Qualitative Description and Black Males: On Race, the Body, and Researching the Unimaginable

Abstract

In this article, I explore how race and the body are central to social and education research on Black males. The guiding question of this essay is, How has the Black male body been conceptualized over time through qualitative description? I argue that, as Black males entered into new systems of reasoning, the Black male body was examined in different ways. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s concept of subjective understanding and David Theo Goldberg’s concept of racial knowledge, I explore the temporal and spatial meaning of qualitative description in the context of African American males. I conclude this essay by arguing for a different approach to qualitative description of Black males that moves beyond recycled stories of deficits or counter-narratives and on to explore the unimaginable.