What role does a child’s sex have in determining how well he or she will do in school? How do gender and race intersect to influence our lives? Are men happier than women? It seems obvious that sex and race affect what happens to us in life but how exactly and how much? Indeed, why?
Of course, these are not new questions. For decades, it seems that an endless parade of books focused on how girls might be disadvantaged in our schools, why they disliked their own bodies and how society robbed them of their self-esteem. All of this constituted a useful exercise and many women have benefi tted from the interventions these books inspired.
At the same time, a few notable African- American authors gave serious attention to why Black boys were at risk for everything: failing in school, choosing less-than-optimal lifestyles, going to jail, fathering children out of wedlock and dying at alarming rates. Some young men have been the benefi ciaries of interventions inspired by these books as well.
Still, we do not know all the answers about the eff ects of gender and race on our lives, but new writers are adding their voices and research muscle to the equation.
Among other things, they remind us that Black girls and White boys have their struggles, too. Perhaps the most provocative and useful new book in this fi eld is Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System Th at’s Leaving Them Behind, by Richard Whitmire ($24.95, AMACOM; January 2010, ISBN-10: 0814415342, ISBN-13: 978- 0814415344, pp. 256.). Whitmire, an education blogger and former editorial writer for USA Today, wondered why boys increasingly were falling behind girls all the way up the education ladder.
Little boys start out at a disadvantage, the author notes, because they trail behind girls in developing the skill set needed to achieve literacy. Now, that distance just keeps widening in a system more geared to and rewarding of female strengths. Boys increasingly present disciplinary problems, have worse grades, score lower on tests, drop out, and avoid college and graduate college at dramatically lower rates than young women. The author warns that hardly anyone is doing anything about the phenomenon, and he looks at approaches that might help.
For urban African-American youth, another book underscores the even grimmer reality that their greatest challenge might be just staying alive.
