This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of a group of 11-to 14-year-old black males who called themselves "the cool kids." The study is framed using theories that view literacy as a social and cultural practice involving multiple sign-and-symbol systems. Two research questions guided the study: How did coolness relate to literacy among "the cool kids," and what symbolic patterns helped to shape these relations? The findings describe how race, gender, and pop culture marked the group's use of language and style and reveal how coolness, as a pop-cultural artifact of black manhood, contributed to the literacy practices of the young men and to the construction of their symbolic selves. These findings contribute to building a theory of black masculine literacies. F or the young men in the "My Brother's Keeper" (MBK) Program, playing with language and style seemed central to literacy practice. Even their body was a tablet that rendered the self textually, allowing powerful forms of composing to be accomplished and shared. Regularly, we observed the young men of MBK-who, by school accounts, were thought to be barely literate in the narrow, print-based sense of the term-operate within multiple symbolic systems to define themselves and shape what they saw as "cool." They made literate decisions, indeed, scribing identity texts in unstable social situations, for example, in the events of dress and speech. The texts that defined these events-and we include here "cool" vernacular and apparel in addition to traditional print and other multimodal semiotic forms (Hull & Nelson, 2005), such as songs, films, etc.-were circulated, shared, and picked up by the young men in sophisticated ways. The texts they produced were also symbolic, offering a narrative of who these young men were and wanted to be.As we sought to locate meaning in their texts, this study took shape around a particular set of literacy practices firmly rooted within black masculine and popcultural models. Although a growing body of literacy research on urban youth has seemed to harden literacy into a performance of race and gender, we have resisted this impulse. Instead, we present the constructs of race (blackness) and gender (masculinity) merely to present a telling case (Mitchell, 1984). What follows is an examination of literacy revealed through the language and style of 11-to 14-year-old black boys.The initial purpose of the study was to examine the critical literacy practices of the young men of MBK. As we became more familiar with the young men, we became more aware of the social ecology of the group. Important to us was understanding how the literacy practices of seven of its members, "the cool kids" (the phrase "the cool kids" is actual language taken from one of the students in the program), had lifted literacy off the page. As two young black men ourselves, the literacy practices of these young men were both unique and familiar. However, we experienced difficulty finding theories of literacy that acknowledged t...
