The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship : Race and Revolt in Education

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?   The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life.

Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.   The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more.