Racialized Emotions and Young Men of Color in Carceral Los Angeles

• In Event: Using Justice-Oriented Conceptual Frameworks in Research With Boys and Men of Color

Abstract

Background/Objectives

As a conceptual tool, racialized emotions suggests that emotions are shaped by social structures and racial domination (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). In other words, racialized emotions frame emotions as not just individually felt, but also group-based, relational, and socio-historical (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Tichavakunda, 2021). As a conceptual tool, racialized emotions are “window[s] into the ways social structures shape lived experiences” (Woody, 2021, p.1). My objective in this paper is to explore racialized emotions as a tool and framework to advance scholarship on boys and young men of color.

Theoretical Framework

Racialized emotions do not stem from one individual encounter or a single identifiable source (Woody, 2022). Even when not explicitly articulated as racialized emotions, researchers have asked “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois, [1903] 1994). Previous studies have demonstrated that everyday experiences with racism and racialization are internalized, and they inflict emotional harm (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 2009; Sue 2010; Franklin 2016). Power dynamics in racialized organizations, for example, require people of color to manage racialized and gendered emotional labor (Evan and Moore, 2015). Relating to youth studies, race, gender, and criminalization, several scholars have alluded to emotional responses, trauma, and healing (Ginwright, 2010; Shedd, 2015). In schools, Black children’s emotional expressions are often seen as punishable challenges to authority (Ferguson, 2001). Ferguson (2001). describes the interplay between racialized emotions, youth, and power as constitutive of “emotional ingredients—fear, anger, resentment, hurt feelings—that lies just under the surface and seethe into the open when race as a feature of social division enters the discussion” (p.199) Because schools are sites of criminalization and suffering for young men of color, racialized emotions allow us to understand how larger social and political context and structures materialized in the lives of young people.

Methods and Findings

To explore the utility of racialized emotions, I draw on 40 interviews with Black, Afro-Latinx, and Latinx youth and youth workers in Los Angeles County. The interviews come from a larger multi-year ethnographic project that explores the relationship between youth, criminalization, and community based-educational spaces in Los Angeles. Drawing on findings from this project, I argued that racialized emotions can serve as both a subject of study and as a framework that informs research methodology. To demonstrate this, I first highlight the racialized emotions produced by experiencing and witnessing constant criminalization. In so doing, I discuss how an examination of racialized emotions revealed complex processes of criminalization at the individual, interpersonal, and structural level that trouble current conceptualization of youth criminalization. I close by discussing the implications of racialized emotions for methodological approaches.

Implications

In many arenas, the relationship between the carceral state, schools, and young men of color is viewed through the ubiquitous metaphor of the school-to-prison-pipeline. Researchers and community organizations have troubled this metaphor for its failure to capture historical and structural processes of criminalization (Annamma, 2018; Sojoyner, 2016). This paper offers racialized emotions as framework to revisit concepts and approaches that inform our understandings of boys and young men of color.

Author

• Uriel Serrano, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author