Maria J. Garcia

Commentary for 5-5-09: Ferguson

Ann Ferguson’s ethnographic research as participating observer highlights the stigmatization of Black males at Rosa Parks Elementary School.  Ferguson details her observations over three years of field work at the school, where, she claims, African American males were “tracked” for prisons” (2).  Ferguson explores the question, “what does it mean to hear adults say that you are bound for jail and to understand that the future predicted for you is ‘doing time’ inside prison walls” (3)?  In response, she offers that “trouble is not only a site of regulation and stigmatization” and that “under certain conditions, it can also be a powerful occasion for identification and recognition” (2). 

Ferguson details her experience as a member of an evaluation team for a new intervention program for children diagnosed as “at-risk” of failing at Rosa Parks Elementary School. She offers her formula for conducting her fieldwork: “a combination of participant observation at the school and a wide range of interviews and conversations with kids and adults” (7).

Ferguson expresses disgust at seeing what appear to be classes that are “de facto segregated as the result of an elaborate tracking system” (5).  She explains that the most important part of her research as the time she spent with 20 fifth and sixth grade African American boys.  She divided them into two groups, labeling them Schoolboys and Troublemakers.  She tried to identify how these two groups were different.  She investigates the neighborhoods they lived in, their socioeconomic status, and the composition of their households.  She learns that, while the same boys could be troublemakers at school, they could also lead very different lives at home and in their community.  One example of how these children could be “conforming, obedient, and deeply focused in other contexts in school and out” was Horace, who became Ferguson’s research assistant.  Ferguson notes that “traumatic and emotionally disturbing events outside of school directly contributed to children’s anger and troubling behavior in school” (21).  Additionally, she notes how “unwilling our society is to deal with issues of race as a real, divisive, social problem” (21). 

Ferguson concludes with an admonition to the reader: “…should more consciously participate in the critical work of interpretation” (23).  I offer the same advice, “Don’t believe the hype.”  Don’t be guilty of “profiling” the kids you see in the schools or on the streets.  Each child should be given the chance to succeed without the mark of failure being stamped on their foreheads by the very adults who are given the sacred task of “educating” them.