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The Life Course Less Traveled: A Racial-Epistemological Critique.
Sat, August 10, 2:30 to 4:10pm, Sheraton New York, Floor: Lower Level, BoweryAbstract
The overwhelming use of predominantly white samples in life course research makes the life course perspective not just an inappropriate fit for making sense of the lives of racialized youth in urbanized space, but empirically incorrect. In this paper, I argue the life course perspective cannot attend to the everyday impacts of racialization and racism for racialized youth in urbanized space. Drawing on data from thirty in-person interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of one year with youth at Run-a-Way – a shelter and outreach center for youth in a Midwestern city – I make the case that antiblackness and structural racism belie the theoretical underpinnings of the life course perspective. Systemic racism and racialization exceed the conceptual capacity of life course transitions and trajectories precisely because they are not a singular events over the life course, but ongoing forms of violence. In other words, racialization and racism are not life course transitions but life course constants. Based on their perceptions of the systemic delays in legitimate opportunities for success and having to work twice as hard to be half as good, racialized youth in urbanized space sought expedited pathways to make money. Being more prescient, than “present oriented” some youth revised their life course trajectories through participation in the “fast life.” Prepared to begin a long and hard road filled with roadblocks at every conceivable level of opportunity, racialized youth in urbanized space learn various shortcuts and detours along the life course. I conclude with a critique of time-use studies by detailing the consequences for youth who use time that does not belong to them. Because racialized youth are more likely to owe, rather than own time, time that they supposedly “use” is often read as “time theft” and thus criminalized.