The racial crisis in American schooling has been simmering since the introduction of public schools, exacerbated by the entrenchment of Jim Crow legislation, and scarcely affected by the Supreme Court’s 1954 call for integration with all deliberate speed. In this important book, Keisha Lindsay provides a cogent diagnosis of contemporary problems in K–12 education, analyzes a potent misdiagnosis of those problems, excavates the worldview of the architects of that misdiagnosis, links their wrong-headed approach to the epistemic and normative limitations of popular understandings of intersectionality, and advances a thoughtful prescription to redress the systemic racism that has haunted the educational system for centuries. Along the way, Lindsay meticulously documents systemic inequities in contemporary schools, including persistent segregation; underfunding of Black-majority schools; disparate suspension, expulsion, and graduation rates for students of color; underrepresentation of Blacks as teachers and administrators, excessive assignment of Black boys to special education classes, a racial achievement gap, and the prevalence of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Lindsay examines the All-Black Male Schools (ABMS) movement, which emerged to remedy these pernicious inequities. Proclaiming a “male crisis in education,” ABMS proponents link these problems to “overly-feminized classrooms,” where “black boys are poisoned by white female teachers from the suburbs” who “break the black male’s spirit, psychologically emasculate him, so that he simply acquiesces into the oppression that the society has in store for him” (pp. 66–67). Appealing to “brain science,” ABMS advocates allege that “feminized classrooms put boys at neurological disadvantage” (p. 30). The crisis is deepened because Black boys are being raised in women-headed households, and they are further endangered because they are surpassed in school and in the labor force by Black girls. To address these issues, ABMS proponents endorse neoliberal reforms such as establishing charter schools, dissolving teachers’ unions, and implementing school-choice vouchers to “liberate educators as well as students from bureaucratic burdens and inefficiencies—racist and otherwise—of traditional public schools” (p. 47), thereby enabling the creation of curriculum designed to meet Black boys’ needs, as well as the recruitment of male teachers who will teach responsibility along with marketable skills.

Lindsay demonstrates how claims grounded in ABMS proponents’ own experiences of racism, classism, and gender bias in schools, coupled with the belief that experiences of oppression afford unquestionable truth, culminates in these advocates’ arrival at such deeply problematic conclusions. Insisting that “disadvantaged black males have a distinct perspective on the world—one that allows them to understand reality not only from their own perspective but also from the flawed perspective of those who disadvantage them” (p. 83), ABMS activists conclude that “black boys know what it is like to be unfairly disadvantaged in classrooms that are inimical to their needs and they understand their teachers’ antithetical view of them as sub-humans who are socially and intellectually unworthy of care and attention” (p. 84). Assuming that the lessons of experience are unequivocal, ABMS supporters assert that contemporary schooling is a form of “mis-education that teaches the black male child to hate himself and to love white culture” with debilitating consequences (p. 86).

Challenging the belief that knowledge is immediately given, Lindsay advances a dialectical account of the role of dominant values in shaping the perception of experience. She shows how neoliberalism creates potent contradictions in the lives of African Americans. Promised equal opportunity, color-blind legal processes, and public education as a route to upward mobility, Blacks instead experience racist policies, collective dispossession, and classrooms that police and punish rather than cultivating individual talent. These lived contradictions contribute to mistaken understandings of the causes of Black immiseration. Structured by neoliberal presumptions, racism is individualized and psychologized. ABMS proponents attribute the miseducation of Black youth to individual intentions (racist, feminized teachers). Given that diagnosis, they propose a remedy that is also individualized: antiracist, male, Afrocentric teachers. But the individualism fostered by neoliberal premises masks structural issues such as the disinvestment in public education, privatization through charter schools and voucher programs, racial segregation and class-based segregation of schools, spatial containment in inner cities, and the targeted disaccumulation of community resources that affect all Black children. Mistaken notions about the immediate grasp of knowledge derived from oppressive experience lead social justice activists seriously astray.

In a bold intervention into debates about the theoretical and methodological merits of intersectionality, Lindsay points out that ABMS advocates adhere closely to the precepts of intersectional analysis, articulating the mutual constitution of racial and gender oppression in the experiences of Black boys and men. But in contrast to Black feminist theorizations of intersectionality, which conceive the approach to be inherently progressive and operating as a mechanism of liberation, Lindsay emphasizes that, in the hands of ABMS supporters, intersectionality is used for non-emancipatory ends. Combining assumptions about Black masculinity that are sexist, heterosexist, and cisgendered, ABMS proponents advocate policies that are misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic and that operate to the detriment of Black girls, as well as gender-fluid and nonbinary students.

Lindsay reframes intersectionality as a heuristic that is compatible with diverse political arguments and policy proposals. “While intersectional analysis highlights how racial, gendered and other spheres of difference are co-constitutive, intersectionality’s underlying logic does not prescribe which spheres are mutually constructing, who experiences oppression in the process, or how to relieve their oppression. Instead these are context-specific political decisions that are made by people” (p. 53). As a consequence, “intersectionality can illuminate, at the same time that it obscures, inequalities among black women, black men, and other social groups…. While intersectionality is always political, its potential to foster more rather than less policing of social groups’ real and imagined boundaries means that its politics are not always emancipatory” (p. 78).

Abandoning faith in the transparency of experience and acknowledging that experiential claims can both challenge and reinscribe hierarchies of power can prepare both activists and analysts to wrestle with the “messiness” of such claims in the context of public policy (p. 14). Lindsay analyzes a sustained debate about African American Immersion Schools that brought together leading ABMS advocates, feminist activists, government officials, educators, and parents in the early 1990s to show how an intensive exchange of opposing views pressed participants to interrogate contentious assumptions and political demands. Some ABMS supporters came to see that “despite the merits of their critique of racism in the classroom, they erroneously assumed that racially oppressed black males are incapable of perpetuating oppression, including gender-based oppression against black girls and women” (p. 116).

Envisioning public schools as a site in which to negotiate the requirements for emancipatory education, Lindsay endorses a procedural mechanism to identify innovative approaches to mitigate social, political, and material harm to students. She makes a compelling case for reinvestment in public schools both to foster Black students’ capacity for self-determination and to secure the future of democracy.

Addressing the “complex politics that scholars, policy makers, educators, and parents face…as they try to determine what equitable schooling looks like in the nation’s classrooms” (p. 4), Lindsay models a different kind of social science—theoretically sophisticated and attuned to the politics of perception, the socially mediated ground of empirical observation, and the resulting complexities for knowledge production and policy prescription. This thought-provoking approach raises timely challenges for a discipline in the throes of “transparency” standards.