Perpetual Projects of Potential: A Literature Review Tracing 60 Years of Research Questions on Black Men and Boys in Urban Education

This literature review interrogates the genealogy of questions posed about Black men and boys in Urban Education from 1965 to 2025, tracing how policy eras have delimited their discursive framing within educational research. Drawing on Goldberg's (1993) racial knowledg e and Wynter's (1995) subjective understanding , we employ a Foucauldian genealogical analysis to examine four policy periods—from the Moynihan Report to George Floyd's racial reckoning—revealing how epistemic authority has constrained research questions within deficit, pathologizing frameworks. We argue that such questions recursively bind Black males to predetermined assumptions, reinforcing their construction as perpetual projects of potential. This review challenges researchers to resist expedient, market-driven inquiries to challenge the cyclical reproduction of racialized narratives.