‘Hella ghetto!’: (dis)locating race and class consciousness in youth discourses of ghetto spaces, subjects and schools

Abstract

Based on analysis of interviews conducted during 2008-2009 in Oakland, California, this paper examines how narratives of inner-city youth reinforce and destabilize mainstream conceptions of ‘ghetto.’ The paper demonstrates that inner-city youth discourses regarding ‘ghetto’ spaces, subjects and schools often exemplify a consciousness informed by both counter-hegemonic insights and internalized psychological trauma. In other words, the interviewed youth reconstitute the term ‘ghetto’ to signify structural and cultural processes of dislocation occurring in their neighborhood through narratives characterized by contradiction. This finding is significant because it questions how to analyze non-white narratives and offers ‘dislocated consciousness’ as an interpretive lens grounded in the contradictions of subaltern consciousness theorized by W.E.B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci. By developing the concept of ‘dislocation’ to illuminate how such youth negotiate, resist and internalize the material and ideological structures that condition their existence, this study contributes to the existing literature on race and class consciousness of urban youth. The paper concludes by exploring how strategies urban youth utilize to come to terms with their lives can provide new understandings of urban communities and schooling.

“I Am Not a Shelter!”: Stigma and Social Boundaries in Teachers’ Accounts of Students’ Experience in Separate “Sheltered” English Learner Classrooms

“…Others' conceptualizations of teachers (e.g., Katz, 1999;Stanton-Salazar, 2001Valenzuela, 1999) highlight their institutional roles, mediating students' experience and trajectories. However, teachers do so within larger institutional frames, policies, and structures embedded in local contexts that contribute to students' experiences of dislocation from their schools and communities (Sung, 2013).…”

Youth, Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden, New Jersey

“…These power dynamics are evident in the racialisation of place (Anderson ; Gilmore ; Nayak ; Simmons ), where the symbolic and material dimensions of place‐making are deeply intertwined. For example, racist ideas about the “ghetto” not only shape depictions of poor communities of colour (Sung ), but also justify discriminatory policies and processes. These range from aggressive policing and surveillance regimes (Rios ), to “revitalisation” projects that ultimately serve to displace poor residents (August ; Kipfer ), as well as inequitable geographies of food access that are organised around patterns of racial segregation (Ramirez ; Reese ).…”

Educating 'Gangsters': Social space, informal learning and becoming 'Gang' involved

“…Paperson, 2010). of the young people in the ex-mining communities discussed earlier (Bright, 2011: 63, 70, 75;Bright, 2012: 221, 225), of internalised trauma (Sung, 2013).…”

“…From without is not just the obvious structural confines, or reflective caste systems imposed by teachers based on class / economic status / race (Rist, 1970), or other negative teacher attitudinal behaviours (Sung, 2013), but the psycho-social reverence for the 'braining down' and 'keeping it real' whereby those who revere such a mode of being and celebrate those who act down and real there is a confusion between misplaced heroism and anarchism (cf. Crouch, 1999: 105 …”

“…Much has been said of the term ghetto, mostly in pejorative terms (Sung, 2013), or what and where ghettos may be and how they are formed / sustained (for instance Wacquant, 2011 In following Wacquant a ghetto can begin by the 'traditional domains' (Wacquant, 2011: 1) of a ghetto: these being a spatially bound urban locale (Wacquant, 2011;Sung, 2013), an institutional network of a distinct group (Wacquant, 2011;Sung, 2013) and a '… cognitive constellation […] entailing the socio-moral isolation of a stigmatised category …' (Wacquant, 2011: 1).…”