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This chapter examines the way in which racialized tracking creates racial distinctions among students that lead to the interpretation of academic achievement as acting white. It begins with a short discussion of two topics: the meaning and use of the broad concept of acting white among African Americans; and the issue of racial disparities in elementary school gifted programs and race talk among pre-adolescents. The chapter then looks at the experiences of high-achieving black adolescents at nineteen public high schools in North Carolina. Finally, it investigates why some high-achieving black youth are targeted with the acting white slur while many others, including peers at the same school, are not.

In the Progressive Era South, Reconstruction gave way to the rise of white supremacist redemption, subjecting black youths and communities to more explicitly neglectful, exploitative, and violent forms of Jim Crow juvenile justice. North and South, growing juvenile court communities embraced the racial project of white citizen and state building, prioritizing white youth opportunity and community interests in their pursuit of rehabilitative ideals. The institutionalization of separate and unequal juvenile justice throughout the United States, not a new multiracial democracy, was the Progressive Era legacy of juvenile justice reform in the African American experience. This chapter examines how Progressive Era black youths and communities experienced the emergence of the juvenile court, an encounter dramatized by mass black migration to urban centers where modern juvenile courts emerged.

This chapter examines the changing racial politics of juvenile justice in the postintegration period (1954–70) to assess whether the main agenda was realized. It compares and contrasts developments in the American South, where opposition to racial integration still raged, with the unique black urban metropolis of Harlem, where black child-saving attained its most robust expression, to gauge the variable impact of court-ordered integration. In the 1950s and 1960s, sporadic signs appeared of increasing liberal experimentation with racialized social control, especially where earlier progress in establishing equal protection and representation enabled the development of a more cooperative, multiracial parental state. This chapter also shows that, despite important signs of progress early in the civil rights era, integrated juvenile justice systems ultimately showed strain and buckled under the weight of somewhat unreasonable expectations that they would institutionalize racial justice.

This chapter provides an account of this paradoxical and tragic reformulation of racial oppression and domination in the post-civil rights period. Formal integration reconfigured black youth opportunity and community influence in American juvenile justice, but it failed to institutionalize racially democratic control. Instead, subsequent cultural and institutional changes related to a more general late-twentieth-century retraction of the liberal welfare state drained the progressive utility of integration, reducing black youth and community incorporation to more symbolic forms of inclusion. In contemporary juvenile justice, the “accountability movement” reconfigured the social contractual terms of juvenile justice and the organization of decision-making in juvenile justice in ways that undermined the potential for racially democratic control.

The second wave of black child-saving initiatives was a duality of structure and agency rooted within and shaping a changing racial terrain. This chapter emphasizes the evolution of a distinct sense of self and society among black women and men after World War I, especially in the urban North. This played a role in the changing outlook and organization of black child-saving initiatives. A new self-concept and social consciousness blended gender, race, and class identities to shape more assertive, professional, and eclectic icons of the modern race man and woman. These identities intermixed notions such as the modern woman, the New Negro, and the race expert. This catalyzed, divided, and, eventually, isolated black civic leaders and organizations. This chapter also focuses on the resources mobilized during the second wave. Vanguard efforts had relied almost exclusively on the social networks and resources of black clubwomen's associations. The more robust organizational and resource base of the growing civil rights establishment supported the new leadership of black professional race experts.

The growth of the movement in Wilmington was stimulated by the presence of organizations dedicated to breaking through the suffocating restrictions of paternalism that the white elite of North Carolina and elsewhere deployed to manage the change in the racial order that they were knew they would not be able to stop. The chapter follows three organizations in North Carolina as they promoted their variants of black nationalism and Black Power and struggled to break the gradualist consensus on race liberation: the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, the Wilmington Movement organized by the North Carolina chapter of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student (later Youth) Organization for Black Unity. Bombastic Black Power rhetoric was part of the three organization’s plans, and the idea that emboldening blacks and scaring whites could shake things up and alter the balance of power. But they tested their theories of social change in practice, and it was through that process that the organizations made gains.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century foundations of Jim Crow juvenile justice, including the racialized applications of common law protections, the racial politics of houses of refuge, and the often horrific ordeals of black youths in the antebellum South. This illustrates how white racial group prerogatives and privileges shaped the administration of these earliest institutional reforms. Throughout the United States, these racialized denials of protection under the law and of democratic participation undermined black youth and community claims to opportunity or representation in the emerging juvenile justice system. Ultimately, this new institution of racialized social control, the white-dominated parental state, was organized to underdevelop black citizens deemed delinquent and black civil society generally and, thus, to maintain the boundaries of a white democracy. For that reason, turn-of-the-century black civic leaders organized to improve the life chances of black youths, and prospects for racial equality in American democracy, through juvenile justice reform.

This chapter focuses on the societal mechanisms and implications of Jim Crow juvenile justice. This sociological interpretation helps account for the formation and endurance of this peculiar institution while also providing a context for the oppositional racial project it inspired—the black child-saving movement. The basic argument here is that Jim Crow juvenile justice was a racially oppressive social system that grew and flourished amid the racial group power imbalance created by denials of black representation. Black Americans showed tremendous concern for black youth protection, in the interest of youth and community welfare, yet white domination of the public sphere led to monopolization of child-welfare resources and authority. Thus, Jim Crow juvenile justice was defined by a dynamic of underdevelopment, a systematic attempt to deny black youth (and, therefore, community) development, or self-realization, through the racially selective provision of parental state resources. In the urban North, this oppression typically manifested as institutionalized neglect or subtle exploitation, while the oppression of black youths and communities in the South often took more explicit, violent, and politically expressive forms.

This chapter describes the role of youth-based activism by highlighting the origins, development, and collapse of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), and its interaction with a diverse movement infrastructure composed of black progressive and white leftist groups. The SNYC was the most important black youth formation of the pre–Cold War era, implementing grassroots initiatives that pushed for voting rights, desegregation, and economic justice for black workers. This movement infrastructure was dynamic, routinely changing, and shaped by the shifting political, economic, and international contexts of the Great Depression and World War II periods, which further influenced the political orientations of black radical youth. However, this infrastructure also caused the group's collapse as anticommunist hysteria after World War II swept the nation.

Black opposition to Jim Crow juvenile justice systems went through waves of social action by the black child-saving movement. The movement's phases are distinguished by historical period as well as by variations in black social status, oppositional politics, and social movement resources. This chapter covers the first wave of reform, which commenced in the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1920s. This chapter surveys its logic and organization, including its background, ideology, and the way in which the resources of early reformers shaped and limited their collective efficacy and societal impact. Pragmatic and conservative strategies, extremely limited political capital, and a reliance on private resources moderated their advances. Yet this early effort to “uplift the race” through self-help set the stage for future civil rights challenges and the eventual legal demise of Jim Crow juvenile justice.

This chapter offers an overview of youth-based activism. It pays attention to four theoretical concerns: the political status of black youth in the post-civil rights era, the significance of movement infrastructures that buttress youth-based activism, the impact of institutional leveraging on transformational movements, and how movement bridge-builders use creative organizing strategies, such as framing, indigenous resources, and positionality, to stimulate youth-based movements and expand the opportunity structure of youth activism. The organizing strategies utilized by youth-based activist groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) pushed them into becoming the “shock troops” of the Civil Rights movement. This analysis, however, discounts the multiple identities among young activists and varied interpretations of what exactly is a youth activist. The chapter explores how, despite being at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement, young activists, including those in the same organization and from the same racial background, may be equally influenced by competing identities such as gender, region, and class.

This book brings together findings from the author's years spent pondering the questions related to black adults' experience and how they have shaped the development of American juvenile justice, and the legacies or lessons today of this racial history. It details the sociohistorical origins and organization of Jim Crow juvenile justice as well as the social movement by generations of black Americans to replace the white supremacist parental state with an idealized racial structure of democratic social control. The anticipated racially democratic juvenile justice system was thought to provide for equal black youth opportunity and black adult representation or authority in the administration of liberal rehabilitative ideals, enlisting the supposed manufactory of citizens in the production of a racially inclusive liberal democracy. Over a century after the birth of Jim Crow juvenile justice, this book offers a detailed account of this peculiar institution and how it collided with black freedom dreams to spawn a long movement on behalf of that entity W. E. B. DuBois called “the immortal child,” in a veiled reference to group fate. This book argues that this racial history of juvenile justice helps fill the research gaps in the historical literature and challenges much of what has been established as general institutional history.

Owing to the cultural and political link between child development and social welfare, juvenile social control became a concern for various, often competing constituencies interested in shaping the nation. That link was central to the republican idealism of early American juvenile justice, the development of Jim Crow juvenile justice, and the nearly century-long struggle to advance racial democracy within and through juvenile social control. This chapter examines the background of the juvenile rehabilitative ideal and its roots in American liberal-democratic idealism. Mainstream concerns with shaping and molding wayward, neglected, and criminal youths were explicitly linked to unease over the well-being of civil society and the fate of liberal democracy. This setting is vital to understanding why juvenile justice became an early and enduring feature in the struggle over the relation between race and American democracy.

This chapter employs intersectionality as a critical lens to interrogate the ways that race, gender, class, and sexuality impact black adolescents' experiences of child sexual exploitation (CSE). In particular, the exploration is anchored in an intersectional analysis to extend understandings of the nuanced ways in which race-constructed otherness is experienced by young black people affected by sexual exploitation. It first briefly sketches the key messages from the literature on CSE and black children. The chapter next provides an overview of the intersectionality theoretical framework. Finally, it uses a case study, from the Serious Case Review (SCR) of child R, a 15-year-old black girl in the looked-after system, as an exemplar. From there, it presents ways that an intersectional lens can offer some analytical tools to gain a deeper insight into the challenges for black youths at risk of abusive and exploitative relationships. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the implications for a child-focused approach.

Obscured by national preoccupation with immigration and new arrivals, the discrimination and disadvantage experienced by Liverpool-born black youths lay concealed and festering beneath the spurious local rhetoric of harmonious relations espoused by politicians and the media. Denied any recognition of their ‘special but not separate’ needs, Liverpool-born black youths were harassed by the police in the moral panic over mugging. While cordial relations between the police and black community leaders came to an abrupt end, black youths reacted more forcefully, rejecting mainstream values in favour of ‘black power’. As academics and professionals working in the field warned the Select Committee on Race Relations, Liverpool was no longer the role model but an object lesson, foreshadowing problems soon to come elsewhere. The riots of 1972 were the siren call, warning of trouble ahead in other cities as British-born black children of the ‘Empire Windrush’ generation approached adolescence, alienation and racial polarisation.

This chapter focuses on the conflicts around Skyline High School between black middle-class parents and white homeowners who fought over whether children at the school were dangerous criminals or innocent kids. It begins with a portrait of Loraine and James Smith, a couple who led very active political lives fighting to improve Oakland's public schools. It then considers how the history of Skyline High School made the politics of youth in the neighborhood particularly racially charged before turning to the debate over whether or not youth at the school were dangerous or criminal. In particular, it examines white neighbors' calls for color-blindness and the argument of black parents in defense of their children against the image of black youth criminality. Finally, it explores the polarized racial politics around Skyline High School that led black parent activists to engage in spatial politics in the hills.

This chapter examines the collective identities of black youth in Hamilton, Alabama. It shows that young people consider themselves decidedly rural, albeit in new ways. It first explains the prominence of a rural, southern identity among Hamilton’s young people and how such identity is reinforced by popular culture. Using moral panics about the negative influence of popular culture, it then explores how young people interact with translocal influences. It also highlights young people’s use of popular culture to reaffirm rather than destroy the norms, values, and experiences that originate from the local environment. The chapter shows that, contrary to widespread stereotypes, many young Hamiltonians have traveled outside of Alabama more than once, and that these trips have highlighted their distinction from northerners in many ways such as clothing and accents.