For youth, schools are simultaneously sites of production, socialization, and development. At school, students learn about race, social values and norms, power, and positionality (Noguera, 2003, p. 443). This "hidden curricula" reinforces social inequities and influences how individual students experience the process of schooling as well as come to understand themselves. School processes that divide students along lines of difference communicate beliefs about those differences and marginalize separated groups. Nowhere is this more damaging than in the case of male African American students, where the intersections of race and gender place them at odds with their environment, resulting in academic underperformance and a disconnection. Although theories like Ogbu's (1978) "oppositional culture" and Lewis' (1998) "culture of poverty" make culturalist arguments for the disparate achievement of Black males, the current text will take a structuralist approach, arguing that schools are production sites for inequities that facilitate underachievement in African American males; consequently, teachers exist as agents of the structure who create and maintain a dominant culture through practices that are at odds with the academic productivity of young black males.