We have to learn to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves: Black teenagers, urban schools, writing and the politics of representation.

Abstract

This dissertation is a collection and exploration of the journal writings of a group of black urban high school students in Boston, Massachusetts who attended the Jeremiah Burke High School. These students created a history of post-busing, post-manufacturing Boston through their journals--a history significant for how it changes understandings of life in Boston and how their writing of the story allows them power not only over how they are represented but how they are understood. Using their journals as well as Census materials, school records, newspaper and television accounts, histories of Boston and the Boston Public Schools, educational articles, historical and sociological work on urban issues, other ethnographies, and my own observations and conversations as their teacher, this dissertation looks the perspectives and stories of a group of urban Black teenagers focusing in particular on how they write about education, race, family, sexuality, fun and violence. It seeks to challenge prevalent ideas of black urban youth as pathological, victimized, or criminal and show these young people as engaged and thoughtful social actors. It locates their writings within the larger history of post-war Boston and the particular realities of the Jeremiah Burke High School. The political, economic, social and educational realities of Boston have helped discount and disenfranchise black urban young people bestowing upon them a second-class citizenship by virtue of their race, class, and location. Such realities inform their writing. This dissertation's purposes are two-fold: to challenge ideas that life for urban teenagers is all horror, pathology, or despair and show instead how it is filled with joy, humor, and meaning. It is also to demonstrate that these students have confronted and continue to face significant hardships which have tremendous emotional and material consequences in their lives. Most importantly, then, it is to create an understanding of the perspectives of a group of young people that is more recognizable to their thoughts and experiences than studies that have gone before.