A Geography of Race and Violence: Reexamining Urban Violence and Black Youths' Spatial and Racial Sense-Making

• In Event: Reexamining Race-Related Stress, Trauma, and Violence: Ecological, Holistic, 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, in particular, Black youth, which often experience myriad forms of violence (Breslau et al., 2004). While much of this research has been pivotal in establishing a starting point for educators and other fields to engage notions 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), and even their collective, community-wide impacts. This paper forwards that complex arrangements of violence intersect, interact, and shape everyday experiences of “normalized suffering” (Scheper-Hughes, 1993) for inner-city Black youth.
Oakland, California is a city marked historically by both deeply entrenched issues of intersectional inequities and a tradition of radical community-based responses to these injustices (Self, 2005). Educationally, Oakland has also been a site for leading, sometimes controversial, educational initiatives and reforms, from the “Ebonics debate” and other targeted interventions, such as its Black Male Initiative (Nasir et al., 2013; Trujillo et al., 2013), to the scaling up of community-model schools to address broader community needs, and multiple state take-overs of the local school district due to various mismanagements.
While spacialization has been understood to be a critical window in understanding the grammar of race (Knowles, 2003; Massey, 1994), conceptualizations of space also provide key insights about the embodied experience of violence, including young peoples’ logics about what violence and race truly mean. In the lives of Black youth, geographies of race and violence are experienced as material artifacts, yet also have rich social and ideational currencies. Hence, this paper aims to interrogate the centrality of race, space, and violence in the lives of young people in Oakland, California. For instance, how do Black youth make meaning from the various geographies of violence they traverse, including shaping (literal and figurative) understandings of threats and safety? How do these geographies of violence inform understandings of race, and inversely, how do racial-spatial imaginaries inform understandings of violence (i.e. where, when and why it happens, and who it happens to)? Such youth cartographic ‘sense-making’ takes on further unique dimensions considering rapid transformations to the urban landscape in the Bay Area—structurally and racially—as a result of gentrification, arguably another contour of violence. Drawing on emergent dissertation data, this paper aims at strengthening how practitioners and academics understand and respond to the cumulativity of urban violence in young peoples’ lives, and just as importantly, capturing the logics about space, race, and violence by urban youth.

Author

• David Philoxene, University of California - Berkeley