Stuart Rhoden, PhD
 Assistant Teaching Professor, University College Arizona State University |
I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.
This critical autoethnographic study examines how the systemic absence of Black male educators in predominantly White institutions (PWIs) impacts the identity development of both students and teachers. Drawing from 15 years of reflection and teaching artifacts, the study is grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy, abolitionist teaching, and Ewing’s theory of educational haunting. Hip-hop texts frame four themes: racial absence, cultural mismatch, teaching as resistance, and radical return. The concept of cultural trust is introduced as a framework for relational healing, calling for a shift from exclusionary schooling to affirming, justice-centered educational spaces.
Teacher Student Relationship; Sense of Belonging; School Culture; Culturally Relevant Education; African American Students
“I never liked school, and that’s no joke
They teach the wrong stuff, that’s why I broke…”
— Dead Prez, They Schools (2000b)“Most of y’all come out confused.”
— Arrested Development, Mr. Wendal (1992)
As an athlete, I played many sports growing up, but tennis was the one that captured my imagination. I remember watching Arthur Ashe win Wimbledon on a small black-and-white television, his steady poise contrasting Jimmy Connors’ fire. When my mother dropped me off at my aunt’s apartment while she taught college courses or tutored students, I would grab her wooden Maureen Connolly Wilson racquet and hit balls off the wall downstairs until neighbors complained. Occasionally, my aunt walked me to the courts a few blocks away, where we would hit informally.
It wasn’t until the summer when I was ten years old, when a new tennis club opened in my neighborhood, that I formally learned the game. Those courts became my world. They were predominantly Black spaces, places where I felt free to compete, struggle, and belong. Tennis taught me early that success was never just about skill; it was also shaped by assumptions, access, and who was expected to win.
By high school, I met the coach who would change my life. One of the few Black male teachers at the school, he believed in me long before I had language for what that belief meant. Only years later did I fully understand how he shielded me, the lone Black varsity player, from the racialized vitriol that surfaced on courts across the city.
Two decades later, in 2013, that belief resurfaced unexpectedly. Sitting in an Arizona coffee shop while finishing my dissertation acknowledgements, one name kept returning to me: my high school tennis coach. On impulse, I Googled him and sent him an email. His reply came within hours. He spoke of former players, of lives unfolding, and then wrote the words that stopped me cold:
I had a great time with you guys. You don’t know how many people doubted my choice of you for a top varsity position. But I trusted you all to do your best when your best was needed.
Even after all those years, he was still teaching me. What he offered, long before I had language for it, was cultural trust: a trust rooted not in institutional authority, but in shared experience, mutual recognition, and genuine belief.
This moment clarified a truth I had been circling for years. The educators who shaped me most were the ones who saw me culturally, not just academically. And those educators, especially Black men, were rare. Across my schooling, Black male teachers were nearly invisible. My experience was not exceptional; it reflected a systemic pattern documented across U.S. education.
Black male educators comprise less than 2% of the teaching workforce (Mitchell, 2016). Their absence matters not only for Black students, but for all students who benefit from seeing Black men positioned as intellectual authorities and cultural leaders (Dee, 2004; Gershenson et al., 2018). Hip-hop artists such as Dead Prez and Arrested Development have long articulated this disconnect, offering cultural critiques of schooling that miseducates, marginalizes, and alienates Black youth. The phrase they schools signals more than frustration; it names a structural distance between schools and the communities they claim to serve.
This manuscript uses autoethnography to examine how that distance is lived and navigated by one Black male educator working in predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Rather than treating narrative as anecdotal, autoethnography positions lived experience as a site of knowledge production, allowing theory to emerge from moments of recognition, withholding, and relational risk.
Drawing on my insights as both student and teacher, I introduce cultural trust as a framework that extends existing scholarship on culturally relevant pedagogy, institutional trust, reality pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching. Cultural trust names what is often missing in schools: assurance that students and educators do not have to fragment themselves to belong. Through critical autoethnography, this study explores how cultural trust is cultivated, withheld, and negotiated across classrooms and institutions and how it offers a pathway toward justice-centered educational practice.
As an autoethnographic study situated within the politics of schooling, this manuscript draws from multiple theoretical traditions that address culture, trust, and transformation in education. Specifically, it engages culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), institutional trust, reality pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching. Each framework offers important insights into how educators navigate inequitable schooling contexts; however, each also contains conceptual limitations when applied to predominantly White institutions (PWIs). This review synthesizes these traditions while introducing cultural trust as an integrative framework that addresses their gaps.
“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?
… Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.”
— Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete (1991)
Ladson-Billings (1995, 2009) introduced CRP to challenge deficit models that positioned students of color as culturally lacking. CRP reframed culture as an asset, arguing that effective teaching must promote academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. Subsequent scholars such as Gay (2010) and Howard (2012) expanded this work by demonstrating how culturally responsive practices affirm identity and challenge inequitable norms.
While CRP affirms culture as an educational asset (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2009), critics caution that it is often reduced to symbolic inclusion without structural transformation (Young, 2010). For Black male educators, this limitation is especially acute, as they are frequently positioned as disciplinarians or role models rather than intellectual leaders (Davis, 2003).
Paris and Alim’s (2014) articulation of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) extends CRP by insisting that schools must sustain, rather than merely acknowledge, the linguistic and cultural practices of communities of color. Still, both CRP and CSP often operate at the classroom level, leaving institutional structures largely intact. Cultural trust extends these frameworks by linking cultural affirmation to relational safety and institutional responsibility, insisting that belonging must be structural rather than episodic.
“A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind…
You’ll grow in the ghetto livin’ second-rate
And your eyes will sing a song called deep hate…”
— Grandmaster Flash, The Message (1982)
Bryk and Schneider’s (2002) groundbreaking study of Chicago schools introduced relational trust as a foundational condition for school improvement. They define relational trust as the quality of interpersonal relationships among educators, students, families, and administrators, grounded in respect, competence, personal regard, and integrity. Schools with strong relational trust, they argue, are more likely to sustain meaningful reform.
This framework has since been expanded to discussions of institutional trust, which refer to confidence not only in individuals but in the fairness, legitimacy, and consistency of schooling systems. Institutional trust is not evenly distributed; it is racialized and historically shaped, particularly for Black students and educators navigating PWIs (Harper, 2012; Ishimaru, 2014; Khalifa 2018).
Harper’s (2012) concept of onlyness, briefly defined as the experience of being the only (or one of a few) person(s) from a particular identity group in a given setting, further illustrates how Black students and educators in PWIs experience isolation that undermines trust. Ewing’s (2018, 2025) notion of educational haunting deepens this critique by showing that schools are not broken but function as designed to assimilate, discipline, and exclude. The disappearance of Black educators, in this context, is not accidental but symptomatic of institutional betrayal.
Cultural trust builds on these critiques by explicitly centering race, history, and cultural affirmation as prerequisites for trust-building. It reframes trust not as neutral goodwill but as a restorative practice shaped by collective memory and relational accountability.
“Yo, we gotta start respectin’ life more, y’all
You look at your brother, man, you gotta see yourself
Gotta see the God within him…”
— Common, Retrospect for Life (1997)
Emdin’s (2016) reality pedagogy advances a model of teaching rooted in co-construction, reciprocity, and deep listening. Through the “five Cs:” co-teaching, co-generating, cosmopolitanism, context, and content reality pedagogy positions students’ lived realities as central to learning rather than peripheral (Alim, 2011; Emdin, 2016).
Reality pedagogy validates students’ cultural knowledge as intellectual capital, but without institutional support, these practices often remain fragile and isolated (Emdin, 2016; Irby & Clark, 2018). Cultural trust extends reality pedagogy by embedding co-construction within a broader framework of relational safety. It insists that student voices must be institutionally protected, not dependent on individual educators’ willingness to take risks.
“Black rage is founded on draining and draining…
Black rage is founded on blocking the truth,
Murder and crime, Compromise and distortion…”
— Ms. Lauryn Hill, Black Rage (2012)
Love’s (2019) abolitionist teaching challenges educators to move beyond reform toward reimagining schools as spaces of joy, freedom, and justice. Rooted in Black ways of knowing, abolitionist teaching rejects systems that criminalize, surveil, and erase Black youth, calling instead for relational care and collective liberation.
As Ewing (2018) and Love (2019) argue, Black communities have long been on the receiving end of harmful school policies, including segregation, disproportionate discipline, and school closures. When schools fail to reflect the cultural and racial makeup of the communities they serve, especially in leadership and teaching roles, trust erodes (Khalifa, 2012).
Songs like They Schools by Dead Prez (2000b) and Brenda’s Got a Baby by Tupac Shakur (1991) articulate the kind of institutional betrayal Love critiques as schools that surveil rather than support and discipline rather than develop. Abolitionist teaching calls on educators to take these cultural critiques seriously, not as extracurricular perspectives but as intellectual texts that expose the gaps and ghosts of educational systems. Black male educators occupy a unique position in responding to this betrayal. Their visibility, cultural alignment, and community positioning often make them bridges between students, families, and schools (Brockenbrough, 2015). Yet without systemic support, they are frequently left to carry this emotional and relational labor alone or rather what Griffin (2018) terms the invisible tax of teaching while Black. Cultural trust operationalizes abolitionist teaching by grounding its liberatory vision in daily relational practice rather than aspirational rhetoric alone (Love, 2019).
As summarized in Table 1, each framework offers critical insight while leaving important gaps when applied in isolation. Cultural trust synthesizes these traditions into a racially conscious, historically grounded framework of recognition, affirmation, and care, positioning trust as a necessary condition for educational justice and orienting the autoethnographic findings that follow.
| Framework | Core Contribution | Common Critiques | How Cultural Trust Addresses the Critique |
|---|---|---|---|
| Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) | Centers students’ cultural identities in learning; connects curriculum to lived experiences | Often diluted into superficial “celebrations of diversity” without structural change; risks being reduced to multicultural “add-ons” | Cultural trust insists affirmation must be paired with relational safety and systemic critique, making cultural relevance more than symbolic. |
| Institutional Trust (Bryk & Schneider, 2002) | Demonstrates how trust among teachers, students, and families is central to school success | Race-neutral framing overlooks how racism, history, and culture shape trust; assumes neutrality in hostile institutions | Cultural trust extends institutional trust by making race, history, and cultural affirmation explicit, correcting neutrality and centering marginalized voices. |
| Reality Pedagogy (Emdin, 2016) | Positions students lived realities and voices as central to pedagogy; promotes co-construction of learning | Difficult to implement at scale; risks being appropriated as “edutainment” rather than systemic pedagogy | Cultural trust integrates reality pedagogy into a broader trust-building framework, ensuring student voice is honored without reducing pedagogy to novelty. |
| Abolitionist Teaching (Love, 2019) | Calls for dismantling anti-Black/deficit model schooling practices; centers freedom, joy, and justice as non-negotiable in education | Sometimes critiqued as aspirational but difficult to translate for some, into sustainable classroom or institutional practice | Cultural trust operationalizes abolitionist teaching by grounding its liberatory vision in daily trust-building practices that affirm identity, foster belonging, and reimagine schools as sites of justice. |
| Cultural Trust (Rhoden, 2026) | Synthesizes cultural relevance, student-centered pedagogy, institutional trust, and abolitionist intent into an identity based, race-conscious, historically rooted framework | Builds upon rather than replaces existing frameworks | Provides a comprehensive, actionable approach that acknowledges inequities, validates cultural knowledge, and establishes trust as both interpersonal and cultural-historical, moving education closer to abolitionist transformation. |
This study employs autoethnography as both method and analytic lens, positioning lived experience as a site of knowledge production rather than anecdotal reflection. This study is best understood as a critical autoethnography, a methodological approach that uses personal narrative to interrogate power, culture, and systems of inequality, particularly as they are lived and resisted by marginalized communities (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021). As a Black male educator working within PWIs, I use this approach to examine how trust, belonging, and cultural affirmation are negotiated in spaces not designed for my presence.
This work is modeled after the groundbreaking work of Goings (2015) who stresses counter-storytelling is essential for illuminating the perspectives of those historically silenced or marginalized in educational discourse. Specifically, his work, The Lion Tells His Side of the (Counter)Story: A Black Male Educator’s Autoethnographic Account, demonstrates how Black men’s education narratives challenge deficit-based and stereotypical representations, offering instead thick, nuanced descriptions that disrupt dominant assumptions (Goings, 2015). Goings specifically models reflective, first-person narrative that not only illuminates how cultural trust may operate, but foregrounds agency and multiplicity within Black male identity. This methodological tradition informs both the rationales for data selection and the construction of findings in the present study.
Merriam and Tisdell (2016) provide foundational guidance on qualitative research methods, underscoring the importance of methodological congruence, analytic flexibility, and the ethical responsibilities of researchers. They argue that qualitative research is best suited for exploring meanings, constructing knowledge, and understanding complex social phenomena from the perspective of those who live them, a positioning that directly supports the use of autoethnography and narrative inquiry in this study. Their detailed explication of methods, from purposeful sampling to analytic sensibilities, informs how data was managed, interpreted, and presented throughout this research (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). This study is best understood as a critical autoethnography, in which writing itself functions as a primary mode of analysis (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Rather than engaging in formal thematic coding, I revisited narratives through iterative writing and reflection, attending to moments of tension, withholding, recognition, and trust.
The narratives presented here draw from reflective writing, memory work, teaching artifacts, and sustained engagement with students across secondary and postsecondary contexts. Memory is treated not as a neutral recall of events, but as an interpretive process shaped by present positionality (Bochner, 2014). Writing itself served as analysis, with repeated cycles of reflection used to identify patterns of absence, affirmation, mistrust, and relational risk.
Analytically, I revisited critical incidents across my educational trajectory, attending to moments where identity was affirmed, muted, or strategically withheld. These incidents were then examined in conversation with scholarship on CRP, institutional trust, reality pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching. Through this process, cultural trust emerged inductively as a framework that connected lived experience to theoretical insight.
The data analysis followed a systematic and iterative process designed to capture the complex, layered nature of the observations under study, aligning with recommendations from key qualitative methodologists (Bhattacharya, 2016; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Initially, the researcher engaged in an immersive reading of the entire data corpus, including reflective writings and reconstructed memories, to develop a chronological understanding and generate initial codes identifying recurring themes, critical incidents, and emotional patterns. This phase included creating a timeline that contextualized personal insights within relevant sociopolitical histories. Subsequently, analysis proceeded through a multi-lens thematic approach, inspired by Bhattacharya’s (2016) notion of layered and multimodal narratives, enabling the study to integrate personal, interpersonal, and structural perspectives. Codes and emerging themes were continuously compared and refined to ensure analytic depth and coherence. In the next phase, representative narratives were constructed using selected vignettes that exemplified key findings, with careful anonymization of details to protect confidentiality; this stage integrated theoretical frameworks with lived experience, weaving scholarship and story into a compelling whole. Finally, to enhance trustworthiness and community accountability, drafts of analyses and interpretations were shared with peers, family members, and community elders for feedback and resonance, reflecting a commitment to relational ethics central to the study’s design (Bhattacharya, 2016; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). This rigorous, recursive analytic process allowed for a nuanced and ethically grounded understanding of the challenges and transformative potentials associated with Black male educators in predominantly white educational contexts.
Because autoethnography necessarily implicates others, ethical care guided this work. Identifying details have been altered where appropriate to protect privacy, and narratives are presented with attention to relational accountability rather than exposure. Ethical autoethnography requires not only consent, but responsibility telling stories with care, humility, and awareness of power (Ellis et al., 2011).
As a Black male raised in educational spaces shaped by both access and exclusion, my positionality is inseparable from the method. I occupy shifting insider–outsider roles across institutions, carrying both cultural knowledge and the psychic weight of navigating predominantly White spaces. These visions shape how stories are recalled, interpreted, and theorized. Importantly, moments of withholding; learning when to speak, when to remain silent, and how to remain legible, are not methodological flaws but analytic insights that reveal how trust is racialized and conditional.
The circumstances described here are also shaped by specific educational contexts, including elite independent schools and urban educational settings in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. These contexts do not represent the full range of depth of Black male educators, particularly those working exclusively in under-resourced or rural public school systems. However, autoethnography does not claim comprehensiveness. Instead, these geographic and institutional specificities provide textured insight into how cultural trust is negotiated across varied but interconnected educational landscapes.
“They teach the wrong stuff, that’s why I broke…”
— Dead Prez, They Schools (2000b)
This section presents four thematic findings drawn from an autoethnographic analysis of my educational journey from Black boyhood in high-achieving schools to my current role as a Black male educator in PWIs. Together, these findings illustrate how racial absence, cultural dissonance, institutional mistrust, and abolitionist intent shape the lived contextual understanding of Black male educators, and how cultural trust emerges as a relational, embodied response to these conditions.
Despite arguably attending some of the best schools in the country, I rarely encountered Black male teachers. I had only one Black male academic teacher prior to graduate school. At the time, I did not have language for what this absence meant, only a persistent sense that something was missing. Black men were visible in my athletic life as coaches and mentors, but almost never positioned as intellectual authorities in classrooms.
Over time, I came to understand this absence as structural rather than incidental. Black male educators remain less than two percent of the teaching force (Mitchell, 2016), a reality shaped by institutions historically unwilling to recruit, support, or sustain them (Bristol, 2020; Brown, 2009; Lynn, 2006). This absence shaped my imagination of what was possible. I aspired to become a civil rights lawyer, not a teacher, despite being raised by educators and surrounded by Black intellectual excellence. Teaching simply did not appear on my horizon. This was striking given my upbringing. My mother was an educator throughout my childhood: she taught nursing students at the collegiate level, opened an independent school just prior to the rise of charter schools, and later retired as a public middle school guidance counselor. That dissonance speaks volumes. I could imagine myself fighting for justice in a courtroom, but not shaping students’ lives daily in a classroom, because the profession itself felt distant, uninhabited by people who looked like me.
Although individual teachers were often supportive, institutions rarely affirmed Black identity in sustained ways. This contradiction, care without belonging, embodied what Du Bois (1903) described as double consciousness. I learned how to succeed, perform competence, and remain likable, but not how to be whole. Over time, I began to mute parts of myself that felt too cultural or risky. Withholding authenticity became a strategy for survival. I felt this most clearly years later when I returned to my alma mater to teach service learning.
I was warmly welcomed, greeted as a success story, yet subtly discouraged from moving into more formal academic teaching roles unless I went elsewhere first to “prove myself.” Another moment came when I questioned why Black authors were absent from the curriculum. When I attended as a student, the English curriculum was organized around comparing canonical texts and contrasting them with more contemporary works, such as pairing James Joyce with Anne Tyler. At the time, diversification largely meant centering women and other minoritized voices, but not Black authors specifically. When I later returned to the school as an educator, I noticed the curriculum had expanded to include more authors of color, including Black writers. But when I was a student, Black authors were almost entirely absent.
As a high school student, I did not have the voice to challenge or raise concern. Rather, I learned the texts, performed the analysis, and moved on quietly absorbing the implicit message that Black literary voices were perhaps peripheral to what constituted serious academic canonical study. Looking back, this absence was more historical than intentional. It revealed how individuals could care deeply about us as students and yet, often without malice, participate in institutional erasure, and how I learned to withhold parts of my intellectual and cultural self simply to avoid drawing negative attention to myself as a Black male student.
The code-switching I learned was literary as well as social: I learned to see myself in characters like Holden Caulfield, Roy Hobbs, or Josef K. from Kafka’s The Trial, translating my own experiences into narratives that were never written with me in mind.
This duality, care without belonging, created fractures that personal affirmation alone could not repair. I learned how to succeed, how to perform, how to be likable, code switch and be competent, but rarely how to be whole. In PWIs, I became skilled at navigating expectations while quietly muting parts of myself that felt too cultural, too political, or too risky. This experience reflects a broader challenge with CRP in PWIs: when individuals affirm culture, but institutions do not, students and educators experience fragmentation. Cultural affirmation becomes episodic rather than systemic.
Looking back now, I can name what I could not then: for much of my educational journey, I was withholding parts of my authentic self. I learned how to achieve, how to build friendships across a wide range of identities, how to move comfortably through institutions, but I also lived with a persistent sense of impostor syndrome, an unspoken fear that full visibility came at a cost. What I needed, and what so many students still need, was not symbolic affirmation but systemic trust. Cultural trust names that absence and insists that belonging, recognition, and affirmation must be structural rather than conditional. It was not until years later that I fully understood what my presence had meant to others and what I had been carrying alone.
An example of this came a few summers ago, when I happened to be in Chicago during the weekend of a Black Alumni Organization high school reunion. It had been decades since I had seen many of them, and being together again felt like a blessing. As yearbooks began circulating around the room, a few fellow alumni asked if I still played tennis. I joked that I probably would except the three months I am not working happen to be the hottest months in Phoenix.
Almost immediately, several of them nodded in agreement with what one friend said aloud:
“You made us all so proud out there playing. We really were rooting for you.”
The words caught me off guard. I felt myself grow emotional, unexpectedly so. Trying to hold it together, I thanked them and joked that at the time I was mostly trying to impress my girlfriend and win matches for our high school. But at that moment, when she made that public statement with all of us Black alumni present, I understood something I could not have known then. To them, my presence on the court had meant being seen. It had been collective, symbolic, and affirming. What I experienced years later as validation was something they had been carrying with them all along and something I now recognize as deeply formative.
When I entered teaching, I quickly recognized familiar patterns. Black students were overdisciplined, misunderstood, and excluded from advanced coursework. These observations aligned with Bryk and Schneider’s (2002) concept of relational mistrust but extended beyond interpersonal dynamics into institutional betrayal (Ewing, 2018, 2025).
In my first-year teaching AP U.S. History, I found myself quietly doubting whether many students were ready for college-level work. That hesitation unsettled me mainly because it echoed the same deficit logic that once circumscribed my own abilities. A conversation with my principal forced me to confront that internalized caution. Exposure to rigor mattered, he reminded me, even if students struggled.
After that conversation, I remember sitting alone in my classroom, roster still open, realizing how familiar my hesitation felt. It echoed moments from my own schooling, when opportunity was quietly rationed and trust had to be earned before it was extended. In trying to protect students from potential failure, I saw myself reproducing the same caution that once constrained me. Letting go of those assumptions felt risky not because I doubted my students’ ability, but because I had been trained to be careful with rigor in spaces where failure carried consequences far beyond grades.
After I initially tried to narrow the roster to those I believed had a real chance of doing well. His words unsettled me, not because they were unfamiliar, but because they forced me to confront my own internalized caution. I had learned, over years in elite spaces, to be careful about who was trusted with opportunity.
Years later, staying connected with many of those students through social media, he was proven right. They learned not only the historical content, but something quieter, more subtle yet powerful: someone believed in their capacity. Once I let go of my assumptions, my teaching changed. I stopped teaching around my students’ lives and began teaching through them. We watched New Jack City and mapped Nino Brown’s empire alongside the American, French, and Russian Revolutions. Students built organizational charts, debated power and resistance, and wrote with urgency. Most importantly, they saw themselves in the material.
Administrators praised my lessons and relationships with students, yet structural barriers continued to limit access to advanced coursework and reinforce racialized discipline practices. Students trusted me, but they did not trust the system, and quietly and sometimes not so quietly, neither did I. These moments affirmed what Bryk and Schneider (2002) argue: trust requires consistency across relationships. For Black educators in PWIs, that consistency is continually undermined. Institutional trust, like our presence, was conditional.
I came to realize my presence alone, which I assumed as a Black male educator would be sufficient, was not enough. I leaned into what Bettina Love (2019) calls abolitionist teaching: teaching that refuses compliance and demands transformation. In practice, abolition meant small but meaningful acts, no rigid seating charts, uncompromising expectations, scaffolding that honored different definitions of success. It meant joy was not a reward, but a right. It also meant acknowledging how often I had learned to mute parts of myself in similar spaces. Each decision to center student voices felt like a quiet refusal to repeat that erasure.
Over time, students, especially students of color, came to me not only with academic questions, but with personal ones. They lingered after class. They tested boundaries. They told me, sometimes plainly, that I was the first adult in the building who truly saw them. I carried that responsibility with care, but also with a growing awareness of its cost. Institutional trust had been outsourced into my body. What students found in me was not just interpersonal care, but a response to historical absence.
This realization forced me inward as well. In offering students the freedom to bring their whole selves into the classroom, I began to see how often I had withheld my own. I had learned how to succeed, how to perform competence, how to build relationships without revealing vulnerability. Teaching through cultural trust required me to unlearn that restraint. It demanded presence not as performance, but as vulnerability and authenticity.
Cultural trust names this practice. It is not accidental, nor is it purely relational. It is historical, racialized, and pedagogical. It is built through what Love (2019) calls teaching through freedom and what Emdin (2016) describes as reality pedagogy, using lived experience as the foundation for rigorous learning. Yet cultural trust cannot rest on individual unicorn educators alone. If it is to endure, it must be structurally sustained through policies, practices, and representation that no longer require students, or teachers, to withhold all or parts themselves to belong.
Even as I succeeded academically, I carried an internal dissonance that never fully left me. Schools rewarded my performance but rarely affirmed my cultural identity. The hip-hop group Arrested Development captured this tension succinctly: “Still, most of y’all come out confused.” I learned how to code-switch, manage visibility, and perform achievement, but remained unsure where my full self-belonged. Scholars have named this condition in various ways; Milner (2012) as the tension between race and opportunity, Ladson-Billings (1995, 2009) as institutions’ failure to sustain cultural practices, and Noguera (2003) as structural exclusion masked as meritocracy, but for me, it was lived daily as a quiet negotiation over how much of myself it was safe to reveal and to whom.
Years later, as an educator, I began to see that same confusion mirrored in my students. Many of them excelled academically, yet constantly felt pressure to shrink, defend their intelligence, or explain themselves in ways their peers did not. Long before I encountered the language of reality pedagogy, I had experienced its logic firsthand. One of my earliest memories of this came from elementary school, when a teacher asked me to bring my baseball cards to class so we could calculate batting averages. Together, we divided hits by at-bats, starting with Jim Rice’s .315 MVP season, then moving through the entire South Side Hitmen Chicago White Sox lineup. Soon, I was doing the math with ease. Only later did I realize what she had done: she honored what I loved, trusted what I already knew, and used it as a bridge to academic thinking. And she honored me. This was a lesson for me, not the entire class. That individualized attention and moment stayed with me. It taught me that learning deepens when students do not have to leave themselves at the door and can express their authentic self.
In my own classrooms, I tried to teach with that same spirit. I centered hip-hop, oral storytelling, and popular culture not as hooks or add-ons, but as legitimate texts. Songs like Dead Prez’s They Schools and Arrested Development’s Mr. Wendal became entry points for examining alienation, race, and resilience. When students saw their lived realities treated as intellectual capital, something shifted. They leaned in. Trust followed.
At the college level, inviting students to co-generate knowledge disrupted traditional hierarchies. For many, it was the first time their expertise had been publicly validated. Engagement increased, not because rigor was lowered, but because students no longer had to withhold themselves to participate. Using what Emdin (2016) describes as reality pedagogy, I invited students to co-generate content, to bring their knowledge and questions into the center of the classroom. Authority shifted. Conversations deepened.
As one female student reflected at the end of the semester:
After finishing this class, I am thankful I took it. I feel like I already knew a lot of the topics we talked about, but it was most beneficial to be recognized an know I wasn’t alone in struggling through school. It was also extremely good to know that I had someone in my corner if I ever needed anything.
Yet these moments also revealed the limits of classroom-level change. Without institutional support, practices rooted in trust were often dismissed as “too radical” or misread as “edutainment.” Colleagues’ skepticism echoed the same forces that once taught me to be careful, to restrain parts of myself in order to remain legible. It became clear that reality pedagogy alone was not enough. What was needed was a broader framework, one that named how trust is racialized, fragile, and historically shaped.
One student who identified as non-binary articulated the stakes of this trust in a reflection that has stayed with me:
… I would like to say that this class really did help… Even though I started to feel like a failure again I still looked forward to coming to your class and doing your assignments. It was one of the things that helped me pull myself out of that slump. Knowing that I could still enjoy soaking up knowledge and knowing that you never saw me as a failure. And over all, that failing does not make me a failure. And for that I thank you…
Cultural trust emerges at this intersection. It connects the confusion I carried as a student, the withholding I practiced for survival, and the risks I later took as an educator. Cultural trust insists students and teachers should not have to fragment themselves to belong. Reading that last quote, I was struck by how familiar that feeling was, how easily failure becomes internalized when trust is conditional. It demands that affirmation move beyond individual classrooms and become structurally sustained. Only then can education shift from a space of performance and erasure to one of recognition, safety, and possibility.
Choosing to teach at a PWI was an intentional return to spaces that had once required restraint. Following Love’s (2019) call for abolitionist teaching, I shaped classrooms that rejected compliance and centered joy, agency, and belonging.
These practices came with risk. As a Black male educator, I was often celebrated as a unicorn while constrained in how much disruption I could enact. Students found affirmation in my presence but also reminded me that one classroom could not undo systemic inequities.
Following Love’s (2019) call for abolitionist teaching, I began to shape my high school classrooms as sites of refusal and reimagination. Reframing compliance that demanded silence or assimilation. Reimagination of classrooms as spaces of joy, freedom, and belonging. In practice, this meant holding uncompromisingly high expectations while rejecting deficit framing. It meant scaffolding rigor without narrowing what counted as intelligence. It meant refusing mandated rigid seating charts, inviting student voices, and reframing discipline as responsibility to community rather than obedience to authority or “compliance.” These choices were not incidental; they were attempts to create spaces where students could show up whole, spaces I knew they needed to thrive.
At the collegiate level, my presence often carried symbolic weight that I did not choose but could not ignore. At one graduation ceremony, a family stopped me and said I was the only Black faculty member they had seen all week. The moment landed heavily. For many students, particularly first-generation and students whose identities are often devalued in academic spaces, I was the first Black male professor they had ever encountered. They lingered after class, confided their struggles, and expressed relief at feeling “seen” and valued for the first time. These encounters clarified for me that abolitionist teaching is not only about curriculum or critique; it is about creating spaces where students’ full humanity is recognized and protected.
Yet that recognition came with a cost. As Davis (2003) and Warren (2013, 2017) note, Black male educators often bear the burden of heightened visibility, expected to embody authority while simultaneously resisting erasure. Irby (2015, 2021) reminds us that equity work demands more than representation, it requires structural disruption while still coloring within the lines. When I reframed certain institutional norms, zero-tolerance punitive discipline practices, standardized lesson scripts, I sometimes faced resistance. These moments were unsettling, but they were also clarifying. Love (2019) describes abolition as both decentering compliance and co-constructed creation. My classrooms became spaces where both were enacted: refusing erasure while creating belonging.
My return to these institutions carried a false sense of familiarity. Having grown up in majority White spaces, I knew how to navigate them. I knew when to speak and when to remain silent, how to perform competence, how to make myself legible. But as a Black man arriving with abolitionist commitments, I also encountered their limits, their reluctance to fully welcome someone who challenged not just content, but structure. This return was not nostalgic. It was intentional. I came to they schools to be what I never had: a Black male educator whose presence affirmed, protected, and reimagined what could be, not only for Black students, but for all students.
Even in spaces that did not fully welcome my authentic self, I carried the conviction that cultural trust is both scarce and sacred. I brought into the classroom not only academic expertise but familial, historical, and community knowledge what Paris and Alim (2014) describe as the foundation of culturally sustaining pedagogy. In my classrooms, this meant teaching with music, movement, and counter-narratives that unsettled narrow versions of history and knowledge. I placed the Founding Fathers and Adam Smith in dialogue with Tupac, James Baldwin alongside Nirvana, and Toni Morrison in conversation with The Patriot. These juxtapositions were not gimmicks; they were acts of reclamation re-suturing erased cultural lineages into academic discourse and affirming that rigor and culture are not oppositional but mutually reinforcing.
At the same time, teaching in higher education revealed new forms of restraint. In a climate marked by cultural wars and political polarization, students increasingly feared being “wrong,” “controversial,” or offending someone. Many retreated to safe ground, hesitant to move beyond what felt familiar or acceptable. I recognized that hesitation. It mirrored my own earlier instinct to withhold to manage how much of myself I revealed in order to remain legible. Cultural trust became essential here. Students needed to know that questioning, risk-taking, and vulnerability would be met with care rather than punishment. It became incumbent upon me, and scholars more broadly, the strong need to cultivate environments where students could build not only cultural capital, but the courage to affirm what they believe while resisting pressures to capitulate.
Over time, abolitionist teaching revealed its limits when practiced in isolation. While my presence mattered deeply, students reminded me repeatedly that one classroom could not undo systemic inequities. Their stories of exclusion elsewhere, and their mistrust of the broader institution, made clear that abolition must be collective, not individual. Cultural trust offers a way forward not as a replacement for abolitionist teaching, but as a means of operationalizing it through daily relational practices that can be sustained beyond individual actors.
As Ewing (2018, 2025) reminds us, schools are haunted by histories of erasure. But haunting also implies possibility. Schools can be sites of reanimation places where ghosts are named, trust is rebuilt, and new futures are imagined. My classrooms were never neutral. Each time I stood before students whether in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or Phoenix, it continued to be a political act, a cultural offering, and a refusal to withhold myself in spaces that had long demanded restraint.
Across these examples, I came to have an appreciation that what students valued most was not simply representation, but assurance, assurance their identities would not be erased as the cost of belonging. Again and again, students returned to the same need: to be seen without having to perform, to be challenged without being diminished, to exist fully without fragmenting themselves to fit institutional expectations. In naming this need, I also named my own. Cultural trust emerged not as an abstract framework, but as recognition of what had been missing throughout my own educational journey.
Students trusted school, and ultimately themselves, because they trusted me. They trusted me not because I held authority, but because they sensed I had lived what they were living: the careful calibration of voice, the quiet decisions about when to speak and when to withhold. I refused to demand their cultural erasure in exchange for success because I knew too well the cost of that bargain. Cultural trust is not automatic or assumed; it is earned slowly, through presence, persistence, risk, and a willingness to show up authentically in spaces that have historically required restraint. It is both scarce and sacred, forged in moments where recognition replaces performance and safety replaces surveillance.
Over time, I recognized that trust had become the axis of my practice. Students came to me not only with academic questions, but with personal ones. In offering them space to be whole, I began to see how often I had withheld my own authenticity to survive similar spaces.
Cultural trust names this practice. It is historical, racialized, and relational. It connects the withholding I practiced as a student, the risks I took as a teacher, and the possibility of transformation when trust is structurally sustained rather than individually borne.
“It’s bigger than hip-hop.”
— Dead Prez, It’s bigger than hip-hop (2000a)
The findings from this critical autoethnographic study suggest an important observation: many PWIs remain structurally unprepared to welcome, support, or sustain Black male educators, even as they publicly commit to diversity and equity. Grounded in autoethnographic narratives, these findings illuminate how cultural trust is enacted, withheld, and negotiated within PWIs. The emotional labor of being the unicorn often singular in representation, alongside the disconnect between academic achievement and cultural affirmation, positions Black male educators as both disruptors and healers. These insights are not merely personal; they reflect enduring patterns of institutional exclusion that existing frameworks help illuminate, but do not fully resolve.
CRP and institutional trust each offer critical insights into how schools might better serve students historically excluded from opportunity, yet the findings suggest that both frameworks remain limited when applied within PWIs. CRP affirms culture as an asset (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2009), but in practice it often becomes symbolic, relying on individual teachers’ commitments without altering institutional structures. Similarly, institutional trust emphasizes respect, competence, and relational integrity (Bryk & Schneider, 2002), yet frequently treats trust as race-neutral, overlooking how histories of exclusion and cultural erasure shape who is expected to trust and who is deemed trustworthy. As Harper (2012) and Irby (2021) note, Black students and educators often experience trust as conditional, mediated through isolation and onlyness rather than systemic support. Read together, these frameworks illuminate why affirmation without structural accountability is insufficient. Cultural trust emerges here as a necessary extension, linking cultural affirmation to institutional responsibility and reframing trust as a historically situated, racialized, and relational practice rather than an interpersonal outcome alone.
Reality pedagogy and abolitionist teaching converge around a shared commitment to honoring students’ lived realities and resisting pedagogical practices that demand assimilation or compliance. Reality pedagogy emphasizes co-construction of knowledge and the validation of students’ cultural worlds as legitimate intellectual capital (Emdin, 2016), while abolitionist teaching calls for the rejection of schooling practices that reproduce harm in favor of joy, freedom, and justice (Love, 2019). In practice, the findings show that both frameworks are most powerful when they move beyond engagement as a strategy and toward trust as a relational condition for learning.
At the same time, the narratives reveal the fragility of these approaches when enacted at the classroom level alone. Pedagogical practices grounded in student voice, cultural affirmation, and relational care were often misread as “too radical” or dismissed as entertainment within compliance-driven institutions. While students experienced these spaces as affirming and intellectually rigorous, their trust rarely extended beyond individual classrooms. This gap underscores a central tension: pedagogy can interrupt harm locally, but without institutional support it cannot sustain transformation systemically.
Cultural trust bridges this divide. It reframes reality pedagogy and abolitionist teaching not as isolated instructional approaches, but as trust practices that require institutional recognition and protection. Where reality pedagogy centers how knowledge is co-constructed, and abolitionist teaching insists on the ethical imperative of freedom, cultural trust names the relational and historical conditions under which these practices can endure. In doing so, it clarifies why engagement alone is insufficient and why liberation-oriented pedagogy must be supported by structures that affirm cultural presence rather than merely tolerate it.
This study began with my background and returns to it, using critical autoethnography to theorize what is often missing from discussions of equity and reform: the conditions under which trust becomes possible. Through autoethnographic narrative, this manuscript traced how absence, erasure, and cultural dissonance shape the educational experiences of Black male students and educators in PWIs.
The findings reveal that while CRP, institutional trust, reality pedagogy, and abolitionist teaching each offer critical insights, none alone fully addresses the layered realities of racially stratified schooling. CRP affirms identity but risks superficiality when reduced to representation. Institutional trust emphasizes relationships but often ignores race and history. Reality pedagogy validates student knowledge yet struggles to scale, while abolitionist teaching offers a liberatory vision that can remain aspirational without sustained relational practice.
Cultural trust emerges from the narratives as a necessary synthesis. It reframes trust as racially conscious, historically rooted, and culturally grounded. Cultural trust is not abstract but rather it is lived and cultivated through presence, persistence, vulnerability, and authenticity. Students trusted school because they trusted me, and they trusted me because I refused to demand cultural erasure in exchange for belonging. These moments of recognition created conditions for deeper learning and relational connection.
The narratives also make clear that presence is political. Black male educators are more than symbolic figures; we embody intellectual leadership, cultural affirmation, and pedagogical resistance. Yet transformation cannot rest on individuals alone. As Harper (2012), Irby (2021) and Warren (2017) remind us, equity requires institutional commitment rather than reliance on unicorns.
Importantly, cultural trust reframes hope as practice. As Love (2019) argues, abolitionists hope demands transformation. Cultural trust enacts that demand in daily educational life, insisting that trust is not neutral and that belonging must be actively cultivated. In this way, schools can move from haunted spaces of exclusion to sites of possibility.
While this study centers the insights and observations of one Black male educator, its implications extend beyond a single identity or context. When culture is recognized as an asset and trust is actively built across difference, all students benefit (Dee, 2004; Gershenson et al., 2018).
In closing, educational equity requires more than representation or curricular reform. It requires reimagining trust not as a neutral exchange, but as a culturally and historically situated practice. Grounded in autoethnographic narrative, this study positions cultural trust as a foundational component of educational justice. Real progress demands transformation. Cultural trust is abolition in practice and a reflection of the daily work of building schools where students and educators are recognized, affirmed, and free.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
ISSN: 2998-8470