UNCIVIL YOUTH

Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality

By Soo Ah Kwon

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5405-5

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixIntroduction………………………………………………………1CHAPTER 1 Civilizing Youth against Delinquency……………………….27CHAPTER 2 Youth Organizing and the Nonprofitization of Activism………..45CHAPTER 3 Organizing against Youth Criminalization……………………73CHAPTER 4 Confronting the State…………………………………….95Conclusion………………………………………………………..121Notes…………………………………………………………….131References………………………………………………………..149Index…………………………………………………………….165

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

CIVILIZING YOUTH AGAINST DELINQUENCY

Community-based programs have been and continue to be an importantyouth intervention strategy to enable technologies of affirmative governmentality.In recent decades, a host of private and public actors—foundations,companies, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations—have organizedto meet young people’s specific needs. The services provided are direct(educational tutoring, mental and sexual health services), rehabilitative(drugs, mental illness), and preventive (drugs, violence, pregnancy, riskysexual behavior); promote positive youth development (self-confidence,teamwork, leadership skills); and involve youth activism. In this chapter, Isituate the youth organizing movement and the emergence of these agenciesand actors in the 1990s within a historical context going back to the latenineteenth century, in which programs were created to transform poor,marginalized, immigrant, and ethnic youth to become better democraticsubjects. In the Progressive Era, youth or adolescence was established as asocial category of inquiry and intervention and as a subject of state regulation,a schema that continues to shape young people’s lives in the currentmoment. Progressive Era reformers inaugurated a wide variety of communityinstitutions and programs targeted exclusively at young people thattook the form of after-school programs, industrial and vocational schools,settlement houses, and reformatories. Not coincidentally, the first US juvenilecourt was created in 1899 in Illinois by social reformers as an advance inchild welfare to refine “delinquent” youth. The fact that these institutionswere founded in the same period, I argue, reveals something crucial aboutthe emergence of youth as a category of governance in the current moment.

Those who wanted to make youth into better democratic subjects in thelate nineteenth century did not acknowledge a sense of individual youthagency like the one we see as part of affirmative governmentality today. Nordid speaking of a youth delinquent then connote images of the super-predatoryoung criminal of color as it does today. But these early youthintervention institutions and strategies of social control did set a precedentfound in current relations of power to care and to govern. Moreover, liketoday, strategies of youth care and control were related to categories ofclass, race, and gender and involved interrelationships between state andcivil society. I touch on youth intervention strategies of the late nineteenthand early twentieth century not to produce a historical account, but ratherto show that current youth organizing and activist programs are the latestpermutation of youth improvement techniques that represent linked strategiesof social control to empower and to criminalize.

Youth and Adolescence:A Special Category of Social Care and Control

The subjugation of young people as a powerless group in need of improvement(as in community-based youth programs) or punishment (as in thejuvenile justice system), as well as a subjective population capable of reformand self-empowerment, depends on the creation and manageability ofyoung people as a problematic category of inquiry and a target of intervention.Social investments in enabling and controlling young people can betraced to the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, particularly toinstitutional and ideological movements in the Progressive Era and the”benevolent” social reform efforts by its “child-savers”—”an amalgam ofphilanthropists, middle-class reformers and professionals.” This was aperiod of tremendous social change in the United States. As Anthony Plattnotes, the child-saving movement “reflected massive changes in the modeof production, from laissez-faire to monopoly capitalism, and in strategiesof social control, from inefficient repression to welfare state benevolence.”Rapid capitalist expansion and the shift in labor from agriculture to urbanfactories accompanied migration to the cities, especially among youngwomen; and increasing immigration widened social inequality and heightenedsocial turmoil. Faced with growing social concerns over crime, disease,and social deterioration, as well as social unrest resulting from theseconditions, Progressive Era reformers needed to ameliorate the poor livingconditions of less-privileged, city-dwelling counterparts. Also of socialconcern were the immigrants newly arrived from Southern, Eastern, andCentral Europe who were not quite considered white (such as Greek, Irish,Italian, and Jewish immigrants). In a period of increased immigration(thirteen million new European immigrants arrived between 1886 and1925), Asian exclusion laws, and legal challenges to race-based citizenship,social reformers ameliorated social anxieties about race and racial and classinequality by targeting their efforts at rescuing a select group of Europeanimmigrants–still-developing children and youth—deemed worthy of rescue.Progressive Era reformers, businessmen, cultural elites, and politiciansalike were particularly distressed by the vices and “degeneracy” of thesepoor urban dwellers.

Thus, young people became a special category of concern serving asimportant metaphors for reshaping a society in transition. Attempts toregulate young people relied on emerging notions of science and medicalknowledge to categorize, identify, diagnose, and treat certain subjects. Developmentsin the social and life sciences that focused on adolescence as atopic of inquiry and object of research converged to cement adolescence asa distinct life stage in need of intervention and social control. In 1904 thepsychologist G. Stanley Hall published his very influential Adolescence: ItsPsychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex,Crime, and Religion. The book characterized adolescence as a distinctphysical and psychological stage of storm and stress and described youngpeople as experiencing hormonal and emotional turmoil, a portrayal thatis now commonly accepted. Hall presented parallels between human developmentand human evolution, naturalizing adolescence as a discrete phasecharacterized by traits that are biological (physical and hormonal changes),psychological (emotional instability, irresponsibility, frivolous behavior),and social (rebellion, orientation toward peers). Hall also standardized”normal” adolescent development and the adolescent as a white, heterosexual,middle-class male against which non-normative young peoplecould be judged—and then treated in social programs. Youth interventionapproaches are often based on such deeply naturalized biological assumptions,through which the impetus to protect young people presumes theirinnocence and immaturity, while discourses to regulate them depend onwidespread beliefs of their uncontrollable hormones and emotions. Whatis significant about this categorization of young people as an object ofknowledge is their social construction as subjects of governance and intervention.Barbara Cruikshank writes: “For social programs to be territorialized,they must be known. For government to solve the ‘social problems’ ofpoverty, delinquency, dependency, crime, self-esteem, and so on, it musthave a certain kind of knowledge that is measurable, specific, and calculable,knowledge that can be organized into governmental solutions. Socialscientific knowledge is central to the government of the poor, to the veryformation of the poor as an identifiable group.”

The period in which young people became legitimate objects of scientificinquiry and knowledge also coincided with the creation of social programsand institutions that segregated young people into age-specific spaces forintervention. Establishment of new institutions and programs affirmed thatyoung people were fundamentally different from adults and were specialsubjects in need of adult care and control. The phasing out of child labor andstate enactment of school attendance laws expanded educational institutionsand services. Social and community programs were established to dealwith young people outside schools, in both informal and formal groupsfound at settlement houses, after-school programs, public parks and recreationfacilities, and private industrial and vocational schools. Juvenile courtsand affiliated correctional centers—including halfway houses, shelters,camps, maternity homes, and reformatories—were also instituted at thistime. These various social programs for young people were based on numerousrationales and provided a wide range of services, but they had in commonthe role of reforming and training poor, immigrant, and marginalizedyoung people to become better citizen-subjects. In his historical study ofafter-school programs, Robert Halpern observes: “Progressive reformersbegan reinterpreting the ‘problem’ of working-class children’s out-of-schooltime as an opportunity, to use that time to improve those children, andthrough that effort ultimately to improve society.” The management ofyoung people was based on biological and psychological assumptions oftheir vulnerability and uncontrollability, and these intervention programswere posed as an opportunity to protect young men and women from therisks of crime, poverty, and other social ills. In tackling issues stemmingfrom the perceived negligence and inadequacy of immigrant parents, thevices and dangers of the city streets, and female sexual immorality, youthintervention programs reflected social concerns and tensions over race, class,and gender that were shrouded by the premise of benevolence and reform.

Philanthropy, Reformers, andCommunity Programs of Care and Reform

Jane Addams, the most widely recognized and celebrated reformer of theProgressive Era and, with Ellen Starr, cofounder of the Hull House settlementin 1889, best exemplified the progressive tradition of reform andsocial control. For Addams and her fellow child-savers, youth were in needof control and it was the reformers’ responsibility to care for them; neglectingto provide youth with wholesome activities would lead to delinquencyand other unproductive behavior. As Addams wrote in her widely read TheSpirit of Youth and the City Streets, first published in 1909: “To fail toprovide for the recreation of youth, is not only to deprive all of them oftheir natural form of expression, but is certain to subject some of them tothe overwhelming temptation of illicit and soul-destroying pleasures.”One of the earliest activities that Addams and Starr offered at the HullHouse were clubs and classes to expose their less fortunate residents to finearts and literature: “One of their primary tasks, they believed, was to bringan appreciation of beauty and great art to those forced to live in the draband unattractive slums.” These clubs and classes were soon joined by akindergarten, homemakers’ clubs, cooperative residence for working girls,music school, sewing and book clubs, and many other activities. The HullHouse instigated what became a national movement—by 1911 there weremore than four hundred social settlements across the country.

In addition to settlement houses, other social agencies provided activitiesincluding after-school programs, industrial training classes, church programs,and clubs. For instance, after-school programs were first started assmall “boys clubs” that in part grew out of the limits of settlement housesto provide for “boys’ work,” as these places were viewed as more suited forgirls. These after-school programs had a variety of sponsoring agencies,including churches, YMCAS, municipal departments of parks and recreations,libraries, and some schools. An example was the North BennetStreet Industrial School, “a charitable institution dedicated to providingsocial services, industrial and vocational training, and Americanizationprograms to immigrants in the North End of Boston.”

In 1899, as noted previously, the first US juvenile court was created inIllinois, across the street from the Hull House in Chicago and in closeconnection with its reformers. A fundamental rationalization for a juvenilecourt system was the need to rescue children from existing jails and separatethem from criminal adult ovenders. The juvenile justice court wasbased on the premise of the British doctrine of parens patriae, the state asparent and as an agent of care. Platt writes that the Chicago Bar Associationviewed the 1899 Illinois juvenile court act as follows: “that the State, actingthrough the Juvenile Court, exercises that tender solicitude and care overits neglected, dependent wards that a wise and loving parent would exercisewith reference to his own children under similar circumstances.” Thispremise also holds that the state has the right and responsibility (andpower) to intervene in the welfare of the dependent, neglected, or delinquentchild: “The courts could also commit [to an institution] childrenwho were found to be ‘destitute of proper parental care, or growing up inmendicancy, ignorance, idleness or vice.'” Entrenched in a discourse ofrehabilitation, the dominant prescription was therapy, not punishment.The titles given to individual actors who worked with young people is acase in point: court judges were referred to as “doctor-counselors”; lawyerswere “therapists”; and prison (detention) guards were “reform doctors.”Supporters of the Hull House served as the first probation officer of thejuvenile court (Alzina Stevens) and chairwomen of the Juvenile CourtCommittee (Julia Lathrop and Louise Bowen). Touted as a system ofreform and rehabilitation, the “child-savers hoped to demonstrate thatdelinquents were capable of being converted into law-abiding citizens.”The most highly regarded form of youth rehabilitation was the reformatory,where city youth were sent to an institution in the country to beseparated from the vices of urban life and their unfit parents for an indeterminateperiod of healthy treatment, found in a rural life and agriculturallabor.

Social and community programs, including juvenile court, were largelyestablished by the charitable donations of wealthy philanthropists whowere members of the cultural and political elite. For instance, the NorthBennet Street Industrial School was established in 1880 by Pauline AgassizShaw, the daughter of an affluent family, and was put under the directionof the Associated Charities of Boston, a philanthropic organization servingthe needs of immigrants in Boston’s North End. The Hull House wassupported by a distinguished list of prosperous patrons, many who wereprominent society women who donated time and money to the settlementhouse. The bulk of people who carried out youth reform were women,many of them wives and daughters of the industrial gentry. Well educatedand well traveled, they came from privileged social and political backgrounds.Addams was the scion of a wealthy family, and her father was aRepublican senator in the Illinois legislature. She was the first woman toreceive a bachelor’s degree from Rockford Female Seminary (renamedRockford College), where she met Ellen Starr—the cofounder of the HullHouse. When faced with changing domestic roles wrought by separation ofhome and work, these women found a niche in philanthropy—either astraditional benefactresses of society or as career women rescuing and savingchildren and youth. The very forces that created social anxiety overtheir poorer counterparts enabled these women to take on more prominentsocial roles. Becoming frontline workers in newly established youthintervention programs, they were teachers, social workers, juvenile courtwardens and officers, and police officers, and they ran reformatories.Through such roles, these middle-class women attained new social andprofessional status: it was generally believed that child-saving work wasmore suited for women than men, based on women’s ability to nurture andcare—especially in dealing with delinquents.

Ironically, in their new professional roles, these women enforced traditionalideals of gender, home, and family, turning their attention to immigrantyouth and the perceived inadequacy of their recently arrived parents.Halpern writes that after-school “sponsors commonly cited family neglectand inadequacy as a rationale for their work. Immigrant parents weredeemed incapable of preparing their children for the demands of a complex,industrial society; and their values were deemed irrelevant, evenharmful, to their children.” The project of Americanization and assimilationwas central to these social and community programs. At the HullHouse there was “basic instruction in English language and Americangovernment to aid the immigrant who was desperately trying to learn newAmerican ways.” Kate Larson observes of the North Bennet Street IndustrialSchool that “it was through the multitude of literary, debate, andathletic clubs for boys and young men, and sewing, cooking, and a fewliterary clubs for girls and young women that reformers and immigrantsoften experienced their first cross-class and cross-cultural exchanges.”The hope was that by directly exposing immigrant children to upper-middle-class,well-educated volunteers and social reformers, the latter’svalues and decorum could be learned by and transferred to the former.Furthermore, such exposure would civilize others: “The goal here was bothto change the children’s own values and behavior and to use children tochange the values and behavior of their parents, as new practices werebrought home.”

Community Programs againstDelinquency and Sexual Immorality

Although social and community programs were promoted as a means ofreforming children and youth to become better citizens, the programs werealso a medium of social control. Young people were the subjects that cameto be the focus of social anxieties over urbanization, increasing social inequality,crime, and changing sexual norms. Like other reformers, Addamssaw social and community programs, including juvenile justice, as an opportunityto provide proper guidance of young people’s unfettered timeand deter them from juvenile delinquency and crime. Moreover, it wasbelieved that young people’s propensity for such risks and risky behaviorwas based on their innate immaturity and volatility, a belief informed byprevailing conceptions of adolescence as a distinct stage of life that neededproper care and control. In a review of material collected from juvenilecourts by participants at the Hull House, Addams asserted: “The youngpeople are overborne by their own undirected and misguided energies. Amere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of obstreperousness exposesa promising boy to arrest and imprisonment, an accidental combinationof circumstances too complicated and overwhelming to be coped withby an immature mind, condemns a growing lad to a criminal career.”
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