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. 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. 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.

Through a centering of BIPOC youth subjectivities, this phenomenological project offers a
textured account about the scope and impact of urban violence, highlighting five youths’ sense-and spatial-making repertoires as they navigate the social and material landscapes of Oakland, California. This paper offers a place-based analysis of violence that factors how young people experience and perceive geographies of safety and risk, and the myriad ways interpersonal violence intersects with racialized space. Such a process highlights sociospatial dynamics in “real-time,” including the mutually constitutive ways social and spatial relations generate racial meanings. In this regard, the research is an interdisciplinary contribution that deepens understanding into the hyperlocal worlds and lived practices of a group of urban youth, and in the process, foregrounds a critical spatiality that widens the scope of knowledge about the capaciousness of urban violence. Findings suggest (a) “Whiteness” is perceived to be a form of sanctuary, with White bodies and “White space” as symbols of safety, perceived to be buffered from the most egregious forms of violence; (b) youth must leverage deep insider-knowledge and develop spatialized safe-keeping schemas to navigate everyday precarity; and (c) racialized violence conveys a narrative of disposability, creating an affective geography youth must contend with. Such findings signal the need for increased study into the qualitative impact of urban violence in the lives of youth of color, and the significance of racialized space as a function for safety and violence.

Author

• David Philoxene, University of San Francisco
  Presenting Author