the natural state and primary utility of Black teach-
ers was located within their innate or adaptive ability to rescue endangered Black boys
from death or deviance. However, these tactics changed when the specificity of Black
boys’ endangerment was presented differently.

Motivating the lazy and irresponsible

When Black boys were not shown as self-destructive and in need of being saved from
death and deviance, they were portrayed as lazy and irresponsible school avoiders who
only needed to be motivated. Ten of the eleven films analyzed portrayed Black male
educators as mere motivators who were able to magically inspire Black boys. The inter-
action between Professor Phipps and Malik Williams in Higher Learning exemplified
this trope. When Malik called his professor an Uncle Tom while complaining about the
low grade and grammatical critiques he received on a paper, Dr. Phipps said:
So, Mr. Williams thinks I am an Uncle Tom. What does that have to do with your ability
to put a comma in the proper place, or a period at the end of a sentence. You must rid
yourself of this attitude that the world owes you something … It breeds laziness. It is
laziness that has kept Black people down in this country.
Professor Phipps continued to draw on notions of meritocracy and rugged individual-
ism by metaphorically relating to Malik’s student-athlete status. As Malik complained
about additional pressure he faced as a Black male student-athlete, Professor Phipps
asked him what he would do if he were to race against another track athlete who was
bigger and faster. When Malik simply responds, “run faster” (i.e., work harder), he was
magically imbued with a sense of rugged individualism and self-help as demonstrated
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 469

by scenes showing him pouring over textbooks late at night. In Major Payne, one of the
Black boys—Deak—also wrongly assumed that Major Payne was there to provide an
experience absent of scholastic rigor because he, too, was Black. When Deak referred to
him as “brotha,” Major Payne screamed, “I am not your damn brotha!” and proceeded
to make him work harder through physical activity. The ability to motivate lazy, disen-
gaged cool posers was also seen in House Party II where Professor Sinclair tried to root
out the laziness demonstrated by Kid’s reluctance to do any of the class readings. Fed
up with his behavior, Dr. Sinclair required Kid to write an extra paper on how Ralph
Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin took up the theme of growing up as Black
men in America. Before departing, Dr. Sinclair said, “It might not be fair that you’ve
got to prove that you’re here because you’ve earned it, but you do. If you don’t prove it
to me, Mr. Robinson, I’ll fail your ass.” In addition to these Black male educators using
metaphoric notions of meritocracy, high-stakes rigor, or emotional appeal to motivate,
they also emphasized personal responsibility to express the same message.
In a scene from To Sir, with Love II, Mr. Thackeray took his class to downtown
Chicago and had his Black and White students explore how White people saw them in
public. Mr. Thackery trained a Black boy by having him pull up his pants, remove his
hat, and stand up straight before cautiously approaching a White woman with a smile
while using “excuse me, ma’am” in his initial greeting. When the students return to the
classroom the next day, Mr. Thackeray stresses that Black youth are solely responsible
for how they are perceived. Similarly, Mr. Clark tried to motivate students to be more
responsible about their physical appearance to garner more respect in society. During a
cafeteria scene, Mr. Clark brings Sams to the center to upbraid his sloven appearance
and announces that “self-respect permeates every aspect of your lives, [and] if you don’t
have it for yourself, then you’re not going to get it from anywhere.” Hall (1997) cau-
tions against the treatment of cultural texts, such as film, as a pure element of public
pedagogy. To do so is to “ignore how representations are linked to wider social forms,
power, and public struggles” (p. 355). Through these films, viewers see what is pre-
sented as a purely normal, commonsense representation—inspirational Black male
teachers and lazy or irresponsible Black boys. Rather than creating a space to mediate
stereotypical portrayals, the film presents viewers with the same old recursive tropes
of pathology.

Discussion
This research set out to understand how Black male teachers are represented in
Hollywood films. Black male teachers are a significant topic of debate not simply
because they are the majority protagonists in these films, but because of the larger
implications of Black male identity in the U.S. Given the enduring conceptual narratives
applied to Black males in general, we sought to explicate how social science and educa-
tional discourses were reproduced in film. Our study demonstrates a connection
between social science conceptual narratives from the 1930s to the present-day that enc-
loses Black male educators within pathological tropes. Our data suggests that Black men
performing as educators on film remain constrained by an “absent,” “powerless,” or
470 THOMAS ET AL.

“endangered” tropes, therefore limiting the expectations of pedagogical capabilities of

Black male teachers.
This research aims to strengthen the connection between critical public pedagogy the-
orization and socioculturally situated teaching and learning. This analysis aligns with
critical public pedagogy’s assertions that informal sites such as film can affirm problem-
atic stereotypes and take up meanings associated with characters, plots, and settings.
Our analysis also aligns with patterns featured throughout conformity literature such as
role entrapment (Kelly, 2007) and Ladson-Billings’ (2011) claim that the major goal of
Black male education is preserving order and discipline instead of academic perform-
ance and learning success was pervasive among Hollywood films. Lost within these films
are the pedagogical, curricular, and content-specific knowledge of Black male teachers.
Ferguson (2003) asserts that this “institutional narrative” is a prevailing ideology por-
traying Black males as the worst behaved students in school in need of a
Black Superman.
Black male teachers’ redemption projects were almost exclusively tethered to Black
boys. Even when films included White (To Sir, with Love, Major Payne) or Latino (One
Eight Seven) boys, the students remained scripted as endangered or unmotivated due to
absent fathers. This points to a problematic expanded application of recursive concep-
tual narratives (Brown, 2011a) relative to how society imagines the role of Black male
teachers (Brown, 2012). That is, these men are not only scripted as those best suited to
redeem endangered Black boys, but they are also presented as the best suited role mod-
els for fatherless, endangered students of all racial and ethnic groups. This leads us to
extend the thinking of Ellsworth (2005) to view education within popular culture as not
merely a process but a way to develop and reinscribe a product for consumption.
Critical public pedagogy also identifies spaces of resistance in popular culture that
contests common-sense assumptions tied to public imagery (Zorrilla & Tisdell, 2016).
The expression of Black manhood that does not fit neatly into predetermined gendered
scripts is frequently suppressed in films and schools. Given the impact of cinema on
educational techniques, attitudes, and expectations, we must seek to disentangle school
environments from conventions that depend on and support Black male educator ster-
eotypes. This involves empowering educational stakeholders to engage in the task of
critically examining how films operate as social practices that impact people’s daily lives
and orient them within existing social, cultural, and institutional power structures
(Giroux, 2008). We encourage further research to exemplify the proficiency and skills of
Black male teachers rather than anchoring their sole existence within enduring def-
icit tropes.
In these films, more attention is given to Black male teachers’ determination than to
why the social milieu that these men and students are situated within exists at all. We
assert that an increased focus on institutional racism, systemic discrepancies, and
accounts of normalized achievement within these films would grant clarity and context
to the social and educational position of Black male teachers. As Hall (2009) suggests,
doing so can foster novel interpretive practices regarding Black manhood that shift us
from canonical preconceptions to nuanced (de)scripts for Black men. The depictions
presented via these films are not only problematic for Black male teachers but for Black
men in general. To this point, Guerrero (1995) states, “What is missing from
 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 471

Hollywood’s flat, binary construction of black manhood is the intellectual, cultural, and
political depth and humanity of black men [ … ] (p. 397).” Black men and boys become
ontologically sealed within these depictions of contempt and pity (Scott, 1997) to the
point that academics, film producers, and the entire schooling apparatus cannot imagine
their existence beyond the stifling limitations of these tropes.

ORCID
Daniel Thomas http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7332-4776
Marcus Johnson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3741-6312

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