Risk in Recovery: Intersections of Black Youth Advocacy in Philadelphia after 2020

• In Event: 50610 - Unpacking Intersectionality: The Tangle of Disadvantage

Abstract

When a global pandemic and racial uprisings swept the United States in 2020, their treatment from the United States and local governments revealed for many the immense depth of American inequality. In cities, the condition of black youth – long considered representative of this inequality – has become a focal point of recovery efforts from both local governing initiatives and organizations. Yet for black youth themselves, the perceptions of self that emerge among competing initiatives in these efforts have great implications for their own societal participation. Through ethnographic study with two black youth organizations in Philadelphia from 2024-2025, this paper explores members’ perceptions of self and the city as shaped by the in/visibility that 2020’s disruptions have exposed for the demographic. Intersectional scholars and activists alike have pointed to the disruptions of 2020 and their aftermath to explore the importance of age in racialized policy, politics, and their consequences in the everyday. This paper expands that scholarship by identifying these modern stakes, considering them through the post-2020 activist organizational landscape, and exploring organization members’ experiences within that landscape to illuminate emerging dimensions of young black life.

Author

• Sophia Lindner, Yale University