"Know Me, Feel Me": Reexamining Urban Violence and Deepening Empathy Toward Urban Youth

• In Event: Reexamining Urban Violence and Trauma: Ecological, Empathetic, and Pedagogical Responses

Abstract

Substantial interdisciplinary research, from fields within and outside education, has helped to demonstrate the impact of traumatic experiences on youth populations (van der Kolk, 2005; Perry & Szalavitz, 2007, Burke et al., 2011). This is particularly true of the most marginalized urban communities and non-dominant youth, which often experience an intensification of these types of occurrences (Breslau et al., 2004). Still, while much of this research has been pivotal in establishing a starting point for educators and other fields to engage this notion of youth trauma, it has often done so through the framing of violence as largely interpersonal, potentially invisibilizing other forms of various symbolic and structural “violences” (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourgois, 2001). This paper forwards that complex arrangements of violence intersect, interact, and shape everyday experiences (Scheper-Hughes, 1993) for youth in inner-city poverty, and are woven into the very fabric of their environment and cumulative experiences. Consequentially, researchers and practitioners must better account and respond to these complex forms of violence within the urban ecological landscape, including deepening how we conceptualize and theorize them, and potential interventions.

Oakland, California is a city marked historically by both deeply entrenched issues of inequity and a tradition of radical community-based responses to these injustices (Self, 2005). Educationally, Oakland has also been a site for interesting, sometimes controversial, educational initiatives and reforms, from state takeover of the local school district to targeted interventions, and the creation of a Black Male initiative prior to Brother’s Keeper (Nasir et al., 2013; Trujillo et al., 2013), to the scaling up of community-model schools throughout the city in an attempt to address the urgency of broader community needs.

This paper attempts to advance a multiplicity of ghetto violence and trauma by looking at Oakland, CA as a particular urban social location, utilizing various methodological tools from different disciplines not typically applied to education. Such purposes ultimately aim at strengthening how educators understand the complexity and cumulativity of urban violence in young peoples’ lives. Lastly, the paper will highlight voices of young people participating in the author’s pilot-study, as a means of complicating all-too-often narratives of urban pathology, even while challenging notions regarding the impact of trauma and violence. In doing so, the author desires education researchers and practitioners to better meet the contextual needs of urban youth, as both students and community members.

Author

• David Philoxene, University of California - Berkeley