The Child as Scourge: Racialized Childhood, Carjacking, and the Politics of Disposability in Chicago

• In Event: "When a Conjuncture Unrolls, There Is No Going Back": Education and Social Crisis in Chicago

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Over the past several decades, a robust body of literature has addressed how childhood is linked to discourses of crime, moral panic, and law-and-order politics (Valentine, 1996; Cohen, 2015/1972; Meiners, 2017; Renfro, 2020). Among the most prescient of these analyses, Hall et al.'s (1978) Policing the Crisis highlights how mass-mediated representations of criminogenic youth secured consent for coercive state intervention during a moment of social, political, and economic rupture. I draw from this analysis to examine representations of the “youth carjacker” in Chicago and explore how discourses of criminalized childhood are implicated in the social reproductive crisis of “pandemic neoliberalism” (Mezzadri, 2022; Jagannathan & Rai, 2021), and in youth resistance to the necropolitics of disposability and waste (Mbembe, 2003; Bhattacharyya, 2018) characterizing the present conjuncture.

This paper interrogates the resurgence of moral panic and law-and-order politics alongside histories of youth-led organizing against anti-Black state violence that destabilized and de-legitimized the racial carceral state (Camp, 2016). Extending Katz’ (2008) concept of “childhood as spectacle,'' I argue that racialized representations of the figure I term the child as scourge become mobilized through panic-laden discourses to forge a new revanchist ‘common sense’ around youth, security, and urban space that legitimates carceral interventions intended to manage the crisis of social reproduction while recasting racialized youth as a threat to the future of the entrepreneurial global city. Contesting this narrative, which reinforces racialized distinctions between those deemed fit for productive labor in the new knowledge-economy (Bhattacharyya, 2018) and those surplussed through the “financialized revanchism” of neoliberalism (Haiven, 2020), youth-led social movements make radical claims to the “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1968); turn the sphere of social reproduction into a terrain for contesting racialized disposability, state violence, and organized abandonment; and engage in prefigurative politics grounded in radical relationality, care, and abolition democracy.

Methods and Data
Conjunctural analysis aims to “historicize the present” (Grayson & Little, 2017) by attending to the “complex field of power and consent and looking at its different levels of expression – political, ideological, cultural, and economic” (Hall & Massey, 2019, p. 65). Following Ege & Gallas (2019) and drawing from critical geography, narrative criminology (Sandberg, 2022), and Race Social Reproduction (Mezzadri, 2022), I expand on a concrete social phenomenon (carjacking) to explore the periodization of broader objects of analysis: the crisis of social reproduction and hegemony of racial neoliberalism. Employing critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001) of news reports, editorials, policy, and protest art, I examine how the child as scourge is constructed, how narratives of youth criminality circulate and for what purpose, and how youth-led social movements advance counter-narratives of the crisis.

Significance
Understanding this crisis requires us to contextualize the contradictory social forces in this moment. Hall and Massey (2019) note, “crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given” (p. 57). As a Chicago teacher and unionist, I offer an account that underscores the importance of understanding how youth resist oppression and share counterhegemonic visions for building a new social order.

Author

• Andrew J. Chenohara, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author