Feeling Justice in Long Beach’s Youth Organizing Movements

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Learning About Remedy and Repair From Research on Youth Organizing in California (Table 8)

Abstract

Objectives
This project provides a framework for “feeling justice” by uplifting how three Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American youth-led racial justice groups in Long Beach, California (Californians for Justice, Invest in Youth-Long Beach, and Khmer Girls in Action) re-imagine social change.

Framework
It builds on the increasing embrace of healing and healing justice in youth/community organizing and scholarship and healing/ healing justice as conceptualized especially by Black and Indigenous scholars (e.g. Chavez Diaz and Lee 2015; Jacob 2013; Hemphill 2024; Ortega-Williams 2021; Page and Woodland 2023; Terriquez and Serrano 2018). Feeling justice is emblematic of how feeling, living, and realizing intersectional forms of racial justice unveils portals to new worlds: youth leaders embrace expansive liberation practices, from grassroots organizing to raze infrastructures of oppression to embracing care, joy, and humanization systematically denied to youth of color.

Methods
Drawing from five years of critical community-engaged scholarship- including engaged ethnography and movement-driven research, I actively co-conspired with Black, Latinx, Southeast Asian/ other Asian American, low-income youth leaders (many of them queer and young women).

Findings
Youth refuse respectability politics that denigrate their emotions as an irrational product of their age, race, class, sexuality, and gender and refuse masculinist movement cultures that glorify self-sacrifice and working to the point of bone-deep exhaustion. Findings also highlight how youth practice new terrains of emotional possibility by being together differently and organize to press schools and the city to value the full spectrum of their humanity, critiquing carceral logics that have devastated youth’s communities in distinct yet inextricable ways. This project aims to advance academic and on-the-ground understandings of youth organizing practices that truly value the complex lives, emotions, and resistance methods of youth of color.

Author

• May Lin, Cal State Long Beach