Dr. Darius Prier wants aspiring teachers to think about how negative images of Black males in the media might influence the way they interact act with young Black males in the classroom.
It’s a mission that he is seeking to accomplish in his capacity as an associate professor of education at Duquesne University, where Prier teaches courses including “Social Justice in Educational Settings” and “Ethics, Education, and the Teaching Profession.”
And it’s work that is aided by a new book by Prier, titled “The Media War on Black Male Youth in Urban Education,” published earlier this year by Routledge Research in Educational Equality and Diversity.
The way Prier sees it, the onslaught of criminalized images of Black men — from the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation” that portrayed Black men as villains and violent rapists, to the “gangsta” narratives of contemporary rap music and the disproportionate news reportage on Black perpetrators of crime — all conspire to induce a punitive approach toward Black male students in America’s schools.
The situation can be exacerbated if newly minted teachers have only had limited experience in the African-American communities in which they’ve been assigned to teach, Prier argues.
“That creates antagonism between teachers and students,” Prier said. “When they have not lived around, played with, interacted with Black students, they then unconsciously or subconsciously act on mental schemas and familiar stereotypes, so they perceive a young man coming into the classroom — sagging pants, hoodie over his head — that to them signals the videos that they saw on television all their life.”
In America’s streets, such preconceived notions can have fatal consequences when it comes to interactions with law enforcement. Prier recounts a several emblematic cases from the past few years — from Trayvon Martin to Tamir Rice — to illustrate and underscore that point.
