Examining the Racial Settler Capitalist Politics of Trauma-Informed Care With Incarcerated Black and Latinx Girls

• In Event: Holding Kids Captive and Imprisoning Education: Abolitionist Research on Youth Incarceration and Carceral Schooling

Abstract

Overview, Methods and Data Sources

The authors examine the racial settler capitalist politics of “trauma-informed care” (Ginwright, 2018) with incarcerated Black and Latinx girls within a juvenile probation camp in LA County, and discuss implications for abolition of the juvenile justice system. Findings are based upon a Black Feminist analysis (Collins, 1990) of observations, field notes and qualitative data collection over one academic school year. Fourteen interviews were conducted with students, as well as ten with educators. There were seven sharing circles (Tachine, Yellow Bird, & Cabrera, 2016) with two educators who were crucial to developing the camp’s educational model.

Theoretical Framework and Findings

While healing is often framed as an altruistic and neutral endeavor, the authors explore how juvenile probation camps envision and practice trauma-informed care as an individual healing process that benefits from the social isolation of girls from their communities. The use of social isolation for education, healing and “human development” (McKittrick, 2015) of Black and Latinx girls in the interest of the U.S. nation-state operates from racial capitalist politics, which aim to “truncate forms of appearance of the social to disestablish possible relations between people that are not conducive for capital” (Melamed, 2015); as well as settler colonial politics that focus upon banishing and/or eliminating Indigenous people and racialized outsiders from stolen lands, unless they can be coercively prepared to enter “structurally marginalized and racialized workforces” to sustain and build the settler society (Hernández, 2017, p. 8). Healing becomes a racialized, classed, and gendered project of self-development and progression. Incarcerated Black and Latinx girls are encouraged to discipline themselves toward becoming workers who embody ways of knowing and being that accommodate to the values prescribed by White cisheteromasculine settler men of the financial asset owning class. In this way, trauma-informed care is indelibly shaped by racial settler capitalist politics (Robinson, [1983], 2000; Tallbear, 2018) rooted in “reducing collective life to the relations that sustain” accumulation of land and capital for the U.S. nation-state (Melamed, 2015, p. 78).

Accordingly, findings examine how incarcerated Black and Latinx girls are counseled and given care that pushes them toward: 1) accepting complete agency and accountability for harm, without acknowledging the role of social contexts and systemic injustices; 2) prioritizing socioemotional learning that neglects critical inquiry in favor of developing emotional regulation and compliance “skills” for working in hierarchical settler-dominated industries; 3) moving from sexual orientations and ways of being constructed as uncomfortable, unprofessional and/or unproductive by White cisheteromasculine settler men; and 4) separating from families and communities as a means to integrate into the U.S. nation-state as productive laborers.

Significance

As scholars like Gilmore (2007) have documented, the U.S. nation-state has increasingly justified prisons and juvenile incarceration facilities as a means to provide therapeutic and educational services, which offer “just” rehabilitation and pathways to inclusion within U.S. settler society. This paper critically interrogates this rationale within the context of the ongoing and increasing criminalization and imprisonment of Black and Latinx girls (Davis & Shaylor, 2001).

Authors

• Casey Philip Wong, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jamelia Nicole Harris, University of California - Los Angeles