The academic achievement gap, particularly the mathematics achievement gap, between Black students and their White counterparts has been well documented with numerical facts. As mathematics education researchers attempt to develop theories and practices that assist in eradicating the gap, they would serve mathematics education well if they would expand the sphere of their research into the sociocultural arena. To assist in expanding the sphere, this article presents a review of key historical and current theoretical perspectives regarding the schooling experiences of African American students, with an emphasis on African American male students, borrowed from the disciplines of anthropology, social psychology, and sociology. The review is organized around three discourse clusters: the discourse of deficiency, the discourse of rejection, and the discourse of achievement. The author suggests that researchers move away from the discourses of deficiency and rejection and toward the discourse of achievement when developing sound education theories and classroom practices that assist in eradicating the academic (and mathematics) achievement gap.

This study documents the counterstories of four academically (and mathematically) successful African American male students. Using participative inquiry, the participants were asked to read, reflect on, and respond to historical and current research literature regarding the schooling experiences of African American students. Their responses were analyzed using a somewhat eclectic theoretical framework that included poststructural theory, critical race theory, and critical theory. Collectively, the participants’ counterstories revealed that each had acquired a robust mathematics identity as a component of his overall efforts toward success. How the participants acquired such “uncharacteristic” mathematics identities was to be found in part in how they understood sociocultural discourses of U.S. society and how they negotiated the specific discourses that surround male African Americans. Present throughout the counterstories of each participant was a recognition of himself as a discursive formation who could negotiate sociocultural discourses as a means to subversively repeat his constituted “raced” self.

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This article shows how equity research in mathematics education can be decentered by reporting the “voices” of mathematically successful African American male students as they recount their experiences with school mathematics, illustrating, in essence, how they negotiated the White male math myth. Using post-structural theory, the concepts discourse, person/identity, and power/agency are reinscribed or redefined. The article also shows that using a post-structural reinscription of these concepts, a more complex analysis of the multiplicitous and fragmented robust mathematics identities of African American male students is possible—an analysis that refutes simple explanations of effort. The article concludes, not with “answers,” but with questions to facilitate dialogue among those who are interested in the mathematics achievement and persistence of African American male students—and equity and justice in the mathematics classroom for all students.

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