Pedagog(ies) of the Oppressed: Black Male Youth, Community Organizing, and Racializing Pedagogies of Resistance in Carceral Los Angeles

• In Event: Imagined and Realized Places: Spatializing Youth Political and Racial Identity Development

Abstract

As its own political geography, Los Angeles County is home to the largest carceral regime in the world, with the largest network of law enforcement agencies, courts, and county jails (Sojoyner, 2016; Hernandez, 2017; Felker-Kantor, 2018). The carceral regime was generated in direct response to both Black community organizing (Sojoyner, 2014) and anxieties around Black masculinity and criminality (Muhammad, 2010; Shabazz, 2015; Curry, 2017). With Black male youth as some of the central targets of carceral control, community-based organizations, advocates, and even popular media in Los Angeles responded with ways to address the “Black male problem.” As the carceral regime has grown exponentially since the 1980s, there has been a concerted effort among some community-based organizations to depart from traditional models of youth development and providing services, and they have worked to mobilize a broad base community members to address the impacts of criminalization in their communities, specifically Black and Latinx youth (Kwon, 2013). These organizations have taken vastly different approaches to the criminalization and dispossession problem, and in order to explicate the role that race plays in politicizing youth, there needs to be more analyses about the specific pedagogies that organizations use to develop the critical consciousness of the young people they work with, even if these young people may share identities.
Focusing on two types of youth programs that work to cultivate the political identities of youth, one that directly focuses on Black male youth, and the other that more broadly with youth of color, I seek to unpack how youth from different organizations and with different organizational foci develop critical consciousness with Black males. Drawing on Racial Rearticulation (Omi & Winant, 2014) and transformative resistance (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001), I assert a new framework for assessing the impact of community-based pedagogies - racializing pedagogies of resistance. Deeply rooted in local and historical context, organizers use racializing pedagogies of resistance to draw upon race and context specific logics to both connect the lived experiences of the youth to larger systems of social inequity and to foster further political participation. This is significant, since it speaks directly to the ways that critical consciousness (Freire, 1996) is achieved in social movements. Even though the methods to politicize youth may be the same, organizational ideology plays a key role in determining how youth develop a lexicon of critique about oppression. Through 30 interviews with youth, lesson plans, and 11 interviews with youth workers from the two youth programs types, I assert that racializing pedagogies of resistance contributes to our understanding of race, place, and political identity by putting forward both a theory and method of the ways that educators outside of schools mechanize geographies to develop political identity. I focus my efforts on youth-based campaigns to decriminalize their schools and communities, specifically their efforts to both limit the scope and powers of law enforcement, while also demanding and winning law-enforcement defunding campaigns for both municipal and school-based law enforcement.

Author

• David Turner, University of California - Berkeley