Press & Reviews
February 2020: Review by Carla Shedd in Contemporary Sociology: “Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools gives us remarkable insight into the identity-based institutional enclave of two all-black boys’ public schools showing us the organizational structures (e.g., neoliberalism) and representational strategies (e.g., respectability, racial uplift, nontoxic masculinity) imposed on young men at the precipice of them moving onward to college or being tracked onto a carceral continuum.”
December 2019: Review by A. Ponce de Leon in CHOICE: “This volume is well written and highly persuasive, making it an important contribution to the fields of sociology and education… Recommended.”
November 2019: Review by L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy in American Journal of Sociology: “Black Boys Apart is a unique and valuable contribution to the sociology of education literature. Freeden Blume Oeur’s book is a pastiche, bringing together literatures that span sociology, education, feminist studies, and ethnic studies… While the fields of education and policy analysis have examined the successes and failures of these institutions, these studies rarely tackle the intersection of economics and gender. Blume Oeur is particularly interested in understanding how the neoliberal turn has impacted the ways schools address the “crisis” among black boys.”
August 2019: Review by Michael Davis in Anthropology & Education Quarterly: “Ultimately, Black Boys Apart rightfully critiques “Black” “male” academies and provides a complex picture of the schools, school actors, students, and their communities. Oeur also leaves space for an educational imagination in which all Black students and their communities can strive to dismantle the systems that harm them. This book is relevant to any person, scholar, researcher, activist, and/or organizer who is thinking through how to address Black education with genuine love, care, and radical/liberatory action.”
August 2019: Review by Carson Byrd in Teachers College Record: “Black Boys Apart challenges us to think deeply about the nuanced ways race, gender, and sexuality interrelate and shape the daily operations of schools and our approaches to address issues within them. People may sit uncomfortably and uneasily with Oeur’s volume because it necessarily recognizes this complexity in a world transfixed on narrow, quick, and cheap fixes for persistent social problems.”
February 2019: Review by Emily Pingel in Teaching Sociology: “In Black Boys Apart, Blume Oeur achieves a difficult task by contextualizing a localized institutional phenomenon within an explanatory political economic framework. The result is a neatly layered account that cautions us to thoroughly examine well-intentioned responses to deeply entrenched structural inequalities.”
February 2019: Review by Brandon Jackson in Men and Masculinities: “In the end, however, Oeur shows that this exercise in respectability politics does little to hinder white supremacy and the structural issues disadvantaging black and low-income students more broadly. Instead of encouraging a few select young men to be the “Talented Tenth” in their communities and the global economy, Oeur argues that schools and communities should move toward a more holistic approach where these men, along with community leaders, move toward promoting a “guiding hundredth” fighting for an abolition democracy.”
February 2019: Review by Rachel Campbell in Gender & Society: “By focusing on all-male schools, Black Boys Apart provides exceptional insight into how the education system controls black masculinity and the need for an overhaul of our education system that breaks with neoliberalism.”
January 2019: Review by Nadrea Njoku in Black Perspectives: “In A Classroom Of Their Own and Black Boys Apart confront issues of power and domination within Black all-male education with care and reverence to Black intellectual history. Ultimately, each turn toward theories of possibility that refuse to erase Black girls and, thus, fight for the fullest humanity of Black boys.”
January 2019: “Is Separate Education Better?” Interview with Taylor McNeil of Tufts Now.
December 2018: Review by Steve Song in Ethnic and Racial Studies: “Black Boys Apart is a notable work in the field of sociology of education, a must-read for those interested in the intersection of race, gender, and school choice.”
October 2018: Chill Magazine: “The book brilliantly illustrates the surprising success of this holistic method of education, which mixes democratic empowerment, strict discipline — and intentional racial segregation and sex separation — with a warm, loving environment of Black brotherhood. His articulate analysis calls on us to rethink Black masculinity and imagines a humane alternative to how many Black boys are currently educated in America’s overly-policed school-to-incarceration pipeline.”
September 2018: Audio interview with Sarah Patterson of the New Books Network: “This book would be a great addition to any higher level undergraduate or graduate level Sociology of Education or Sociology of Race course. Anyone involved in educational systems, from primary school to higher education, should also read this book.”
September 2018: The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Weekly Book List: “Links neoliberalism and the “politics of respectability” in a critique of single-sex education for black boys; draws on an ethnographic study of two all-male academies in a large East Coast city, one a combined public middle and high school and one a charter high school.”
August 2018: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education’s “Recent Books of Interest to African American Scholars.”