| 123 Turning Negatives into Positives Cool Ways to Implement Successful Expectation Violations in Black Male Classrooms Theodore S. Ransaw, Richard Majors, and Mikel D. C. Moss I sit in your class, I play by the rules. I’m young, I’m fly, I’m black. So of course I think I’m cool. — S. G. Flake, You Don’t Even Know Me, 2010 Due to conflict and cultural miscommunication including nonverbal communi- cation, Black men historically have been misunderstood. Watzlawick’s ĳirst axiom states that a person, cannot not communicate (Watzlawick, Beavin Bavelas, & Jack- son, 1967). In other words, everything we do communicates a message—whether we intend it to or not. Communication occurs even when we are silent. For students, silence can be a form of communicating disengagement from schooling, or it can express embarrassment from not understanding instruction. Both powerful and moving, silence can be just as effective as verbal expressions. Either way, whether verbal or nonverbal, we all communicate. So when a teacher says that a student “just sits there, with no communication whatsoever,” the student is in fact communicating. By being aloof, detached, and silent, many Black males are engaging in a cool pose as a form of resistance to oppression (Majors & Billson, 1992). This silent stoicism has also been described as the cool factor: a behavior that Black males adopt as a way to balance their social capital with their academic Closing the Education Achievement Gaps for African American Males, edited by Theodore S. Ransaw, Michigan State University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/michstate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4504329. Created from michstate-ebooks on 2017-07-10 09:03:11. Copyright © 2016. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.