Imagining, Creating, and Sustaining Alternatives for Racially Minoritized Youth: A Panel Discussion

• In Event: Imagining the Future of Black and Brown Youth in (Carceral) Los Angeles

Abstract

Following the three brief context-setting papers, Damien Sojoyner will respond to question one listed in our proposal overview. Damien Sojoyner’s publications offer a detailed account of how the carceral state and educational carcerality shapes the daily life of young Black people in Los Angeles. More importantly, his work demonstrates how Black young people resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Our second panelists takes a Black feminist and abolitionist approach to examining the experiences of Black girls in one South Central high school. Our third panelists draws on a rich tradition of carceral studies to examine how carceral systems utilize policies, organizational practices, and other mechanisms to perpetuate anitblackness in the lives of Black youth and their families. Our fourth panelist researches how racially minoritized youth navigate various forms of violence in schools, courts, and carceral facilities. What ties them together is their relentless attention to how Black and non-Black Latinx youth, their families, and communities foster healing, resistance, and sites of collective care.

This symposium is in part inspired by Grace Lee Boggs’ (1977) assertion that “critical connections,” the small activities that foster interpersonal communication and meaningful solidarity, are key to futuring and transforming the world we currently live in.
Through our critical connections, we seek to identify shared visions of transformation while still remaining attuned to the most pressing issues facing racially minortized youth in Los Angeles. Through presentations, panel discussion, and interactive Q&A, it is our hope that this small contribution become part of “our small activities [that] will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness” (Boggs, 1972).

Authors

• Damien Sojoyner, University of California - Irvine

• Anibal Serrano, University of California - Irvine

• Pharren Miller, University of California - Los Angeles

• Brianna Marche' Harvey, California State University - Fullerton