From the Hood to Being Hooded: A Case Study of a Black Male PhD

In this paper, we present a case study of a mathematically successful Black male named Rob. This case comes from a larger study involving 23 Black college students who had successfully negotiated the mathematics pipeline. Rob had recently obtained a PhD in applied mathematics, one of approximately seven Black Americans to do so in the year of his graduation. We highlight Rob’s story in order to investigate the question- what does it mean to be a Black male in the context of mathematics learning and participation? The stories of Black men who have traveled far down the road of mathematics can be particularly powerful because they can reflect on their experiences and provide retrospective, first-hand understandings of what it means to endure and persist. We explore a number of themes characterizing Rob’s experiences as a Black male and as a doer of mathematics. We give special attention to issues of racial identity, both in terms of Rob’s assertion of his identity as well as the assaults that were made on that identity across various time periods and contexts of Rob’s life.