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Emotional counterpublics: the feeling of racial justice

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EMOTIONAL COUNTERPUBLICS:
THE FEELING OF RACIAL JUSTICE

by

May Hong-Ying Lin

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
SOCIOLOGY

December 2020

Copyright 2020 May Hong-Ying Lin
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Acknowledgements
This project is in large part about the transformational power of care, and these
acknowledgements highlight just a few of the people and communities who have buoyed me
with their radically generous care. First and foremost, I am forever grateful to the youth and adult
organizers of “YPEJ” and “SEAP,” who welcomed me warmly into their spaces and shared their
stories and full humanity with me. I strive primarily to do you justice. Your movement building
and beloved community continually grounded me, instilled me with hope and life, and reminded
me of what is really at stake—especially when I felt bogged down by the drudgeries of the
academy and the discrepancy between heady theory and the desperate need for action. I am
forever moved by how you have continued to make the impossible possible. And I have felt
healed by the love and care you embody for each other and so graciously extended to me.
I am immeasurably indebted to Veronica Terriquez, who brought me into sociology and
who has patiently guided me throughout this entire process, even before the seed of the idea of a
Sociology PhD program existed in my brain. Veronica is one of my most influential role
models—she showed me the possibilities of producing scholarship that can actually be wielded
by youth organizing groups in concrete ways to bolster their movements. I am heartened by
Veronica because she truly walks the walk of justice in every aspect of what she does: not only
does she bridge university with community needs, she remakes academic spaces to be more just,
in multiple ways. I am deeply grateful for Veronica’s generosity, whether in the form of paid RA
opportunities, co-authoring articles and reports, enabling me to actually get published, reading
draft after draft of papers, proposals, and chapters despite the enormous amount on her plate, or
expressing her encouragement and belief in me. Whenever I felt a lack of faith in my own
capabilities, Veronica’s kind mentorship kept me going.
Manuel Pastor has been another exemplar for public sociology and community-engaged
scholarship. I am also deeply grateful for Manuel and Rhonda for bringing me on board at PERE,
which has been another lifeline and model for how to do scholarship that matters, while creating
a home for me amongst many intelligent, kind, and fun people who wield their smarts for public
good. Manuel has also provided me with many critical opportunities to build my skills and get
published across different public facing platforms. Manuel’s effortless eloquence, ability to hold
any crowd’s attention, ability to package complicated ideas in accessible and powerful ways, and
commitment to rigorous scholarship in the name of justice have provided me with another
exemplar of the type of scholar I want to be.
Leland Saito is another reason that I went into sociology; his book on Asian Americans
and Latinos in the San Gabriel Valley has been foundational in my critical understandings of
race as relational, and a model for how to bring together the social sciences and Ethnic Studies. I
am grateful to Leland for guiding me through my qualifying exams process and for being one of
a very few people in the academy who have always inquired about my well-being as a human
being, not just a student. Leland has listened patiently while I rambled about my inchoate ideas,
helped me begin to give rough shape to these ideas, and remained encouraging throughout it at
all. Like many other students of color, I have been the beneficiary of Leland’s kindness,
patience, and genuine care that served as a critical lifeline through the challenges of this
program.
Jane Junn is an example of how you can be brilliant, kind, and generous, and not have to
sacrifice any of these traits for the other. It was Jane’s work that first inspired me to write my
first paper on Asian American racial consciousness and organizing. Despite me being a random
student in another department, Jane always made time for me, whether to meet in person or to
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read my draft manuscripts and multiple iterations of my first solo-authored article that was
inspired in large part by her work. Jane’s ability to give simultaneously critical and incisive
feedback which helped me better my work, while also encouraging me and expressing belief in
my intellectual capabilities, is tremendous and the epitome of what an academic mentor should
be. Her willingness to leverage her own power for kindness and justice within the ivory tower is
also an inspiration for how to be courageous even in cruel and unjust spaces.
Stachelle, Amber, Melissa, and Lisa, thank you for all that you do to run this department
and to cheer up and support graduate students, whether through listening, notes of
encouragement, and/or sharing hilarious stories. Stachelle, so many of us, especially students of
color and otherwise marginalized students, owe you a huge debt of gratitude for your tremendous
kindness and support that is at the crux of how many of us are able to stay and weather the storm.
Tk has cared for me in innumerable ways and helped keep me human by unconditionally
showering me with generous care, patience, love, and affection even when my suffering rendered
me insufferable. Thank you for gluing me back together, feeding me in ways both literal and
figurative, making me laugh, going on adventures with me, and indulging in complete nonsense.
For my friends inside and outside of the academy, you are another main reason I not only
survived but managed to have a bit of fun along the way. I learned how to ask and receive help in
part because of all the support you so willingly provided me in any way that I needed it at all,
whether it was writing together, reading and giving feedback on papers that didn’t yet make
much sense, listening to and giving feedback on mock job talks and teaching demos, or having
fun together. Candipan, Diana, Robert, Carolyn, Amanda, LaToya, Lizette, Karina, Blanca, Jude,
Thai, Minwoo, Preeti, Sean, Muriel, Vishnu, Ben, Diane, Phyllis, Jung, Andrew, Brett, Viet,
Matt, Raissa, Chun Mei, Mike, Kathy, Trung, Jeffer, Kristin, Clare, Sophia, Hyeyoung, Michela.
Thank you and I’m sorry for any I forgot.
Thank you to my parents for providing for me the best that they can. My mom is an
unapologetic feminist and her feisty unwillingness to bend to others’ stereotypical tropes have
always been an inspiration for how to be. Thank you for doing everything you can to ease the
burden and for feeding me. My dad’s sense of humor and intellectual curiosity are another
critical part of who I am. I am impressed with their pluckiness and survival.
This dissertation is dedicated to my late brother Hong, my only sibling. I wouldn’t value
racial or social justice, nor have pursued the journey that I have, without my brother Hong’s
influence. He put the worm of Ethnic Studies in my brain after he took classes at Berkeley. I was
determined to be just like him and read the Autobiography of Malcolm X too. Maybe he even
bought me an extra one after I insisted that I, too, was going to read it, just like him. After he
majored in Rhetoric and enraged my parents, I, too, wanted to major in something in college that
was meaningful with the side benefit of enraging my parents. Majoring in Ethnic Studies in
college would have been a possibility if he hadn’t planted that seed in my brain so many years
before. It is also his unnecessary and terrible death that has refigured my priorities, reminded me
of what really matters, and pushed me to live a fuller, more enjoyable, more adventurous, more
loving life, as he embodied so unapologetically.

iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... ii
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1. Emotions at the Heart of Racial Injustice and Justice ............................................ 1
Engaging Critical Race, Intersectionality, Social Movements, and Health Interdisciplinary
Scholarship .................................................................................................................................. 3
Research Design: Organizational Background and Approaches ............................................... 22
Chapter Outline ......................................................................................................................... 32

Chapter 2. Contextualizing the Organizations ......................................................................... 35
Background: Setting and Structure ............................................................................................ 35
Organizational Activities ........................................................................................................... 39
Pacific City Contexts: Relational Racialization of Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian
Americans .................................................................................................................................. 50

Chapter 3. “School Doesn’t Care about What I think or Feel”: Why Youth Need Emotional
Counterpublics ............................................................................................................................. 59
Contextualization within literature: ........................................................................................... 60
How Punitive Schools Feel: Hostile Emotional Cultures .......................................................... 67
Emotional Gaslighting & Silencing ........................................................................................... 79

Chapter 4. Caring for the Self in Emotional Counterpublics: Bridging the Paradoxes of
Personal and Political .................................................................................................................. 91
Centering Race, Gender, Class, and Age: Synthesizing the Literatures .................................... 93
Foregrounding Healing .............................................................................................................. 94
Tensions between Individual and Collective Resistance ........................................................... 95
Saving and/or Sacrificing the Self ........................................................................................... 100
Time Constraints ...................................................................................................................... 113
Naming Trauma ....................................................................................................................... 122
Tensions in Practicing Self-Care and Healing ......................................................................... 131
Discussion and Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 134

Chapter 5. Interpersonal Dimensions of Emotional Counterpublics: “We’re Creating
Something Different” ................................................................................................................ 138
Alternative emotion rules in social movements ...................................................................... 139
Collective Emotionality: Community Agreements, Embodied Support, Consent .................. 143
Valuing Full, Complex Humanity ........................................................................................... 155
Affective Capital: Organizational Emotional Terrains & Loving Leadership Development .. 164
Dilemmas: Cognizance of Emotional Labor ........................................................................... 177
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 179

Chapter 6. Show Youth the Love, Show Youth the Money: Emotional Counterpublics and
Institutional Transformation .................................................................................................... 181
Centering Care, Redefining youth needs: Relationship Centered Schools & Invest in Youth 182
v
Tensions Around Care ............................................................................................................. 199
Budgets as Schisms of Care ..................................................................................................... 204
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 222

Chapter 7. Emotional Counterpublics amidst “Converging Pandemics” ............................ 225

Appendix: Positionality and Power in Research ........................................................................ 231
My Role as a YPEJ Research Associate .................................................................................. 231
Building Relationships and Trust: YPEJ ................................................................................. 232
Building Relationships: SEAP ................................................................................................. 233
Positionality and Participation ................................................................................................. 233

References ................................................................................................................................... 237

vi
Abstract
Emotions are an engine of racial and intersectional inequality—whether the emotions of
Black and Brown youth are derided, or emotions of white decision-makers upheld as
authoritative fact. And yet, social science theories of social movements have shied away from
investigating how emotions matter in racialized resistance. This study puts forth a framework of
“emotional counterpublics.” Emotional counterpublics are spaces where youth harness emotions
to redefine and expansively enact social change: such as expansively re-imagining strategies for
racial and educational equity and healing wounds from structurally induced trauma. I argue that
youth show how emotions are not just instrumental, but central to social, paradigmatic
transformation. This study expands sociological understandings of dilemmas and possibilities for
rectifying racialized intersectional inequalities and to move beyond the social movements’
literature inclination to focus on structural change aimed solely at the state.
Emotional Counterpublics is based on three years of critical feminist, community-
engaged ethnography in two Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American youth-led, racial
justice organizations in a diverse city in California. Groups engage in leadership development;
political education; policy change campaigns around racial, economic, gender, and education
justice; and holistic youth development. I show how groups harness youth’s emotional and
affective knowledge as “epistemic resources” indicting the abject failure of educational and other
institutions in their lives. Doing so is especially critical because youth are often met with
emotional suppression in other spaces.
Groups practice three main dimensions of emotional counterpublics that knit together the
micro and the macro by transforming the self, interpersonal dynamics, and engaging in structural
change. First, emotional counterpublics encourage youth to recuperate a damaged self by
addressing what I call “paradoxes of the personal and political.” Youth activists can become
politically empowered and recuperate erased selves, but fighting for systemic change can also
exacerbate stresses of everyday survival amidst structural violence. Group strategies to manage
these dilemmas, such as self-care and reclaiming time for rest, form new movement cultures
oriented towards holistic well-being instead of working to exhaustion in the name of justice.
Second, youth and staff forge emotional prefigurative norms of interpersonal dynamics that
embody care and support. I highlight how these norms can be categorized as collective
emotionalities or democratically created agreements on how to be together, spaces for sharing
unfiltered thoughts, and affirmative practices that encourage affective capital. Third, I show how
these practices translate into systemic and institutional transformation that redefine robust
schools and cities. Groups validate youth’s emotions (elsewhere dismissed or even punished) as
critical knowledge about trauma engendered by carceral landscapes and anemic city and school
budgets. They mobilize this emotional knowledge to assess the “success” of institutions in
alternative ways (e.g. beyond test scores) and to propose policies and material investments that
instead center youth’s well-being.
I show how groups seek to heal racialized, gendered, classed trauma—often neglected
both in previous scholarship and by movements themselves. Youth show that emotions are
central to forging social relations not wholly defined by injustice. Embracing youth’s emotional
knowledge, groups value their complex humanity and create new epistemic paradigms. That is,
they refuse the respectability politics that shun emotions as an irrational product of their race,
class, age, and gender. I argue that these emotional counterpublics constitute a paradigm shift
unsettling our most deeply held assumptions about what is needed for social change, particularly
racial justice.
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Chapter 1. Emotions at the Heart of Racial Injustice and Justice
Stomach-twisting anxiety, fiery rage, glimmers of hope, the warm glow of genuine care:
these are some of the emotional paint strokes that stand out to me from my fieldwork. The idea
of “emotional counterpublics” germinated from moments such as these:
Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian youth leaders gathering somberly in the wake of
Trump’s election in November 2016. Nerves, anxiety, grief, and fear are swirling in the air.
Skyler, a longtime student who is Black and queer, folds his lanky arms into his torso. His friend
Kamaria has just recalled to the group how they were verbally harassed with racial slurs on their
way to a protest downtown, and Skyler explains that since the election he has felt paralyzed by
an unrelenting fear of violence at the hands of now emboldened white supremacists. He confides
that he began to dissolve into tears on the bus because he became convinced that the person
sitting next to him was a Trump supporter. Skyler’s comment shows how white supremacy
enacts ever-present fear that polices, surveils, and shrinks his humanity in deeply felt ways—
regardless of whether he has ostensibly reasonable “evidence” of someone’s intent to harm him.
Emotions are central not just to structural violence but to corresponding imaginaries and
practices of resistance and liberation. Almost a year after this moment, life has gone on—if in a
labored and limping way. In the midst of breathless campaign season, organizers surprised me
when they cut phone banking short and transported youth to a grassy cliff overlooking the beach.
Organizers ask youth to cast aside their stresses—about the PSAT the juniors are taking the next
day, about their mountains of school work, about their goals for recruiting new members and
collecting voter registration forms, and their considerable family troubles. Instead, we munch on
frosted donuts, breathe in and out, and scribble the sources of our fears onto a piece of paper.
The organizer collects the written-out fears in a white bucket and lights them aflame with a
2
cigarette lighter. We watch, then the youth exhale a deep breath. A moment of respite, a brief
lifting of all that weighs them down dissipate in the air like the smoke.
Moments like these stretched my political and intellectual understanding of what it means
to carve out a new world that truly values the lives of people of color. As Ta-Nehisi Coates
argues, our academic jargon to describe racism can
“obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips
muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.
You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the
charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (Coates 2015:10)
As I’ve learned from youth leaders, we must also feel resistance, liberation, and possibility
viscerally. This contention is at the heart of the concept of “emotional counterpublics” that I
theorize and describe in this dissertation. I build off concepts of “subaltern counterpublics” as
spaces that amplify the voices of marginalized people, thus advancing alternative political
discourses, identities, and interests that can also transform the broader public sphere (Felski and
Felski 1989; Fraser 1990; Spivak 1988).
I define emotional counterpublics as spaces where youth of color—in this study, Black,
Latinx, and Southeast Asian American, and some other Asian American youth—harness
emotions to redefine and expansively enact social change. First, the naming of “emotions”
honors the centrality of feelings that have long been subordinated via association with
femininity, people of color, and youth—as well as defined in binary opposition to rationality.
Second, the “counter” element of counterpublics points to how youth practice new types and
terrains of emotional possibility elsewhere foreclosed—for example, by unapologetically healing
wounds from structurally induced trauma. Third, the “public” element of counterpublics
emphasizes how youth expansively re-imagine strategies for racial and educational equity and
push for dramatic transformation of institutions and systems. Altogether, youth show that
3
emotions are not just instrumental, but central to social, paradigmatic transformation. These
emotional counterpublics shift paradigms and unsettle our most deeply held assumptions about
what constitutes knowledge and what is needed for social change, particularly racial justice.
It is understandable for social scientists to be suspicious about this proposition. Don’t we
too often see emotions ruling over reason, facts, data, in ways that service injustice,
heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy? It makes sense, then, that our response as reasonable,
justice-inclined social scientists, is to respond with an appeal to facts and our rigorously
researched scholarship. I do not argue against the importance of this research (what did I just
spend seven years doing, after all?) But, I also argue against a response that uncritically accepts a
false dichotomy of facts and reason in binary opposition to emotions. This maintains the same
epistemological hierarchies that dismiss youth, women, non-white people as “too emotional,”
fragile, coddled (Brooks 2020), and “snowflakes,” (Murray 2018). Furthermore, this hierarchy
unnecessarily suffocates our political imagination and enactments. Instead, I argue that young
people of color, often women, queer, and gender non-conforming, challenge us to explode
stifling bounds of what racial justice looks like. Instead of discounting all emotion wholesale,
youth produce new critiques and solutions that would otherwise be ignored should we continue
to deny the power of emotions. In short, youth of color harness emotions in ways that
fundamentally shift social science understandings of social movements and social change.
Engaging Critical Race, Intersectionality, Social Movements, and Health Interdisciplinary
Scholarship
Emotional Counterpublics builds on critical race, intersectionality, social movements,
and health scholarship. Here, I review the literature and explain how I make the following
4
contributions: first, I bring a critical race and intersectional
1
understanding to social movements
literature. Second, I bring emotions to the fore of understanding racialized social change—in
contrast to extant literature on race and social movements that often focuses on cognitive
elements such as identity and engagement with the state for policy change. Meanwhile, studies
on emotions in social movements rarely engage with race, especially as intersectionally shaped.
Third, I build on the growing literature on race and emotions, which has mainly focused on how
emotions perpetuate white supremacy. Instead, I draw from affect theory, cultural studies, and
feminist theory to center resistance and to decenter whiteness. Because these bodies of literature
can be vague on actual practices and challenges of feeling differently, I bring together social
science literature on social movements together with more abstract theories to consider what
feeling differently actually looks like in light of predicaments of enacting change on multiple
social scales.
Infusing Critical Race into Social Movements Scholarship
My dissertation builds on interventions in sociological scholarship on social movements
that has premised theory on Black-led and centered social movements while willfully ignoring
race (Bell 2016; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Bracey 2016; Liu 2017; Luna, Robnett, and Reyes 2016).
For example, political process theory (PPT), a prevailing social movements framework,
emphasizes political opportunities such as the state’s likelihood of repression and openness of
political institutions to change (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996). Bracey (2016) argues that
PPT’s assimilationist bent makes a number of untenable assumptions, including that U.S.
structures are Western, democratic, and centralized; that assimilation is desirable; that dominant

1
I refer primarily to intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age.
5
group prejudices eventually dissolve and do not create long-lasting impediments to movements,
and that the state does not hold capacity to maintain inequality. As such, PPT focuses on the state
as the main site of racial change and assumes linear racial progress, treating ostensible legal
eradication of racial discrimination as the end of racial inequality (Bell 2016; Bracey 2016; Liu
2017).
These assumptions create myopic perceptions of social change that limit our
understandings of “movements’ target, scope, and goals” (Bracey 2016). Mainstream scholarship
presumes that social movements for racial equity primarily aim for full inclusion and recognition
by the state (Liu 2017). This explains the dominant focus on integrationist efforts—that is, Civil
Rights and other rights-seeking movements (Biggs and Andrews 2015; Meyer and Minkoff
2004). Bell (2014) argues that PPT ignores movements such as the Black Power movement as
invalid because they targeted the state as irrevocably racist in ways that PPT could not explain—
for example, via prison breaks, police monitoring (Bell 2014; Nelson 2011a). As a result, social
movements theories do not fully account for how race structures inequality, social relations, and
thus collective behavior in unique ways (Bracey 2016; Liu 2017). Racialized social change
processes remain under-examined.
My dissertation thus builds on scholars who have synthesized critical race,
intersectionality, and social movements theory. First, race—despite the prevalence of colorblind
ideologies (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Saito 2015)—is central, not coincidental to the story of the U.S.,
politics, and thus political participation, engagement, and transformation (Junn and Matto 2008;
Masuoka and Junn 2013). Furthermore, racial change and inequality are driven not only by the
state, but by multiple actors and institutions, on many social levels (Omi and Winant 2014). That
is, racialized, intersecting forms of inequality are persistently reproduced, contested, and
6
negotiated at macro, micro, and meso levels, including individual interactions and non-
governmental institutions and organizations (Bracey 2015; Golash-Boza 2016; Ray et al. 2017).
However, scholarship that centers critical race and social movements still tends to focus
on cognitive and systemic forms of social change—such as collective identities, critical
consciousness, leadership development, or framing. For example, literature has highlighted how
influential movements for racialized parity and recognition have rearticulated meaning of race
for communities and voicing exclusion, while working with the constraints of the state’s
categories to organize for policies and resource allocations for their communities (Lopez and
Espiritu 1990; Espiritu 1993; Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 2014). This dissertation thus
addresses the under-examination of emotions in social movements for racial equity. As I will
show, emotions are not just a matter of inserting another content area into the canon—but rather
call upon us to upend basic paradigms and assumptions about racial transformation.
How Emotions Denigrate Femininity, People of Color, and Youth
This dissertation builds on a growing literature around critical race and emotions. The
2018 American Sociological Association meeting, organized around ASA president Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva’s theme “Feeling Race,” urged sociologists to take emotions seriously in
dissecting, analyzing, and combating racial injustice. Black feminists have already argued that
emotions are central to producing and perpetuating racial inequality (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2007;
Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Bonilla-Silva 2019; Evans and Moore 2015; Ioanide 2015; Matias
2016; Wingfield 2010). Bonilla-Silva describes racialized emotions as “fundamental social
forces shaping the house of racism” (2019: 2). As such, “eradicating racism will require a radical
process to uproot its visible, “objective” components as well as demolish its emotional skeleton.”
(Bonilla-Silva 2019) This invisible “emotional” skeleton explains why circulating facts alone
7
does not win people over to justice. As social movement leaders and participants know all too
well, facts alone are insufficient because they take on meaning through our pre-existing frames,
or ways of viewing and understanding the world (Ryan and Gamson 2009). This explains why
white emotions including “embodied experiences of fear, phobia, shame, or desire take
precedence over cognition or knowledge,” fueling steadfast commitment to policies that are
ultimately counter to their interests and well-being (Ioanide 2015).
And yet, as Patricia Hill Collins argued, sociology has long “worship[ped] at the altar of
rationality” as a “discipline of the mind and not the body, when it comes to our understanding of
race and racism,” which results in an “impoverish[ing] tunnel vision.” (Collins 2018) Similarly,
Matias (2016) argues that ignoring the omnipresence of emotions “makes us nothing more than
somnambuliacs, walking through life asleep.” The tunnel vision, sleep walking of social
scientists in the form of reason, rigorous methodology blind us to the emotional processes
fueling, and alternatives to, white supremacy.
The longstanding refusal to grapple seriously with emotions in social science scholarship
about race is hardly an accident, but rather reflects unchallenged embraces of Cartesian
divisions, and accompanying hierarchical assumptions about ways of knowing. As feminist
scholars have long argued, emotions are treated as supposedly mutually exclusive and
binaristically opposed to rationality (Taylor 1995). So on the one hand, we have emotions, the
body, private sphere, and irrationality; on the other, knowledge, intellect, mind, public,
rationality (Sara Ahmed 2014; Boler 1999; Jaggar 1989; Lutz 2002). Feminist scholars have also
argued that the former is associated with femininity and non-whiteness: people of color have
been racialized and feminized as subhuman, un-intellectual, savages, and infantile via claims that
they are ruled by emotions rather than intellect (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Ellis 1894).
8
Emotions are perceived as “distorting or impeding observation or knowledge,” (Jaggar 1989) and
as a signal of deficient feminine brain functioning (Broverman et al. 1970; Ehrenreich and
English 2013). As Sarah Ahmed argues: women are “represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by
appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgment.” (Sara Ahmed
2014)
I would add to this binary—often unspoken, because it is assumed to be true—is that
youth are broadly constructed as naïve and unknowing in part because they are supposedly ruled
by unregulated emotions (Denham et al. 2002; Ortiz 2004). Even when defending youth against
harsh juvenile sentencing, for example, psychological experts describe juveniles as “impulsive,
aggressive, and emotionally volatile.” (Ritter 2007) In sum then, youth, white women, people of
color are dismissed as emotional, irrational, hysterical, precluded from legitimate knowledge
production. Deeming emotions as inferior and binaristically opposed to intellect also thus
denigrates youth, femininity, and non-whiteness.
As feminist theorists have argued, however, emotions are “collaboratively constructed
and historically situated.” (Boler 1999). Emotions are public and political (Berlant 2011;
Cvetkovich 2012a; Nussbaum 2013). Furthermore, emotions, intellect, and rationality are
intertwined and inseparable (Jaggar 1989). After all, it is not as if all emotions are universally
derided. Instead, the emotions of white folks, especially white men and adults, become “feeling
power” (Boler 1999), a source of “hegemonic emotional domination” (Matias 2016). For
example, during the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was
hyper-intellectual, rational, drawing upon her scientific training, even-keeled, calm, holding back
tears. In stunning contrast, Kavanaugh was unhinged, sputtering, rageful, indignant (Chemaly
2019). And yet, Dr. Ford was deemed to lack credibility and had to pay out of pocket for private
9
security guards to protect herself against a slew of death threats, while Kavanaugh was fiercely
defended, an object of sympathy, and elevated to one of the most powerful positions of decision-
making in the land. Chemaly argued that
Kavanaugh’s anger was not weaponised against him, but rather, despite his behaviour
clearly contradicting the notion of judicial equanimity, was understood by his supporters
as righteous masculine self-defence in the face of insult and threat. (Chemaly 2019)
These hierarchies, of course, also map out intersectionally onto race and gender. Serena
Williams, having endured overt racist treatment throughout her tennis career, was literally
penalized for “verbal abuse” even when she was measured in her confrontation with an umpire
during the US Open. Meanwhile, white men tennis players like John McEnroe have easily
expressed their rage to no such equivalent penalty and even to the opposite reception—that of
respect. Chemaly’s point fits into literature that has pointed out that emotions of white men,
albeit often discouraged as feminine, can in some contexts be read as masculine, authoritative, a
signal of their strength and worthy of sympathy (Boscagli 1992; Groves 1995; MacArthur and
Shields 2015).
Meanwhile, emotions of white women take precedence over that of people of color,
whose emotions are read as further indications of inferiority. Matias (2016) analyzes an example
from white woman savior films:
Through her trials and tribulations, wrought with tears and well-intentioned behavior, the
White woman’s tears are deemed worthy of sympathy because of her strength to endure
people of Color. However, in the same films, the people of Color are portrayed in ways
where their emotionalities – their tears – are pitied for their weakness thus are in need of
white saviority. Let me be clear, the tears of White ladies are depicted as a symptom of
innate goodness which is not mutually recognized in the tears of people of Color. The
emotionalities of whiteness are given innate humanly status, whereas the emotionalities
of people of Color are rendered both a symptom of social construction and innately
unworthy of humanity. (Matias 2016:6)
Matias points out that emotions are not universally reviled, but rather relationally perceived. In
the context of white women in relationship to people of color, white women’s tears are depicted
10
as charitable virtue, signaling their humanity. The tears of people of color are read as weakness
that further justify the swooping in of the white woman.
Relatively less discussed, even in critical race and feminist theory, are the ways that
emotions of youth, particularly Black and Brown youth, are used to demonize, silence, and
otherwise suppress youth. Much of the scholarship across disciplines on youth and emotions
assumes that children and youth require socialization to regulate and manage their emotions. It is
assumed that youth are underdeveloped in large part because they don’t know how to control
their emotions, and are ruled by emotions over intellect (Bazelon 2000; Farmer 2010; Gagen
2015). However, the emotions of Black and Brown youth are not just treated as innocent—they
are often adultified, regarded as dangerous, and thus treated as if they are unworthy and do not
need protection, nurturing, support, comfort (Dancy 2014; Ferguson 2001; Morris 2016; Wun
2016a). Black and Brown youth experience more circumscribed arenas of emotions deemed as
acceptable, and emotional expressions come with greater sanctions upon threat of violation, than
for white youth. For example, Black and Brown youth must contend with—and are punished for
assumptions that their emotions and behavior are angry, defiant, disrespectful, sassy, apathetic,
redolent of attitude, or dangerous (Cox 2016; Evans-Winters and Esposito 2010; Evans-Winters
and with Girls for Gender Equity 2017; Flores-Gonzalez 2002; Ife n.d.; Lewis and Lewis 2017;
Way et al. 2014). As such, adults and parents often socialize Black and Brown youth to carefully
emotions, so they are not punished for being disruptive in school and other settings (Boler 1999;
Cox 2016; Froyum 2010, 2013). These racialized emotional impositions on Black and Brown
youth have been a major mechanism of the school to prison pipeline.
11
White Emotions Uphold Hetero-patriarchal White Supremacy
Racialized, gendered, and aged discrepancies in receptions of emotions are not just
interpersonal, but manifest in structures, systems, policies, and practices. The concept of
emotional segregation, coined by Beeman, is “an institutionalized process, whereby racially
oppressed and racially dominant groups are unable to see one another as emotional equals or as
capable of sharing the same human emotions and experiences.” (Beeman 2007) There is, after
all, a long history of biological falsehoods that construct Black people as immune to pain, which
has made its way into medical practice: whether in denying necessary analgesics and curative
care pain (Holloway 2016) or rationing palliative medicine (Stein 2007). Silverstein argues that
“people assume that, relative to whites, blacks feel less pain because they have faced more
hardship.’ . . . Because they are believed to be less sensitive to pain, black people are forced to
endure more pain” (Silverstein 2013). Black women are 3-4 times more likely than white women
to die of complications during pregnancy or childbirth, reflecting how their pain is dismissed,
devalued, and disrespected (Martin and Montagne 2017). Meanwhile, although childhood
generally confers innocence and protection, pain and suffering of Black and Brown youth do not
galvanize the same emotional responses—see, for example, the brutal locking up of immigrant
children in cages. In short, the emotional, physical, and other pain of people of color and Black
folks in particular are not treated as on par with white pain and tears.
White people’s emotions get scaled up and rationalized to undergird white supremacist
ideology, systems, policies, and practices. Irrational white emotions such as fear, horror, anxiety,
and disgust are taken as authority in othering people of color. Day (2016) argues that disgust has
been a central political emotion in segregation (ex. Southern whites’ “visceral loathing” toward
Black bodies, deemed “tainted and animalistic” would contaminate water and food). Irrational
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fear of Black and Brown youth as “superpredators” has justified the ramping up of sentencing
and criminalization of young people in adult terms (Bazelon 2000; Jennings 2014). Hancock
(2004) theorizes the politics of disgust in putting an end to welfare. Racializing public housing as
Black rendered it “vile and frightening” (Hostetter 2010). White fear becomes normalized and
uninterrogated, whether in the form of “negrophobia” (Whitney 2015); fear of Black folks in
interracial encounters (Anderson 2015); fear of Filipino folks as savage and dangerous (Kramer
2006). And yet white “pleasure” in racial domination (Bonilla-Silva 2019; Ioanide 2015)
continues despite the devastating impacts of these white emotions.
White emotional resistance also blocks efforts to dismantle white supremacy. Matias
argues that “the emotionalities of whiteness refuse to fully digest [critical race theory].” (2016:
180) As Leonardo (2016) argues,
“white emotions reflect a selective process of attaching affective reactions to social situations
which protect white racial advantage such as crying during difficult conversations about race
in classroom settings, and changing the dynamics in those settings by redirecting sympathy
away from people of Color.” (Leonardo 2016)
Similarly, Srivastava (2006)’s study of feminist organization found that white women are
encouraged and comforted when they cry, whereas women of color’s tears would be seen as a
“diversion.” White emotions become erased, however, in justifying white supremacy, and the
supposed emotionality of communities of color linked to constructions of their deficiency. Berg
and Ramos-Zaya argue that “US Black and Latino poverty was, quite literally, diagnosed in
terms of mental-health pathologies attributed to these populations’ ‘defective’ emotional
makeup” (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015). Youth of color in particular are dismissed as being
deficient as irrational, self-centered, deviant, and lacking virtue—warranting their own
punishment and criminalization (Ayers, Dohrn, and Ayers 2001; Farmer 2010). As such, extant
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scholarship has shown us that white emotions matter not just in interpersonal interactions but are
crucial to systematic racialization and subordination of people of color.
How Racism Impacts Emotional and Overall Well-Being
The extensive literature on how racism impacts emotional and other aspects of well-being
further demonstrate why we must take emotions seriously. Racism burrows under the skin and
into the psyche and the everyday texture of people of color’s emotional lives, especially amidst a
virulent political climate that has likely increased racialized stress and anxiety (Williams and
Medlock 2017). For example, experiencing racism can increase stress (Arbona and Jimenez
2014; Walker-Barnes 2017; Woods-Giscombé 2010); foster anger—which can, in turn, lead to
negative consequences on physical and mental health (Clark 2006; Lorde 1981; Pittman 2011);
and result in depression (Davis and Stevenson 2006; Liu and Suyemoto 2016; Nicolaidis et al.
2010) Some scholars have argued that “race-based traumatic stress” (Bryant-Davis 2007) can
“lacerate the spirit, scar the soul, and puncture the psyche.” (Hardy 2013) The Cartesian mind-
body dualism is not borne out by the health consequences of racism. Instead, racism gets
embodied, quite literally (Krieger 1999, 2006). For example, internalized racism, experiences of
racism, and race-based traumatic stress are linked with chronic self-harm and distress, and poorer
cardiovascular health, and vulnerability to other negative health outcomes (Chae et al. 2010;
Jones 2000; Smedley 2012; Taylor and Jackson 1990; Williams, Neighbors, and Jackson 2003).
Understanding the impact on youth of color is especially important. As Geronimus argues,
African Americans experience “weathering,” that is premature aging on the body precipitated by
constant exposure to hardship (Geronimus et al. 2006, 2010). Toxic stress “triggers the
premature deterioration of the bodies of African American women” and results in poor maternal
health outcomes and can also lead to earlier onset of disease and morbidity (Gee, Walsemann,
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and Brondolo 2012). Black and Brown youth are already experiencing accelerated aging—the
privileges of a protected childhood for their own well-being and growth are not afforded to them.
Youth in poverty are already experiencing advanced cellular aging as they are in turbo-charged
timelines of having to care for others (Brody et al. 2016). Anxiety among young people is on the
rise more broadly (Denizet-Lewis 2017; Flannery 2018). And there are specific stresses faced by
low-income youth of color as they shoulder extreme pressures to lift up their family out of
poverty and to achieve upward mobility—for example, in the form of John Henryism, or the
challenges of constantly battling racial barriers (Hudson et al. 2016; Kiecolt, Hughes, and Keith
2009; Roisin 2015). Students of color in elite institutions experience additional alienation and
stress (Cookson and Persell 1991; Jack 2019)—a sign of the “hidden costs of mobility” (Cole
and Omari 2003).
Yet even as racism is literally killing people of color, emotion rules sanction them for
speaking up, and fighting against systemic racism. People of color are expected to restrain their
emotions in response to racialized injustice (Harlow 2003; Lacy 2007) or risk negative sanctions
(Ferguson 2001; Hughey 2008). Youth of color in particular must manage their emotions, or risk
being punished or having their entire futures jeopardized (Cox 2016; Morris 2016; Shedd 2015).
Such emotional suppression can foster “unpleasant emotional dissonance” in “emotionally
laborious process[es]” (Ramos-Zayas 2011), take emotional tolls (Wingfield 2010), and
discourage critical analyses and actions against racism (Evans and Moore 2015). When people of
color fight back against racism, they are seen as crazy, emotional, and pathological—another
way of being racialized as other, intellectually, emotionally, and physically deficient in ways that
justify and sustain the mythology of racial hierarchies (Davis and Ernst 2017a; Evans and Moore
15
2015; Metzl 2010). For example, schizophrenia was racialized as a disease that pathologized
Civil Rights and Black Power (Metzl 2010).
And so, we see that racism is quite literally a matter of life and death, and that its
devastating impact on emotional and physical well-being is eating away at Black and Brown
communities in particular. We also know that speaking up and pushing back gets dismissed as
pathological. However, this scholarship that focuses primarily on emotions as propelling racial
inequality raises a question: what role do emotions play in challenging oppression? To address
that question, I turn to scholarship on emotions and social movements.
Building on Emotions and Social Movements Scholarship
My work builds on and extends extant social science scholarship on emotions in social
movements. Much of this literature categorizes and defines emotions in relationship to other
aspects of social movements such as the emergence, survival, mobilization, and dynamics of
movements. For example, studies focus on how emotions shape movement mobilization and
recruitment (Morris et al. 1992; Robnett 1999; Williamson 2011); inhibit involvement (Norgaard
2006); enact collective identities (Flesher Fominaya 2010; Taylor and Rupp 2002); shape goals
(Jasper 1998); influence framing (Ganz 2011; Robnett 2004) and precipitate movement decline
(Goodwin 1997; Gould 2009a). Affective bonds, bonds of friendship, love, and community are
important because they induce commitment, encouragement and motivation (Goodwin, Jasper,
and Polletta 2001; Gould 2009a; Jasper 1998; Taylor and Rupp 2002).
Oftentimes, social movement scholars argue that social movements transform destructive
or inhibiting emotions into mobilizing, galvanizing ones (Taft 2010; Taylor 1995). For example,
movements translate shame, guilt, and fear into anger aimed at decision-makers or proud
identities (Britt and Heise 2000; Gould 2001, 2012; Jasper 2008; Summers-Effler 2002).
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However, Gould (2009) points out that the complexity of emotions leads to a dialectic. Simply
typologizing emotions does not fully help us understand social movements: scholars must not
only assume that “powerlessness, political efficacy, apathy, and despair” are inhibiting, but
rather see possibilities for “new political horizons.” That is, “effects of despair are contingent,
and not necessarily depoliticizing or demobilizing” (396) For example, Gould points out that
ACT UP’s emotional habitus required submerging grief and despair, but that they could have
collectivized and harnessed it as they did with anger.
Studies in this vein may implicitly suggest that emotions are merely a means to
understanding what supposedly really matters in movements. Instead, my dissertation builds on
the smaller segment of literature that points to broader possibilities of emotions as social,
paradigmatic transformation, such as reshaping norms around who can express what types of
emotions. For example, Gould (2009) argues that ACT UP was able to “inaugurate a new
constellation of feelings, emotions, and emotional postures,” thus “puncturing the dominant
emotional habitus with its prevailing attitudes, norms, and ways of feeling and emoting.” (39)
Feminist movements challenge dominant feeling rules (Groves 1995; Hercus 1999; Jaggar 1989)
by redefining what kinds of emotions they are allowed to express (Whittier 2001, 2009).
Feminist and other social movements provide outlets for “deviant emotions” (Groves 1997;
Hercus 1999) such as anger (Chemaly 2019; Reger 2004; Traister 2018). For example, Taft
(2010) argues that girl activists across the Americas drew out anger via political mobilization,
despite being taught that their anger is unacceptable. Others have argued that women are asked to
suppress/ manage their anger (Hercus 1999); Taft points out that girl activists manage these
contradictions by linking anger back to emotions that are deemed more “acceptable” for women,
such as love and care (Taft 2010). Furthermore, these emotional norms can instill value in
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feminine logic, emotional expressiveness, and caring (Ferree and Martin 1995; Taylor 1995;
Taylor and Rupp 2002). Feminist philosophers argue that reclaiming these emotions as a virtue
helps to develop an alternate feminist epistemology: for example, Haraway argues that desires
for love and knowledge should not be seen in a negative light (Haraway 2004), and Jaggar
(1989) argues that women’s emotions are a strength to disrupt the status quo. In some feminist
movements, “women’s culturally glorified emotional empathy is radically reconceptualized as a
‘skill in political analysis’ rather than a sign of their intuitive and nurturant virtue.” (Lutz 2002)
This approach in social movements literature in the social sciences is still relatively
neglected, however. In order to argue how feeling differently can help us expand both knowledge
and practice and to build new worlds not beholden to the standards and assumptions placed forth
by white supremacist, heteropatriarchal assumptions of knowledge, I turn to interdisciplinary
affect and cultural studies theories.
Radical Love, Healing, and Healing Justice: Feeling Differently
I build on ideas that anti-racist politics also enable “the increase of bodies’ capacity to
enable new ways of feeling and being with others” (Lim 2010). As Muñoz argues, “feeling
revolutionary” is a
“feeling that our current situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we
cannot live without it. Feeling revolutionary opens up the space to imagine a collective
escape, an exodus, a ‘going-off script’ together… Practicing educated hope is the
enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing the way things ought to be,
but, instead, imagining what things could be” (Duggan and Muñoz 2009)
Black, Latina, Indigenous feminist scholars have already long argued that marginalized
communities practice different ways of feeling and being together in the form of radical love,
hope, and healing (hooks 2001:200; Kelley 2002; Moore and Casper 2014; Nash 2011). Nash
(2011) argues that Black feminism has a long tradition of “love-politics,” including writings by
bell hooks, Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, for whom
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“love acted as a doing, a call for a labor of the self, an appeal for transcending the self, a
strategy for remaking the public sphere, a plea to unleash the radical imagination, and a
critique of the state’s blindness to the violence it inflicts and enables.”
Radical love re-imagines a public sphere around “shared utopian vision” that is based not in
sameness but rather, “broader political/social formations and solidarities where “difference” is
not policed or expunged, but acknowledged and celebrated.” (Moore and Casper 2014).
Similarly, Kim (2016) argues for a “feeling of equality”, including shared “anger and grief
[about racial inequality and violence], not from sympathy for the other but in sympathy with the
other.” These feelings of justice necessitate more than just “passive empathy” (Boler 1999), or a
recognition of suffering that "that produces no action towards justice" (161). For example, bell
hooks (1994) argues that an ethic of love in movements helps us “intervene in our self-centered
longing for change,” and instead enables us to expand our fight to understand “interlocking and
interdependent systems of domination,” rather than remaining mired in our blind spots and
narrow understandings of self-interest. This claiming of love is unapologetically feminist—as
hooks argues, the masculinist biases of Black Power leadership “equated love with weakness”:
so “to choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture.” (hooks 1994)
Similarly, I draw upon concepts such as “emotional justice,” a conceptual framework
coined by Esther Armah (Cras 2017; Paul 2015) that asserts the need for recognizing how
oppression and intergenerational trauma impact emotions, and to find strategies that
acknowledge and harness emotions as a foundation for resistance. Armah argues that “emotional
justice” involves remedying intergenerational trauma and “unrelenting cycles of violence” that
Black people have long experienced—including articulating, giving voice to trauma, exploring
trauma, and developing counter-narratives. She suggests that “emotionality” matters and that
justice is not just about what is handed down or arbitrated by a judge—and her analysis of this
issue is explicitly intersectional: that is, “a toxic masculinity that makes girls and women
19
responsible for the traumatized emotionality of men.” (Paul 2015). Similarly, Akili suggests that
“emotional justice is about working with this wounding. It is about inviting us into our feelings
and our bodies, and finding ways to transform our collective and individual pains into power.”
(Akili 2011)
Another form of feeling and doing differently is “healing justice” and “radical healing.”
(Chavez-Diaz and Lee 2015; Ginwright 2010, 2015a; Lee 2014; Terriquez and Serrano 2018).
Refusing to abide by previous generations of social movements and families that have argued
that survival requires suffering and denial of well-being, instead healing justice movements push
for broader practices. These approaches address toxic environments of structural violence as they
manifest in socio-psychological impacts of depression and anxiety in ways that “aims to restore
and renew the individual and collective emotional and spiritual well-being of youth, families,
and the broader community” (Chavez-Diaz and Lee 2015). Healing justice thus means that
organizations should employ both “inward” strategies that address how inequality manifests in
depression, anxiety, and other socio-psychological individual impacts, as well as “outward”
grassroots organizing strategies for social and economic change (Chavez-Diaz and Lee 2015;
Lee 2014).
Tensions, Dilemmas, Predicaments: Bringing Together the Literatures
However, these efforts at healing justice, radical love, and radical healing do not come
without debate, nor tension. Indeed, some feminist and critical theorists have long argued that
focusing on “self-help,” “healing,” or what can broadly be described as “therapeutic cultures” are
counter-productive to systemic change and redolent of navel-gazing. Some have argued that
these approaches to feeling differently are a form of self-victimization, a politics of ressentiment,
and wounded identities (Brown 1995). Even those who argue for the power of feeling differently
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caution that “affective healing” can be overly focused on the individual, personal, and intimate as
solutions to structural problems (Berlant 1997, 2008; Cvetkovich 1992). Berlant (2010) argues
that ‘shifts in the affective atmosphere are not equal to a changing world’. Being overly focused
on individual healing merely serves to buttress oppressive power structures (Brown 1995; Echols
1989; Rapping 1996).
I investigate this tension in light of the particular paradoxes and predicaments of
collective action. After all, on the one hand, social movements can promote well-being, such as
empowered ethnic/ racial identities that help buffer the negative impacts of discrimination, group
stigmatization, and powerlessness fostered by racialized poverty (Caldwell, Guthrie, and Jackson
2005; Christens and Peterson 2011; Cooper et al. 2014; Ginwright 2015a; Mossakowski 2003;
Phinney et al. 2001; Sellers et al. 2003). Yet it is also true that resisting can result in alienation,
exclusion, and ostracism, even when not speaking up surely wears on the psyche (Evans and
Moore 2015). As Jaggar (1989) argues, “the more forcefully and vehemently the latter
[feminized, non-white] groups express their observations and claims, the more emotional they
appear and so the more easily they are discredited.” Hercus (1999) outlines a kind of “emotional
battery”: some feminists become frustrated and exhausted from the ridicule they receive in
spaces outside of the movement, but others received an “emotional boost” by affirming feminist
identity and expressing deviant emotions.
These tensions are of heightened consequence for communities of color. A recent study
found that activism is associated with more stress and anxiety for Black student leaders, but
positive health outcomes for Latinx leaders (Hope et al. 2017). Recent suicides and suicide
attempts of leaders in the Movement for Black Lives underscore how social movement
participation can engender stress that compounds mental and physical health issues fostered by
21
systemic injustice (Harris-Perry 2018; Hope et al. 2017). One leader noted that activists have
“sacrificed job stability, relationships, educational opportunities to fight against a system that
was literally killing people.” (Austen 2017). Some studies, counterintuitively, find that racial
identity can exacerbate racial distress by increasing cognizance of racial discrimination
(Caldwell et al. 2002; Noh et al. 1999; Sellers et al. 2003; Yip, Gee, and Takeuchi 2008). These
contexts make the case both for the importance of healing and emotional counterpublics, as well
as the contradictions involved.
How Emotional Counterpublics Extends Scholarship
Taken together, these bodies of literature remind us that racism manifests and resounds
on multiple levels: from the invisibly cellular to systems and structures that, too, are easily
rendered invisible. Race is felt in the most deeply, intimate ways—worming its way under the
skin, and into organs in ways that often create fertile breeding grounds for premature death. If we
care about upending racism, it will require us to undo and grapple with the full reverberations of
how racism is embodied on every level. At the same time, we also know that racism—despite its
deeply internal and individualized impacts—cannot merely be eradicated via personal solutions
and individualized acts. Rather, transforming deeply entrenched racial disparities warrants
structural and systemic solutions. I propose a theory of emotional counterpublics that brings
together resistance on these vastly different scales, with emotions as the glue.
My dissertation thus builds on and extends these bodies of scholarship in the following
ways. First, much of the extant literature tends to focus on the role of white emotions in
perpetuating racialized inequality. In contrast, I seek to de-center whiteness as much as possible
(although it cannot be entirely avoided), and to center the role of emotions in the resistance of
youth of color. Second, even extant social movements and emotions scholarship tend to
22
submerge emotions and regard them as important only insofar as they contribute to assumed
ideas of what is “actually” important in social change—for example, mobilization, policy/
structural change, identities, and framing. Rather, I argue that youth leaders’ embrace of, and
practicing of different emotional norms open up new political possibilities and worlds. To do so,
I build upon understandings of radical love and care from cultural studies. However, these
generative theories are also limited in understanding application to the complexities and
dilemmas of collective action. As such, my final contribution is to bring together
interdisciplinary theories to understand how emotions propel nuanced transformative change on
multiple levels. These contradictions necessitate and inspire the dimensions of emotional
counterpublics that I will outline throughout the dissertation: tensions of self and collective; the
need for prefigurative practices in remaking interpersonal relations; translation into systemic and
structural change. First, however, I explain how my research design enables me to do so.
Research Design: Organizational Background and Approaches
Although my dissertation has taken on a distinct form and structure since the initial
proposal, my original rationale for choosing the groups and sites that I did, as well as the
methods, still apply. My study focuses on high school aged youth of color, in particular Asian
American and predominantly Southeast Asian American, Latinx, and Black youth. Youth have
always been at the forefront of social movements, pushing for more creative and more expansive
forms of transformation (Milkman 2017) and they are now at the precipice of a moment where
social change is necessary for the survival of the planet, even as they have inherited deep
inequities. Although I have just showed how the emotions of young women and people of color
are devalued at the intersections of their positioning, their experiences, voices, and political
imaginations also produce bolder, more expansive forms of social transformation.
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I chose to focus on two youth organizing groups, given the gaps in understanding and the
role of youth at the forefront of social movements. Youth organizing groups are social movement
organizations that develop the leadership of low-income youth of color to address inequitable
conditions in their schools and communities (Noguera, Cammarota, and Ginwright 2013; Rogers,
Mediratta, and Shah 2012). These groups offer insights into racial framing challenges and
possibilities in their efforts to reframe dominant narratives of youth of color, who are often
criminalized and/or deemed apathetic (Clay 2012; Hosang 2013). Furthermore, such groups can
illuminate interventions around stressful experiences of racism during adolescence, which
engender greater health risks in adulthood (Brody et al. 2014; Viner et al. 2015). For example,
civic engagement and development of empowering racial/ethnic identities during adolescence
can foster long-lasting protective impacts (Ballard and Syme 2016a; Christens 2012; Christens
and Peterson 2011; Cooper et al. 2014). Finally, youth organizing groups play critical roles in
developing civic leadership of youth of color (Bloemraad and Terriquez 2016a; Kirshner 2015;
Terriquez 2015), who have low rates of civic engagement compared to white peers and adults
(Dobard et al. 2017), lack access to high-quality civics education (Kahne and Middaugh 2008),
and are not engaged by mainstream civic institutions (Ramakrishnan 2014; Wong 2006).
Methods
My primary methods were participant observation: I embedded myself in two
organizations and observed a range of programming over the course of three years, and
conducted interviews with 50 youth and 30 adults, including organizational staff and allies such
as teachers and school administrators. The timing and number of organizations balances
feasibility, the imperative of building trust, and appropriate lengths of time in order to observe
dynamic, ongoing, and complex practices. Spending significant time in each organization also
24
allows me to pay attention to potential issues around self-selection by examining why youth
enter the organizations, their characteristics, and why they stay or leave. Although my
methodology does not allow me to make generalizable conclusions, my sites are relevant for
addressing theoretical and empirical considerations.
I discuss the organizations in greater detail in the subsequent chapter, but in brief: one
organization that I call by the pseudonym Youth Power for Educational Justice (YPEJ) focuses
on racial and educational justice by working on local and statewide campaigns to advance
educational equity in K-12 public school systems. The other organization, which I call by the
pseudonym SEAP, has a more specific and pronounced focus on Southeast Asian American
communities, gender, and refugee reproductive justice; it initially grew out of a young Southeast
Asian women’s reproductive health project. Both groups arose in the mid-1990s in response to a
slew of attacks on immigrant and communities of color and increased criminalization of youth of
color, including bans on affirmative action and attempts to ban undocumented immigrants from
accessing social services and prohibition of bilingual education (HoSang 2010; Pastor 2018).
YPEJ’s Southern California chapter has approximately thirty members; about fifteen “core
members” have leadership roles. Approximately half are Latino, a quarter Black, and a quarter
Asian American (although the composition was often in flux and often changed according to
who was currently employed as adult organizing staff). Most come from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds. SEAP has a total of approximately 50 core members across 4 programs. While
YPEJ is a statewide organization that operates across multiple regions in California, SEAP
focuses on organizing in Pacific City but also is an anchor in regional, statewide, and national
movement building around Southeast Asian and refugee and reproductive justice more broadly.
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These sites allowed me to examine the potential paradoxes of addressing individual well-
being while also attempting to change broader systems of inequality. Both organizations are
located in a diverse city in California that I call by the pseudonym “Pacific City”: a fourth of the
population is comprised of people of color including African Americans, Filipinx, Khmer,
Mexican, and Central Americans, and immigrants are about a quarter of the population
(Policylink and PERE 2019). Several previous studies of youth organizing focus on the Bay
Area, which tends to have a more established youth organizing history and infrastructure (Clay
2012; Ginwright 2015b; Gordon 2009). Instead, I focus on efforts in a city that has a relatively
new infrastructure for coordinated grassroots organizing. Organizing groups have experienced
heightened challenges in advancing policies because of a resistant school board, but have also
won important victories. This context allows me to observe strategies bridging ethnic and racial
difference and suggests both challenges and possibilities transforming racial landscapes that may
be relevant for other regions.
Critical Race, Intersectionality, Critical Feminist Ethnography in Research Design
My research design was rooted in critical race, intersectional theory. First, I analyze
youth organizing groups’ social change efforts not only in policy campaigns, but as broader
“racial projects” that aim to shift racialized distributions of resources and to create racial
representations (Omi and Winant 2014:125). For example, groups challenge dominant racialized
ideologies embedded in concepts of well-being and educational inequality (Franklin 2014;
Kirshner 2015; Kwon 2013). Second, I recognize both internal organizational practices
addressing intersectional power dynamics and social change efforts aimed at institutions beyond
government as processes of racial transformation (Biondi 2014; Brown et al. 2003). Third, I treat
social movements as unique sites of racial formation, wherein communities of color create racial
26
meaning in relationship to each other (Almaguer 1994; Glenn 2002; Lipsitz 1998; Ochoa 2013).
Such dynamics may challenge dominant understandings of Latinos and Asian Americans as
fitting into black-white dichotomies according to measures of social and economic assimilation,
such as educational attainment (Lee and Bean 2004; Lee and Zhou 2015; Yancey 2003). Finally,
I examine multiple types of differences (e.g. ethnicity, gender, sexuality) between and within
groups (Espiritu 1996:1; Hunting 2014; Lorde 1980; McCall 2005), including categories that
may not be explicitly acknowledged (Choo and Ferree 2010). I situate respondents’ perspectives
within multiple social locations (Collins 1990), organizational processes, and socio-historical
contexts (Choo and Ferree 2010; Hancock 2007; McCall 2005).
Feminist and community-engaged ethnography have been at the heart of my research: my
primary purpose for doing a PhD has been to produce collaborative research and to support
social movements on the ground from my privileged position within the university. Like other
feminist and community-engaged scholars, this has taken the form of deep attention to
marginality, power differences, and aims to produce scholarship that is in service of communities
and their movements (Davis and Craven 2016). That purpose has shaped every aspect of my
research, from my initial contact to organizations to what I hope to produce from this
dissertation. While I delve into my methodology and positionality in more detail in the appendix,
I briefly describe it here. I first got connected to YPEJ in my first year of the PhD program via
Dr. Terriquez as a volunteer and research associate. My first project involved shaping their
demands in the immediate wake of the passage of LCFF: YPEJ knew that something was amiss
in the lack of requirements around engaging students in budget decision-making, but they were
still in the process of developing their demands. I conducted background research on best
practices and models of engaging student voice in decision-making from around the U.S. Since
27
that time, I have collaboratively produced five reports, policy briefs, and toolkits with YPEJ as
well as a total of ten other reports on related topics. These research projects for YPEJ’s purposes
have also dovetailed with interviews and focus groups that I have drawn upon for my dissertation
research.
It was also critical for me to engage and support directly, and interpersonally, not just
conduct research from afar. Part of my purpose was to begin developing trust with YPEJ staff
and youth, key to ethnography but especially a critical form of ethnography that centers
relationships (Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau 2018). I began sitting in on weekly meetings and
youth leadership retreats starting in the fall of 2016 until the fall of 2019. I spent, on average, 12-
15 hours a week in the field. I also observed and participated in summer programs, which
involved workshops for approximately four hours, three days a week. I would also consistently
give a few youth rides home, often those who lived in North Pacific City since I lived in Los
Angeles for part of the time, and it was on my way home. In the academic year of 2017-2018 and
2018-2019, I also consistently worked on YPEJ projects at least one additional day out of the
week in the office, which gave me another opportunity to build relationships with staff and
youth. I eventually built close relationships with a couple of the youth who were there for most
of my time of intensive participant observation.
During the 2017-2018 academic year, I spent my time building relationships with SEAP
by tutoring students every other week, as well as supporting with during events such as their
annual Haunted House and attending canvassing/ other mobilizing events with students. I also
assisted students with a fundraising committee for their Yellow Lounge event. After volunteering
formally for a year, SEAP agreed to grant me access to “Lotus Leaders,” or their top-level
program with eight juniors and seniors. They also agreed to grant me access to their coalitional
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meetings with Youth Coalition, which involved collaborations with YPEJ and four other student
organizations including a youth media group, an organization focused on restorative justice, and
a queer and trans youth organization. I observed and sat in on Lotus Leaders, as well as SEAP’s
summer program from January through August 2019. For the most part, I had a similar
relationship as in YPEJ; however, this particular program was much smaller and more intimate.
There were only eight youth. So I participated quite actively in all the discussions and, similar to
YPEJ, I helped students one on one in small breakout rooms or with their parts of various
projects such as a zine, which included helping students develop their personal stories in writing.
I also supported students generally in making artwork for different events—for example, helping
them trace different Pacific City landmarks and then paint them in as decoration for Yellow
Lounge.
In addition to weekly programming and informal time, I also attended a range of other
programming such as retreats that involve intensive skills development and team building;
preparation for specific events, actions, or meetings with decision-makers; smaller group and
one-on-one meetings with staff members; school-based meetings; and coalitional meetings,
events, and strategy sessions.
Initial Research Questions, Observations, and Interviews
My initial research questions based on my dissertation proposal were: How can social
movement organizations reframe understandings of racial injustice? How do social movement
organizations conceptualize and practice “healing” and other strategies that address both
individual and collective well-being of youth of color? How can social movement organizations
manage difference along various social axes?
29
Accordingly, I observed how youth and staff describe and explain problems,
manifestations of, and solutions to race, racial inequality, racism, and inequality. I paid particular
attention to strategies that youth and staff use to frame and re-frame racism in relationship to
challenges presented by dominant racial frames. I also examined how organizers and youth
frame race and other social axes as providing sites for agency and resistance. In addition to
ethnographic observation, I closely analyzed frames in written materials (for example, flyers,
speeches, etc.).
I observed how groups attempt to address individualized concerns around well-being in
relationship with practices (e.g. grassroots organizing) that aim to improve well-being on a
community-level. Strategies included: 1.) one-on-one support, in which organizers provide
counseling, emotional support, and advice for youth’s individual issues, which may range from
family and home-life problems to college questions; 2.) more collective practices such as
“talking circles” or “healing circles,” in which youth sit in a circle and share experiences and
feelings about a specific theme (e.g. the 2016 presidential elections, school stress, the
Charlottesville white supremacist rally).; 3.) political education, empowerment, and social
movement history that can help youth develop a sense of hope in times of political distress; 4.)
“transformative justice,” which involves performative activities, such as theater, to recognize
how oppression impacts individuals’ bodily and emotional well-being and perform possibilities
for transforming oppressive moments; 5.) “self-care” practices such as journaling, yoga, and
breathing; 6.) arts and culture, such as writing poems and open mics; 7.) broader practices of
encouraging youth to share emotions from daily stresses, especially emotional responses to daily
experiences of inequality.
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Finally, I observed how youth organizers and staff addressed differences according to
race, ethnicity, gender, immigration, status, and other axes, as well as whether and how youth
and staff acknowledge and address power dynamics and different experiences according to
youth’s positioning within various social axes. Although I took fieldnotes on this particular
question, this will constitute a chapter for a future manuscript (and not this particular iteration).
Interviews
I began conducting interviews in the spring of 2015, partially for YPEJ purposes, for
interviews for another statewide study, and for my dissertation research. This included a number
of interviews that I conducted in multiple YPEJ sites across California in the spring of 2015;
several conducted in the Pacific City office in the spring of 2017; and in the summer of 2018 as
part of YPEJ’s baseline research collecting data for the long-term evaluation of Relationship-
Centered Schools that they hoped to conduct. I conducted three waves of interviews throughout
the process, which allowed me to capture reflections in response to dynamic processes as
organizations continue to shift and adapt strategies. My approach to participant observation, I
realized, helped young people feel more comfortable with me during interviews. I also made it a
point during interviews and generally to share as much as myself, and to be vulnerable as well,
especially as young people were being asked to do so in their political education workshops and
in my interviews. Interviews helped me direct my attention to specific practices and dynamics
within organizations, which then provide fodder for respondents to expand upon during
interviews (Crabtree and Miller 1999).
I asked youth about their reasons for joining the organization; general questions about
their involvement in their organization; whether and how the organization has changed their
views on race, gender, class, and sexuality and intersections of these social axes; processes and
31
organizational characteristics that impact their individual and community’s well-being; and
perceptions of well-being. I asked adults about strategies behind framing campaigns; intentions
and perceptions of their “healing” practices (and other practices bridging individual and
community-level well-being), and ways in which they attempt to manage and leverage
difference. I asked for youth and staff reflections and responses to these practices, what resonates
with them and why, whether and how they see “healing” practices in relationship to other
contexts of the organization, how they manage stressful aspects of participating, how they define
“healing” and well-being, and how staff identify and develop capacity to address youth’s
particular needs.
Data Analysis
To analyze data, I read field notes and interview transcripts multiple times and line by
line, using open coding first to identify emerging categories and concepts based on meaning
produced by participants (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011b). I used NVivo and Dedoose, a web-
based application for mixed-methods research. Coding revealed themes such as “self-care in
relationship to academic stress,” “collective care,” “stressing commonality over difference,”
“emotional well-being,” and “transformative justice.” As categories and themes emerge, I
modified coding schema--revising, expanding, or combining different categories, and developing
structures of meaning (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011a; Glaser and Strauss 1967). For example,
I re-grouped and re-structured themes such as “community agreements” and “embodied support”
under a “parent theme” of “prefigurative racialized resistance,” as well as expressions of
different types of emotions into a parent theme of “managing emotions.” I also wrote ongoing
memos according to emerging themes, questions, and patterns, addressing my original questions
and patterns that may not neatly fit into my original set of questions.
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This process of beginning to write and analyze data—even as I was still finishing data
collection with SEAP—compelled me to take this written version of the dissertation into a
different form than that which I originally anticipated. I started with the chapter on healing, but it
began to balloon out as I realized that I was grappling with something that could not be
contained in one chapter. Rather, I had to start with the story of why healing was important in the
first place. As I coded and organized data more, it also became clear that healing took many
forms—including in organizational cultures, as well as in community agreements, embodied,
support and other prefigurative practices that I began to categorize and make sense of. Finally, I
also recognized that these internal practices that organizations engaged in informed the
campaigns and demands that they made of schools and cities. Based on my data and experiences
in the field, centering healing helped me realize how emotions can be an avenue into less
understood approaches that push the boundaries of what are often considered to be “legitimate”
social change.
Chapter Outline
As such, the following chapters respond to my new analytical questions formed by the
aforementioned iterative process of research, analysis, and writing. The overarching question is:
how do youth of color harness emotions for expansive ideas of racial justice? More
specifically—how do they emotionally experience school? How do they bridge the paradoxes of
personal and political in social movements? What does this look like in terms of new
interpersonal, emotional norms in organizations? How does this translate into structural and
systemic change? In the subsequent chapter, I provide more context for the organizations and the
setting of my study, including my relationship with respective organizations and my approach. I
then explain why emotional counterpublics are needed. The next three chapters address
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emotional counterpublics in terms of different scales: the self, the interpersonal, and the
institutional—echoing the “three I’s” of internalized, interpersonal, and institutional inequalities
that both organizations addressed.
In the third chapter, I argue for why emotional counterpublics are necessary by focusing
on young people’s affective and emotional responses to school. Groups enable youth to unearth
feelings about often hostile, punitive school climates that are elsewhere deemed taboo (e.g. rage,
grief). These feelings serve as “epistemic resources” and critiques of institutional failure about
trauma engendered by carceral landscapes and anemic school budgets. Yet at the same time,
young people’s feelings about, and experiences of injustice at school, are constantly subjected to
ridicule and dehumanization. Speaking up and pushing back thus becomes necessary, yet
sometimes another ground for deepened frustration. I argue that these feelings demonstrate a
broader need for emotional and affective assessments of school.
In the fourth chapter, I argue that emotional counterpublics recuperate the self. Youth
organizing groups experience three dimensions of “paradoxes of the personal and political,”
including self-sacrifice to the collective, urgent and long-term time demands, and alleviated and
compounded trauma. Youth activists can become politically empowered and recuperate erased
selves, but fighting for systemic change can also exacerbate stresses of everyday survival amidst
structural violence. Emotional counterpublics manage these dilemmas through self-care and
reclaiming time for rest, forming new movement cultures oriented towards holistic well-being
(including a recognition of the self) instead of working to exhaustion in the name of collective
justice.
In the fifth chapter, I illustrate how groups practice emotional counterpublics in
interpersonal dynamics and prefigurative politics. Youth and staff enact alternative emotional
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norms made necessary by the dilemmas and hostile contexts described in the previous two
chapters. Furthermore, such practices and spaces also depart from traditionally understood
aspects of social movements, such as highly structured political education and leadership
development curriculum. Youth and staff practice restorative rather than punitive responses to
complex interpersonal dynamics, collectively forge agreed upon norms, and attempt to support
each other in expansive ways.
In the sixth chapter, I show how emotional counterpublics translate into structural
change. Youth mobilize emotional knowledge to assess the “success” of institutions in
alternative ways (e.g. beyond test scores) and to propose policies and material investments
centering youth’s well-being. They identify care as critical to their academic success and
thriving. However, youth also recognize that care is unsupported and devalued, whether in the
form of underpaid teachers, crowded classrooms, or city budgets devoted to their punishment
and erasure rather than their development. As such, emotional counterpublics extend their reach
beyond organizational boundaries, and into remaking policy, systems, and institutions.
I conclude by applying the framework of emotional counterpublics to our current
moment, one that bears both terrifying and hopeful potential. Will we spiral deeper into the
devaluation of Black and Brown lives, or will more of us wake up and finally contribute to
enacting a direly needed new world? I argue that youth’s emotional counterpublics has always
provided a roadmap for the way forward. Ultimately, I hope to show how emotional resistance
glues together liberation as it operates from granular to institutional scales. To do so, I first start
with contextualizing the legacies and socio-political forces that youth organizations grapple with.

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Chapter 2. Contextualizing the Organizations
In this chapter, I briefly situate YPEJ and SEAP within broader racialized structural,
sociopolitical contexts, and their efforts to transform these contexts. As such, I contextualize the
need for emotional counterpublics further described in chapters three and four. I do so by
discussing organizational settings and structures, examples of activities and approaches to
change, and finally outlining broader contexts of relational racialization and racial hierarchies, as
well as anti-Blackness and racialized nativism, that impact youth leaders, their families, and
communities.
Background: Setting and Structure
Organizational Settings
YPEJ’s office was originally located on a ground floor in a luxury apartment building in
downtown Pacific City. This office had a chic but cold warehouse feel, an aesthetic that seemed
more suitable to a startup company or gentrifying distillery, with grey concrete walls and high
airy ceilings, exposed pipes, and fluorescent lights. There were four offices, a large, open space
throughout, and a stage. Although the spaciousness was ideal for community events and
workshops where youth could move around, it was hard to hear each other during workshops and
events if it was hot and the fans were going full force. The setup of the space also made it hard to
customize, as there was little wall space. Perhaps most egregious was the general racist and
classed hostility of the apartment residents who constantly complained about the YPEJ youth and
confronted them about whether they deserved to be there or not. It didn’t help that oftentimes the
buzzer didn’t work, and youth would often climb into the office from a side door through an
alley, next to a Burger King parking lot, which was about 3 feet off the ground.
In January 2017, YPEJ moved to a cozier, grey carpeted office that felt much warmer in
tone, on the sixth floor of an office building. Three adjacent offices for staff provided areas for
36
breakout groups, one-on-ones, and other meetings. Offices had large windows that revealed a
rapidly transforming skyline as cranes built towering new luxury buildings. On one side of the
wall space around the large square common space, there are butcher papers pertinent to the
current campaign or workshops of the week—for example, drawings of thermometers dictating
progress towards a goal on collecting postcards or voter registration forms. Another wall is
completely covered with colorful political posters. In another corner, there is a standing altar that
includes testaments to murdered Black and Brown people like Sandra Bland; marigolds
fashioned out of white, yellow, bright green, blue, and purple tissue papers, and items of personal
significance to young people, such as an award for civic engagement or pictures of loved ones.
Until recently, SEAP’s office was located on most of the whole top floor of a building.
The office was always crowded in a homey way, buzzing with activity. Everything was carpeted
in a blue-ish grayish carpet, and plastered with SEAP-made, colorful art that sometimes came
from actions. One of my favorites was a three foot tall broken heart in two pieces, separated by
sharp jagged edges. Painted in vibrant red, one half of the hear stated in all caps white block
letters outlined in black: “Deportation Breaks our Hearts,” and the other, in gold with black
outline: “#Keep Families Together, Not Apart.” There was one small private office for the ED
and one shared office room; the rest of the organizers had desk space in shared areas. As the staff
grew in size, there were eventually small desks and computers set up almost everywhere, lining
the walls. Sometimes during tutoring I would work with students at one of the computer stations
in these open spaces. Otherwise, youth meetings and tutoring took place in a medium sized room
that had a white marker board and colorful posters up usually made by youth and/or staff,
oftentimes related to the particular program or the current campaign. For example, there was a
large poster hung up related to the Integrated Voter Engagement program and timeline, with each
37
month’s goals and activities written out on rectangular pieces of bright colored paper, and linked
together with twine. Lotus Leaders’s community agreements, each agreement written in different
colored marker, was also hung up, as well as SEAP’s “leadership pathways.” During meetings,
we would usually clear the floor and set up a straw mat. Youth would take their shoes off, and
we would sit cross-legged in a small circle. Occasionally youth would meet in a larger room, or
the members’ room, which had a large altar as well in the corner. SEAP’s commitment to
reproductive justice, manifested even in the bathrooms, which came well stocked with pads,
tampons, and posters about STI’s, breast exams, and general information and reproductive
health.
Organizational Structure
YPEJ has 3-4 school-based chapters within each region, where students engage peers at
the school site during lunch or after school. This is the main entry point into YPEJ’s leadership
structure. Some students from school-based chapters come to weekly “core leader” meetings at
the office that bring together students across high schools. These meetings focus on political
education and leadership development and loop students into ongoing local and statewide
campaigns. Students who come regularly have the opportunity to become “core leaders” who
take on leadership roles in base-building, planning events, and otherwise engaging in
organizational activities. Core leaders can apply to become one of four to seven paid interns who
commit up to 10 hours a week and are in charge of coordinating and facilitating core meetings or
chapter meetings, contributing to statewide strategy teams (which coordinate campaigns and
overall strategies between districts), or oversee different aspects of campaigns, such as school
site teams that are currently co-designing “Relationship-Centered Schools” in conjunction with
school administrators and staff. In addition to regular school-year programing, YPEJ also has an
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intensive summer institute, a statewide retreat in the mountains once a year, and a retreat for new
members in the fall. After they graduate, some alum remain involved as paid canvassers in the
civic engagement team, or as justice fellows who help run workshops and develop students’
leadership. Some students and alum may also run for board members. Each regional site for
YPEJ has two organizers, a lead organizer, and an organizing director (this grew from one
organizer, one lead, and one organizing director for every two regions from when I first got
connected with YPEJ). However, because YPEJ is a statewide organization, there is also
significant statewide infrastructure and attention paid to statewide campaigns and alliances on
multiple levels—and maintaining balance between statewide, local, and regional work is tricky,
posing particular challenges for basebuilding and capacity of staff.
SEAP’s structure involves multiple leadership programs that meet weekly, overseen by
different coordinators. Youth generally come from two local high schools. Students have to
apply each year to demonstrate their commitment to SEAP and to advance through the ranks.
The “entry-level” programs for freshmen and sophomores are geared towards identity
development and are separated by gender; the women’s program has approximately 15 members,
and the young men’s program has five to ten. There, young people learn about self, identity, and
begin developing their leadership skills. If they choose to and are admitted to the program, the
next step up is co-ed and one of the larger programs of up to 20 juniors and seniors. Here
political education continues, but the focus is mainly on putting skills into practice, as youth use
the time to plan events such as Wellness Week and the annual Haunted House, as well as
develop their leadership skills such as public speaking and working on campaigns (for example,
doorknocking). Finally, the “capstone” or “top-tier” program that I observed, or “Lotus Leaders,”
was also for juniors and seniors. Youth leaders served as ambassadors to different coalitions,
39
including Youth Coalition, and helped to strategize and lead components of campaign work as
well as to mentor and facilitate workshops for younger youth. Like YPEJ, SEAP also has an
integrated voter engagement program, but one that is larger and more well-resourced. They hire
alum to serve as canvassers, and have also hired a few to run the IVE program. SEAP also has a
“LIFE” program on Mondays, where juniors and seniors come to learn college and career skills,
attend tutoring, and work on their college applications and essays--one of my main forms of
involvement and support SEAP. SEAP has approximately 12 staff, almost all of them alum of
SEAP programs.
SEAP also anchors Youth Coalition, which brings together four other organizations in
addition to SEAP and YPEJ. The organization meets once monthly with youth representatives
from organizations, and once with adult staff to work on the Invest in Youth campaign (detailed
below). A SEAP organizer facilitates and coordinates the coalition, while organizers from other
organizations help out in getting their youth to the meetings and planning and facilitating
workshops. The coalition holds an annual retreat, usually in the winter.
Organizational Activities
As outlined by Terriquez (2017), these groups, like others, engage in development of
“basic civic skills”; provide “critical civics education” to understand root causes of issues they
face; develop “capacity for civic action” through campaigns and voter engagement; and support
youth’s “personal growth and well-being” through mentorship, healing, self-care, and academic
support (Terriquez 2017). Here, I provide an overview as well as some specific examples to
illustrate some of these practices.
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Civic Skills & Critical Civics Education
Like other youth organizing groups, YPEJ and SEAP develop young people’s critical
consciousness and identities so that they can critically analyze systems of injustice and
contextualize their own lives. Political education workshops on “isms,” including racism,
sexism, homophobia, economic injustice, and other systemic injustices expose youth to historical
and current social issues and movements. YPEJ, as a cross-racial organization, has a more
broadly focused racial justice curriculum, whereas SEAP spends more time specifically on
young people’s experiences as Southeast Asian 1.5 and 2
nd
generation refugees. However, both
groups focus on the “three I’s” of internalized racism—institutional, interpersonal, internalized.
Both use popular education techniques, and creative, youth-friendly approaches, oftentimes
addressing history and content that young people point out that they never learn in school. In
both groups, youth also receive training around skills needed for grassroots organizing, such as
base-building, conducting one-to-ones, delegation meetings, planning events and actions, and
public speaking. A majority in both organizations reported learning “a lot” that enabled them to
stand up for their beliefs; leaders also reported developing skills around public speaking,
collecting signatures, event planning, canvassing, and communicating with others (Terriquez and
Lin 2016; Terriquez, Yik, and Lin 2016).
These skills reflect their participation in decision-making processes, campaigns, electoral
organizing, and advocacy. SEAP has a bit more of a focus on the arts and culture than YPEJ: for
example, a Yellow Lounge event each year is focused on highlighting classical Khmer culture
(such as dance) but also youth culture; the year that I observed, youth could choose to write
poetry, design theater of the oppressed skits, or engage in classical dance. Young people also
frequently engage in making videos, zines, and other art projects.
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Youth groups inspired critical consciousness, linking young people’s personal
experiences with analysis and power to transform systemic conditions at the root of their lives.
(Ginwright and James 2002; Lin 2018; Noguera et al. 2013; Rogers et al. 2012; Terriquez 2015;
Watts and Hipolito-Delgado 2015). After all, racial group consciousness is not a given: social or
political contexts are critical in linking race, consciousness, and political action (Junn and
Masuoka 2008; Lin 2018).
In YPEJ, young people often reflected how they developed a critical analysis of race.
Skyler, for example, spoke about learning about race and racism. A longtime leader, Skyler is
tall, lanky, and always has a fresh fade and often a high-top haircut skillfully shaped by his dad.
Sometimes sarcastic with a biting and sometimes surprising sense of humor, Skyler is often
gentle and caring when he becomes comfortable to express it. He explained:
I grew up in a neighborhood where I was the only light-skinned kid there, me and my
sisters. Everybody else was an African immigrant or Puerto Rican so everybody thought I
was white. I would tell everybody that I wasn't and they swore up and down I was.
Everybody treated me like a white kid. Even the police on several occasions so I really
thought I was white for a while. When I moved to California and I realized I wasn't, I
didn't understand what that meant. I guess I developed a white mindset and so people
would try talking to me like people at school who claimed to be activist students. They
would try talking to me about reverse racism, for example. They would say it's not a real
thing. I didn't even understand what it was but I tried to defend it [reverse racism]. [I’d
say:] Yes, you can be racist against white people. Cracker is a derogatory term. Yes, it is.
Don't try to tell me it's not. I didn't even know what I was saying, but I thought I was
right. When I came to YPEJ the way YPEJ students and staff would talk about race I
realized why I was wrong. I can't really explain it but I finally understood what those
other students were talking about when they argued with me. Then I finally took ethnic
studies classes and I learned about race and I interacted with people who were different
from me. I was like oh. Then I was like I'm so in myself for being an asshole. [And] I
didn't understand the point in protest and riots. I thought that it was just a bunch of people
being mad and nothing wrecking, being reckless in their communities. Then I joined a
nonprofit and started being one of those protestors. I'm like oh, that's why.

Skyler’s reflection reveals one of the many possible trajectories for young people in
YPEJ. Some of them were already attuned to critical ideas of race, which had often been
42
introduced via social media, but needed a safe space to discuss and act upon them. However,
most had previous little exposure and explained how learning about “isms” was mind-blowing
for them. Like many others, Skyler deftly expresses the interweaving of the personal and
political: it is learning about structural roots of racism that leads him to turn the looking glass on
himself, and to completely do a 180 in terms of how he views his own racial identity, and the
appropriate prescriptions of change.
SEAP’s curriculum covers some similar, broader critical analysis ground that connects
the personal to political (including structures, systems, and institutions) but is deeply rooted in
the specificities of Southeast Asian Americans in Pacific City, focusing on intergenerational
trauma but also holistic healing and justice. As Dasgupta (2019) argues, youth
“go well beyond the liberal promise of state-sponsored immigration reform. They
interrogate the “refugee,” the “asylee,” and the “deportable criminal alien.” Youth in
[SEAP] learn about structural dislocation, displacement, critique “benevolent refugee
resettlement” narratives, the model minority and immigrant/ refugee justice. Their stance
is unapologetically feminist, and intersectional, with young women’s leadership
uplifted.” (Dasgupta 2019)
SEAP also adeptly linked affective and emotional experiences, consequences for mental,
physical, and emotional health, and structural violence. Young Southeast Asian folks who had
learned next to nothing about their own identities and cultures learned about trauma as a
mechanism of enduring pain across generations. Notably, 74% of SEAP members reported that
overwhelmingly learned “a lot” about their culture and ethnic group, reflecting SEAP’s emphasis
on ethnic identity and engagement in cultural arts (Terriquez et al. 2016). As SEAP’s youth
leader Alexandra put it:
“I never really liked history, but then I realized it was just because of the teachers and we
really just learn about white people history and we only get a page on ours. And I actually
remember when I was going through my folders and my papers from school, I really took
every chance to write about the Khmer Rouge. I would write about my history or write
about my culture…. But when I look back at it now, I'm just, "I chose to do that, but I
43
didn't really think about how it affected me like that." So I thought it was weird for my
little mind to be, "Oh, I'm going to write about this because I'm this…”
Alexandra’s curiosities were echoed by many other students. In hindsight, she is able to see that
she always harbored a desire to know more about her and her community’s history, but the
burden was on her to educate herself because education was not readily available. As with other
students, it wasn’t until they joined SEAP that they really began to understand and collectivize
their parents and individual situations.
SEAP’s political education workshops also helped young people understand, connect,
and speak up about how extreme poverty in the U.S. shaped their living conditions. Alexandra
reflected:
“Honestly, our families are pretty smart to be able to survive here, especially since I
don't think they got that much support from America when they came here. We learned
about what our families had to do. I think they made it like, you know how they had to
sew. They have a class called home ec, which is sewing. I remember my mom would
actually tell me stories about how my grandma would have her sew a whole pile of stuff
so that they could sell it. And then my mom would look back when she was done and a
whole other stack was on there. At the time, my mom was really young too, so my mom
and my aunt were like, what? Middle school or even younger and stuff. And that was a
thing that she told me and I was, "Oh, that's just something my mom did as a child."
And then when I went to SEAP, it was, "Oh, how many of your parents said this?" And I
was, "Oh shit, my mom was not the only one." That this was a thing that our people had
to do in order to survive. And yeah, things like that. I was like, "Oh, what did our parents
have to do in order to survive here?" And a lot of my people have donut shops and
stuff… think when you realize that you're not the only one going through it, you're more
likely to pay attention to it and you're more likely to acknowledge it because it's kind of
easy to forget about and think your problem's not worth much if you think you're the only
one going through it. So when you feel like someone else is going through it, you're more
likely to be, "Oh, I could get help" or "Oh, I could deal with this" sort of thing.
Alexandra speaks to how political education workshops helped her realize she was not
alone in her experiences. SEAP helped situate her and other students’ personal experiences
within systemic and structural violence by weaving together understandings of, and resistance to
genocide, imperialism, war, and trauma and their real physical, mental, and emotional health
impacts. They did so in ways that pointed out that their trauma and emotional well-being were
44
both indicative of, and layered on top of, racialized poverty and violence that constituted serious
obstacles to simply working hard to attain “success.”
I sat in on one workshop where the organizer led a refresher with youth on a timeline of
US war and militarism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which illuminated for me how exactly
SEAP linked together these big “isms” with personal experience. She explained beforehand to
me that the goal is for youth members to
“feel more grounded in the work and contextualize their life within the movement in a
sense, to set us up with our family’s history and recognizing their role today and how that
intersects with the campaign—all our campaigns are a response to our history, we’ve
been traumatized, about bringing the resources back to the community.”
Handing out a timeline that is labeled the “Migration to School to Prison to Deportation
pipeline,” Soph explains that this is for youth to really think about why and how their families got
here. She points out that this starts in 1953, far before most of the start of SEAP youth members’
family history in the U.S. The timeline points out colonization and U.S. intervention in the Secret
War. Soph emphasizes that the U.S. provided France with money to support their control:
“So everyone thinks the history of our migration just starts because of the Khmer Rouge.
But that conflict didn’t just happen out of nowhere. You don’t just wake up and think
okay we’re gonna fight each other and start killing each other. These are about all the
events that catalyzed that—the conditions that created this….’75 is often when we think
of this all as starting, and as the Khmer Rouge as “catapaulting all of us to come here. But
it’s all these events that caused them to migrate—forty years later. Like imagine that,
what we’re facing today started 20-40 years ago.”
The timeline quantifies the weight of bombs dropped in multiple countries in Southeast Asia
over the span of nine years—every eight minutes. Soph lets this sink in and repeats it, and points
out that we don’t always hear about bombs being dropped on Laos, or the length and frequency
at which bombs were dropped. After reading the next point in the timeline about how
information about the first four years of bombing wasn’t made public, Amanda chimes in. She’s
a talented artist with a big imagination who is often the driving force behind many of SEAP’s art
45
projects. She is also an ambitious and focused student who will be attending a UC to study art
history the following year:
“Americans justify it because they didn’t see it. But at the end they started televising it
and they were like oh no, they’re killing children. But before, they were okay with killing
children and they’re like oh, they’re dirty and uncivilized. They didn’t see us as human.”
Amanda’s comment points to how the invisibilization of this history—and how it continues—
justifies the dehumanizing policy that Southeast Asian folks continue to face. After an
acknowledgement that learning this history can be triggering, Soph points to how the timeline is
starting with the resettlement of refugees and the criminalization and poverty that they faced.
Soph asks if the youth members have any reflections—including their parents working in
sweatshops, as well as it means in terms of not having access to healthcare, coming from war
torn countries and not knowing how they’re gonna live and survive. Amanda jumps in and
continues her point on dehumanization: “Getting profiled as gang members, that’s all white
Americans see of us. We’re not seen as human.” Soph nods: “That’s right, we were
dehumanized, called savages, and then blamed for taking away resources. It’s kinda like now
right, like what’s happening with Central America?” “Colombia?” Ary offers, tentatively. “Right
well it’s like—what are they calling Central Americans and Mexicans?” “They’re saying their
rapists, drug dealers.” “Yeah and taking jobs,” Soph says. Ary says, “I feel like that’s happening
with all immigrants.” “That’s right,” Soph says.
The timeline then turns to the intensified criminalization in the 90s. Soph elaborates on
three strikes: “So it’s like, say I peed in public, that’s something a lot of people do but if you do
it, you could get 1 strike cuz that’s a misdemeanor. And then let’s say I didn’t pay a parking
ticket, that’s a second strike. And then oh, I dunno, another petty crime—that’s a third strike and
you get deported. And it’s like, people in our community have been deported just for peeing in
public. One thing about this law too is that it’s retroactive so even if you did something before
46
the law passed, it still counted as a strike. Even if it was stuff you already put time in for. Also
it’s like—how long had your families been here? Only for like 10 years and they were already
starting to hurt us.” She then uses the timeline to explain how this links to immigration laws and
targeting Cambodian communities for deportation: “ And another thing about this, it really
eliminated defense, you just got picked up and sent away and you couldn’t defend yourself as a
human being or write an appeal or anything. It was really just vicious.”
One of the last parts of the timeline discusses the mass numbers of Cambodian folks
deported. Soph comments:
“From the day to day it’s hard to have this history hanging over our heads because it’s
really heavy to carry. But sometimes I just think about all these people missing, that I
don’t always think about. Like where did they go? Where do 750 Cambodian folks, 550
Vietnamese folks just go? Like we have to learn to carry on without them.” She points
out that most of the people deported are men—“brothers and fathers supporting their
family. Some women but mostly men. So what does it mean for the women left behind,
whose men got picked up? They’re raising kids on their own, without their brothers, a lot
of them are single parents. So let’s just let that marinate. That’s a question for us, what’s
our role—it’s always women’s role to hold their families and communities together so
what’s our role as southeast Asian women?”
Afterwards, youth members reflect on the timeline via a self portrait that includes a
reflection on this collective timeline and folks harmed by the system. This excerpt from my
fieldwork with SEAP demonstrates how Soph, the organizer, closely intertwined young people’s
feelings with the vast structural contexts that young people were up against, from prior decades
that involved the U.S.’ purposely obscured role in committing mass violence against Southeast
Asians to the present day where family and community members were being deported because of
conditions within the U.S. that disinvested in their futures.
YPEJ Campaigns
Historically, YPEJ has fought for educational reforms that facilitate high school
graduation, postsecondary educational enrollment, and more equitable educational institutions
47
for low-income students of color. In Pacific City Unified School District, Black and Latinx
students have lower graduation rates than white and API students, and 43% of Black students
and 45% of Latinx students fulfill UC/ CSU requirements compared to 68% of white and API
students (Policylink and PERE 2019). Responding to these statewide racialized, classed, and
other gaps in educational opportunity, YPEJ was a leader in a coalitional campaign that won a
major victory in equitable funding for schools with the 2013 passage of the Local Control
Funding Formula (LCFF). Following up on the LCFF victory, YPEJ’s campaign won a
requirement that students be engaged in district-level decision- making around how LCFF funds
will be spent (in Local Control Accountability Plans, or LCAPs). LCFF and LCAPs remain a
staple of organizing, as students have used the process to advocate for resources to be allocated
towards cultural competency trainings for teachers; restorative justice; home school liaison
positions; psychological, counseling and mentoring services, and career- technical programs and
supports.
YPEJ youth embarked upon determining their next multi-year campaign in 2015 through
a multi-stage process. Youth leaders undertook a vast survey of 2000 students across the state;
held focus groups in each region with 57 total participants; brought together 100 students,
parents, educators, and policy experts; interviewed 65 educators, and reviewed 80 scholarly
articles. The key question at the heart of their action research: “What key resources do California
students, especially low-income youth of color, need to prepare them for 21
st
century college &
careers?” The main finding was that students perceived teachers as the most important resource
for their success: 80% of respondents stated that “quality teachers” were one of the top three
most important resources to graduate and be prepared for college and careers. The survey further
found racial discrepancies in students believing that they can succeed and a lack of
48
empowerment in making decisions in schools. Approximately half of students surveyed believed
that adults care about every student; about a third of African American and Native American
students reported that adults in their school do not make them feel like they matter.
This research became the foundation for YPEJ’s current campaigns fighting for
“Relationship-centered schools” that include investing in staff, creating space for relationship-
building, and valuing student voice. Currently in Pacific City, students are collaborating with
school staff and administrators in “design teams” to enact policy and program changes that
support relationship building (such as designing and leading teacher professional development
on racial equity, master schedule changes, and teacher hiring committees. This has also included
concomitant statewide campaigns to win funding and support in statewide budgets for initiatives
related to relationship-centered schools.
SEAP Campaigns
SEAP’s previous campaign came out of a participatory action research that highlighted
how Southeast Asian folks’ lives are impacted by war, poverty, intergenerational trauma,
incarceration, deportation, and displacement. They found that youth in their communities are
over-policed and targeted by law enforcement and gang databases: almost 40% of young men in
their sample had been stopped by law enforcement, and 16% physically hurt in these encounters.
Youth have faced numerous difficulties meeting their physical, emotional, and mental health
needs. In turn, these challenges have negatively impacted their academic performance and life
chances. As such, their campaign successfully advocated for a wellness center across for one of
their high schools to provide resources for accessible, comprehensive health services and
education to support students’ wellness, regular attendance, and academic success. SEAP also
works with other Southeast Asian organizations nationally to address crises of mass deportations
49
that has impacted their communities hard. They regularly engage in efforts to stop the
deportation of loved ones in SEAP members’ families and hold forums and actions around the
impact of deportation.
Coalitional Campaigns: Youth Coalition
SEAP and YPEJ have worked together in previous campaigns and on the current Invest
in Youth campaign. One campaign from 2014 to approximately 2017 organized for the funding
and implementation of restorative justice programs using the LCAP process in response to racial
disparities in discipline. In Pacific City’s school district in 2019, Black students are 4.5 times
more likely to be suspended than white students in the district (California Department of
Education 2019). Together, Black and Latino students comprise 86% of student-police contact in
the district (Salazar and Omojola 2016). The coalition organized events (such as a town hall
highlighting broader school climate and culture issues) and actions such as events outside of
school board meetings, including one in which student speakers wore graduation gowns,
juxtaposed with student participants in the audience wearing orange (symbolizing jumpsuits).
They also held student delegation meetings with school board and other decision-making,
ultimately winning a resolution proclaiming a commitment to reducing harsh discipline and in
support of restorative justice. This coalition pushed for solutions to racialized disparities in
school discipline by implementing restorative justice, positive behavior interventions, and
implicit bias trainings; increasing health/wellness services through funding wellness centers;
ensuring that Local Control Funding Formula funds are targeted specifically towards the
academic preparation of high-need students; and valuing student/parent voices in school and
district decision-making.
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In recent years, the coalition has turned to campaigns that seek to address mass
incarceration. As discussed more in chapter 6, SEAP is now leading a coalition that pushes back
on the city budget that has focused on policing and surveillance and instead proposes a fund for
youth development. Youth set upon a campaign to establish a Pacific City Children and Youth
Fund. After building relationships with the mayor’s office and city councilmembers, they were
able to win a one-time seed allocation in September 2018 of $200,000 in seed money to fund a
strategic planning process where youth across the city would decide on the services and
resources that they needed most. Initially the plan heading into the academic year of 2018-2019
was to win a number of ballot initiatives that would permanently resource the Children and
Youth fund.
Pacific City Contexts: Relational Racialization of Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian
Americans
Pacific City also provides a fruitful backdrop for addressing complexities of cross-racial
movement building and relational racialization, or “the racialization and formation of
subordinated groups in relation to one another” not only shaped by whiteness (Molina, HoSang,
and Gutiérrez 2019). I am also informed by an understanding of U.S. racial hierarchies that
positions blackness on bottom and whiteness (Masuoka and Junn 2013)—as such, I take into
account anti-Blackness but also racialized nativism (Sanchez 1997) that impacts Latinx and
Asian American communities in both distinct and parallel ways.
Inequities faced by YPEJ and SEAP’s members and communities must be situated within
broader histories, policies, and geographies of systemic exclusion. Like many other locales
across California and the U.S., the history and present of Pacific City is suffused with white
supremacy, including housing discrimination tied to racialized and classed educational
51
stratification (Pastor 2018). Black, Latinx, and Asian American youth in YPEJ come from
communities that have the highest proportions of low-income households, pollutants, and lowest
life expectancies (Policylink and PERE 2019). These present realities are shaped by
disinvestment from Pacific City’s once booming military industrial economy, precipitating mass
unemployment and white flight—again, a familiar tale across California (Marchevsky and
Theoharis 2006; Pastor 2018). The city responded to this crisis by economic redevelopment
seeking to attract tourism, retail, and technology. Pacific City’s attempt to restructure its
economy involved seizing “blighted” land, razing affordable housing and mass displacement of
low-income residents into the central areas of the city, and erecting downtown residential and
leisure spaces (Ibid). This redevelopment did not pan out in widespread prosperity. Rather,
parents of YPEJ and SEAP members are oftentimes poverty-wage, immigrant workers in the
service economy created by this bifurcated economy.
And students are facing the legacies of racialized disinvestment in public education in
California, including the devastation caused by Prop 13. Finally, Pacific City has a large racial
generation gap: 86% of young folks are people of color compared to 47% of seniors (Policylink
and PERE 2019). This is an important element to a political imbalance severely suppressing
YPEJ and SEAP youth and their communities. Underneath this normalized disinvestment in
youth is a racialized reluctance on the part of an older, whiter tax base to invest in public
resources, including public education, that is in service of Black and Brown youth (Pastor 2018).
The reverberations in terms of a housing crisis and lack of low-income housing remains relevant
and painful today for youth members, both in terms of their educational experiences and the
systemic challenges that their parents experience.
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Anti-Blackness
Organizations both pushed back against anti-Blackness endemic in the school institutions
and city budgets that they worked to transform, but they also struggled with anti-Blackness
within their own ranks. In Pacific City, Black men have had the highest rates of unemployment
and lowest median income (Norman and Hollie 2013). Black communities in Pacific City have
the lowest life expectancy and the highest rates of living in rented housing (Ibid). Housing
discrimination has long, ugly roots- African Americans have long been blocked from housing
ownership in Pacific City and more recently, the lack of affordable housing has pushed the
population out of the city and into neighboring areas (Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006). These
realities require a specific understanding of anti-Blackness: as Wilderson (2020) argues, U.S.
chattel slavery continues to stamp the position of Black people, and that Blackness is tied forever
to “slaveness,” forever rendering Black people un, and sub-human.
Patterson argues that Black literal death is also accompanied with “social death,” or
ascription of the lack of meaning on Black folks (Patterson 1985). Reflecting on how police
violence is directed most towards Black people, Hitchens (2017) argues, “To be black in
America is enough to warrant your death—whether armed or unarmed.” Hitchens argues that this
is one way to understand police violence as a systemic incapacitation of Black life (Hitchens
2017). Furthermore, Bassichis and Spade argue that “bodily terror as an everyday aspect of a
larger regime of structural racialized and gendered violence congealed within practices of
criminalization, immigration enforcement, poverty, and medicalization targeted at black people
at the population level—from before birth until after death.” (Bassichis and Spade 2014:196)
(196) This systemic, constant, pervasive devaluation of Black life and targeting of Black folks
53
was a constant backdrop that groups were not only fighting against, but also had to contend with
in their internal practices.
Racialized Nativism and Differential Inclusion
For much of the time that I worked with YPEJ, both youth and staff were predominantly
Latinx, mostly Chicanx, and a handful of youth whose parents are Central American (mostly
from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). Here, I briefly describe how “racialized nativism”
(Sanchez 1997) and “differential inclusion” (Espiritu 2003) characterize YPEJ and SEAP
members’ experiences in parallel, intertwined, but also distinct ways. Southeast Asian, Chicanx,
and Central American communities have experienced what Sanchez describes as racialized
nativism, or racialized anti-immigrant hostilities. Throughout different stages of U.S. history,
groups such as Filipinos and Puerto Ricans have experienced what Espiritu terms “differential
inclusion,” or tentative and contingent inclusion: they “could be routinely bounced in and out of
the ‘national community’ according to the ever-changing political and economic needs of the
nation” (Oboler 1995:38), and thus deemed “ integral only or precisely because of their
designated subordinate standing” (Espiritu 2003: 47). Prieto (2018) argues that the U.S. has
effectively told Mexican immigrants: “we want your labor, but we don’t want you.” (Prieto
2018) This “conditional welcome” to non-white immigrant groups fosters a politics of
hierarchies between the “deserving and eligible” on one hand, and the “unworthy and unwanted”
on the other (Masuoka and Junn 2013). Good and bad immigrant dichotomies are anathema to
cross-ethnic, cross-racial solidarity, instead encouraging some individuals and communities to
embrace assimilation and political quiescence to facilitate their acceptance especially as a
counterpoint to groups’ otherness (Saito 2001).
54
Although Trump’s racism has taken on an indiscriminate, equal opportunity sheen, from
the Muslim ban to his insistence on calling Covid-19 “kung flu,” it is important to name the
specific virulence aimed towards Mexican immigrants, Mexico, and Latinx communities more
broadly. An emboldened hatred towards Mexicans and Central Americans, embodied in part by
Trump’s border wall and his unapologetic and frequent description of Mexicans as rapists,
killers, and criminals—not to mention the deportations razing through communities, the locking
up of migrant children and families into cages, the visible violence at the border, have all
weighed directly and heavily on YPEJ youth’s lives, feeding heightened discrimination and
distress for Latinx and other immigrant communities (Costello 2017; Rogers 2017). The steep
rise of anti-Latino hate crimes, sadly, is not surprising (Romero 2016). Many YPEJ youth
members have siblings, parents, or other loved ones who are undocumented, and the trauma
inflicted upon them is corroborated by the data, as undocumented youth or those with
undocumented family members are experiencing fear, terror, anxiety, depression, hopelessness,
contempt, and disgust (Cervantes et al. 2018; Gomez and Perez Huber 2019; Salas et al. 2013;
Vega 2018).
Of course, it is also important to remember that this didn’t start with the Trump
administration, but rather the hellish last few years for youth, their families, and communities are
part of a longer trajectory of increasingly draconian immigrant policies, intensified
criminalization and the rise of the “deportation nation” (Menjivar and Abrego 2012; Menjívar
and Kanstroom 2013; Patler and Golash‐Boza 2017; Prieto 2018). After all, Obama’s ramping up
of criminalization of immigrants and harsh immigration enforcement earned him the dubious
distinction of “deporter in chief” (Bolter 2017). And it was not so long ago that California was in
the same place that the U.S. seems to be now—not until 2016 was the ban on bilingual education
55
turned back, and the unapologetic stoking of fear and hatred of Mexican immigrants and other
Latin American immigrants as burdening American taxpayers has been a familiar refrain in
California’s own anti-immigrant politics (Pastor 2018). So, too, does this anti-Latin American
immigrant sentiment fit into a longer genealogy of racializing Mexcians as Latinos through the
lens of a “culture of poverty,” (Lewis 1971) and pathologies of the underclass that again divert
blame to so-called cultural explanations rather than structural and systemic barriers purity
(Gonzalez 2019; Gutierrez et al. 2019). Conveniently forgotten in U.S. white supremacist
amnesia is that migration should be traced back to U.S. imperialism that has wreaked havoc,
economic instability, poverty, and violence in Mexico and across Central America (Alvarado,
Estrada, Hernandez 2017; Flores-Macias 2008).
There are parallels that echo when considering what SEAP youth members, their
families, and communities are contending with. I employ a critical refugee studies paradigm that
moves beyond simplistic tropes of Southeast Asians as model minorities (Ngo and Lee 2007; Um
2003), “underclass,” (Espiritu 2014), welfare queens (Ong 2003; Tang 2000), or gang bangers
(Chhuon Vichet and Sullivan Amanda 2013). This paradigm recognizes the long-lasting and
continuing violence of imperialism and genocide that are not sealed off in the past, directly
resisting the mainstream narrative about refugees supposedly rescued into U.S. liberalism and
instead critiquing U.S.’ role in horrific atrocities that were worsened by their bombings in
Southeast Asia and support of coups that destabilized regions (Espiritu 2014). SEAP and youth’s
communities are responding to a context where resettlement was not a fresh new start—instead,
Southeast Asians were often moved to neighborhoods “beset by poverty, crime, and derelict
housing” (Tang 2015). Tang argues that “instability persisted as a result of woeful housing
conditions, unabated working poverty, punitive welfare regulation, and a justice system that
56
would sooner criminalize poor women than protect them from interpersonal violence.” (4) At
the same time, Tang asserts that Cambodian refugees are seen as a “solution” to the “race”
problem created by Black and other Brown folks. He terms this “refugee exceptionalism”:
ironically, this trope both “holds” the refugee in “perpetual captivity” and yet sees the refugee as
“in the hyperghetto but never of it.” Their “persistent underachievement” is seen as “an always
temporary phenomenon distinct from the intractable problem of Black urban poverty.” (175)
This ultimately obscures the violence of colonial projects and reinforces the idea of the model
minority that serves to further punish Black, Latino, and other brown folks.
Relational Racializations and Coalition Building
Of course, as much as Pacific City has been marred by histories and legacies of white
supremacy, it also has involved long histories of organizing and mobilizing—including by the
local chapters of the NAACP and LULAC. I also build on literature documenting cross-racial
alliances building across differences such as race, class, citizenship, and gender by recognizing
how groups are similarly or differently positioned within power relations, rather than relying on
falsely homogenous shared identity and history (Bloemraad and Terriquez 2016; Cohen 1997;
Pastor et al. 2010; Pastor and Carter 2009; Terriquez and Carter 2013). California, of course, has
a long history of cross-racial leftist movements, to name just a few-- from the United Farm
Workers (Araiza 2013), to Third World leftist solidarity movements (Pulido 2006; Umemoto
1989), to Black-Latino labor alliances (Zamora and Osuji 2014), to Asian Americans and Latinos
in the San Gabriel Valley sharing political knowledge on issues of redistricting, education, and
anti-immigrant measures (Saito 1998).
YPEJ and Youth Coalition more frequently than not engaged in analyses of similarities
across communities of color—including the economic exploitation, conquest, colonialism, and
57
legal boundaries that link together non-white communities. Youth organizations pointed to
policies and practices that have allowed whites to benefit systematically “from the structural
impediments to minority access to quality housing, schools, and jobs.” (Lipsitz 1998). Political
education and analyses pointed to how non-whites are thus lumped together as unassimilable and
unfit for citizenship because of their supposed incapacity to serve as productive citizens—a
condition made difficult by these structural barriers (Gotanda 1991; Harris 1993). YPEJ
workshops, for example, aligned with literature that has pointed to differential yet shared forms
of economic exploitation. Political education also discusses how YPEJ’s and SEAP’s
communities face ongoing legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and conquest, as well as
racialization as tied to a “global racial order” (Winant 2009: 6). In particular, Latinx and Asian
American youth members discuss historical colonial power relations to illustrate how how
Latina/os and Asian Americans have been “conceived in the popular mind as outside of the
‘boundaries’ of the ‘American’ community.” (Oboler 1995: 19).
Finally, the current Invest in Youth campaign responds to criminalization and policing
that have served to control and surveil working-class immigrants of color and African American
communities via gang/ youth curfews and police sweeps. In the 90s, fears about Asian/ Latino
youth gangs and their “violent conduct” stamped Pacific City as a “dangerous” area in need of
some brutal cleaning up, with white residents expressing fear about crime and drugs and blaming
the social results of manufactured poverty on those experiencing poverty. As such, the Invest in
Youth campaign also fits into broader statewide and national efforts to turn back the tides against
mass incarceration. For example, SEAP, YPEJ, and other organizations participated in
canvassing and voter registration efforts to pass Proposition 47, which reduced certain non-
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violent felonies into misdemeanors and redirected resources into safe neighborhoods and school
funds
Here, I have provided a brief glimpse into some of the structural contexts of
disinvestment, white supremacy, dislocation, poverty, and intergenerational trauma that YPEJ
and SEAP youth, their families, and communities are grappling with. In the subsequent chapter, I
illustrate how some of these structural contexts translate into felt consequences in schools.

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Chapter 3. “School Doesn’t Care about What I think or Feel”*: Why Youth Need
Emotional Counterpublics
*Quote by YPEJ leader Karly
In this chapter, I show why youth need emotional counterpublics. I argue that it matters
how students feel in school. To do so, I highlight Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American
youth’s experiences of punitive school emotional cultures that often leave them feeling silenced,
embattled, and dehumanized. Karly’s quote, the title of this chapter, sums it up perfectly:
“School doesn’t care about what I think or feel.” These experiences spark youth’s justifiable
emotional responses, but students’ attempts to speak up are often squelched. I argue that these
emotional and affective insights contribute to existing literature on education, school policing,
intersectionality, emotions, and organizing. First, I focus on how policing extends beyond formal
punishment and markers of carceral schools such as metal detectors and school police, into
informal practices and affective carceral landscapes that pervaded even “good” schools and
“good,” or “invisible” students. Second, I center the emotional toll and response of students as
forms of “epistemic resources” and “feeling knowledge” that are not always captured in
quantitative or outcome-oriented understandings of education, even when considering measures
such as “school climate.”
In this chapter, I weave this argument by first illuminating how students are silenced, and
experience complex emotional responses to hostile school climates even if and when they fly
under the radar or are otherwise seen as “good students.” Second, I show how students’
understandable responses to these hostile climates are further treated as trivial and unimportant.
Third, I argue that students’ efforts to speak up and transform school climate are often
suppressed and further policed. Altogether, these themes illustrate why and how racialized,
60
intersectional educational inequality operates in emotional ways—and thus warrants a spectrum
of emotional resistance.
Contextualization within literature:
This chapter builds on rich extant scholarship about zero tolerance policies and carceral
school contexts that threaten to systematically deny many Black, Latinx, Southeast Asian,
Indigenous, and other Brown youth the support needed for their growth, development, and
education (Greenberg et al. 2003; Gregory and Cornell 2009; Roeser, Eccles, and Sameroff
2000). Scholars describe how zero tolerance policies—that is, draconian school discipline
policies supposedly to crack down on school violence, but applied to a wide range of minor
offenses (Browne 2002)—fuel a “school to prison” pipeline that can derail Black and Brown
students’ educational trajectories, funneling them instead into the juvenile justice system
(Browne 2003). Herein we see a deeply unjust contradiction: zero-tolerance policies comprise
“rigid, unforgiving policies aimed at a demographic—kids—whose existence is defined by
growth, development, and change.” (Morris 2016: 94). Furthermore, students who have the
greatest needs for nurturing and support are those most likely to be suspended, expelled, or to
face exclusionary punishment (Noguera 2003).
Many schools serving low-income Black and Brown youth, then, have become sites of
“maximum security and minimum learning” (Browne 2003)--part of a “universal carceral
apparatus” (Shedd 2015) and “youth control complex” (Rios 2011). Rios (2011) argues that
public schools in poor neighborhoods function as part of a broader penal and carceral state to
“control and manage poor racialized bodies,” to “brand, further degrade, and contain youth of
color.” And, as much scholarship finds, there are dramatic racial disproportionalities in
suspensions and expulsions (Browne 2003; Skiba et al. 2002, 2011; Skiba, Eckes Suzanne, and
61
Brown 2009; Wallace et al. 2008). For example, according to the 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data
Collection, Black students, who comprise 16 percent of enrollment nationally, accounted for 40
percent of suspensions (Gordon 2018). These disparities are also located in higher suspensions or
expulsions for subjective behavior such as “willful defiance,” a vague category for behaviors
deemed “defiant” or “disruptive” that has disproportionately been wielded against students of
color. (Forsyth et al. 2015; Gregory and Weinstein 2008; Martin and Smith 2017; Skiba et al.
2011).
Such racist disproportionalities can be traced in part to the broader social construction of
Black and Brown youth that links them to criminality and as devoid of innocence or possibility
of growth usually attributed to children. Black youth have been demonized as “vermin-like,” and
“animal-like savages” (Ferguson 2001). The behavior of Black, Latinx, and other Brown youth is
often “adultified” (Burton 2007; Dancy 2014; Epstein, Blake, and Gonzalez 2017; Gerding
Speno and Aubrey 2018; Sanchez et al. 2019). For example, Morris (2016) argues that Black
girls are subjected to “age compression” in that they don’t get to be seen as girls. Ferguson
(2001) shows how white teachers see Black children keeping books at home as “looting,”
“violence,” and “mayhem,” assuming that “the children embody a willful, destructive, and
irrational disregard for property rather than simple carelessness.” (83)
School staff and administrators often read a wide range of Black students’ behavior
including hunger, fatigue, questions, or pushback against being mistreated as “attitude,”
defiance, and disruption (Morris 2016; Ferguson 2001). On the one hand, these findings fit into
how non-Black people often perceive Black folks’ emotional states as “dangerous” and “angry,”
regardless of how they are presenting themselves (Jackson and Harvey Wingfield 2013). These
misinterpretations, however, are also racialized, gendered, and aged—Black girls are punished
62
for acting “unladylike,” when “ladyhood” is defined by white, middle-class, normative ideals of
girlhood (Fordham 1993; Lewis and Diamond 2015; Morris 2007; Morris and Perry 2017). For
example, school staff and other adults often interpret Black as being loud, exhibiting attitudes,
being domineering, hostile, provocative, disrespectful, irrational, and/or angry (Epstein et al.
2017; Fordham 1993; Lei 2003; Lewis and Lewis 2017). As such, Black girls are more likely to
be punished for behavior that other peers may enact without punishment (such as talking back,
chewing gum, getting up to throw away trash) (Wun 2016b).
Rightfully so, research has focused on concrete, identifiable markers of zero tolerance
and carceral schools, as well as identifiable impacts on educational opportunity and life chances.
Oftentimes, zero tolerance and carceral schools are described in terms of the increase in school
police, surveillance cameras, metal detectors looking for weapons and drugs, police sweeps with
dogs, and upsetting, egregious violence committed against students (Robbins 2008; Shedd 2015).
Scholarship has tracked how being suspended or expelled is linked to dropping out, lower
academic achievement, subsequent suspensions, being held back, juvenile justice involvement,
and criminal justice involvement in adulthood (Arcia 2006; Balfanz, Byrnes, and Fox 2015;
Fabelo et al. 2011; Hirschfield 2009; Noltemeyer, Ward, and Mcloughlin 2015; Raffaele Mendez
2003; Shollenberger 2015; Western 2006; Wolf and Kupchik 2017). And of course,
organizations on the ground have rightfully continued to advocate around better data collection
and transparency around suspensions/ expulsions disaggregated by race/ethnicity.
Literature has focused far less on the emotional “hidden tolls” of zero tolerance and
carceral schools, that punish Black and Brown students for “being their authentic selves” (Hines-
Datiri and Carter Andrews 2017). It is also critical for us to investigate the finer points of
everyday school experiences, and more informal types of punishment or “unarchived forms of
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discipline” (Wun 2014). That means taking into account both those who have been actively
pushed out and those who don’t become one of the numbers of suspended or expelled. After all,
zero tolerance “undermines the social relations in and everyday practices of schools” (Robbins
2008) and warps social relationships within schools, sowing alienation and mistrust (Ayers et al.
2001). I argue that we need to understand the broader, less tangible or quantifiable atmospheres
of hostility and toxicity created by “the culture of zero tolerance [that] has seeped into nearly
every corner of school discipline” (Morris 2016: 94). How does school feel even for those who
are supposedly flying under the radar? Morris’ work shows why these intangibles are important:
even “high-performing Black girls…recognize when they are being treated differently and can’t
understand why” (Morris 2016: 64). For example, Wun (2016) shows that Black girls tend to
“keep stuff in,” keep to themselves, and experience anger, anxiety, and impatience. I call upon
the need to identify the atmospheres and consequences of punitive schools including students
who contort, suppress, and silence themselves in efforts to escape suspensions and expulsions
(with a recognition that even their best efforts do not necessarily work).
In other words: young people experience school in felt ways that are not always captured
in existing measures that attract rightful attention, even in terms of “school climate” as measured
in annual surveys that students take. For YPEJ’s purposes, for example, I would often analyze
the California Healthy Kids Survey or help youth design their own action surveys to capture how
students felt about school. Oftentimes we were surprised by how the data did not seem to quite
match how students knew they and peers really felt. Of course, part of the issue included
limitations on disaggregated data. For example, in examining the “school connectedness” scale
in this school district’s school climate survey results, a majority of students stated that they felt
close to people in school, were happy at school, felt a part of the school, and/or felt safe. Even
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when we designed and conducted our own surveys, students were generally surprised by the
positive marks that students, including Black and Brown students and students of color would
give their teachers. I argue that these school climate surveys, while critical data to continue
collecting, also raise questions about more ambiguous, complex feelings about school that cannot
be as easily measured quantifiably.
To do so, I turn to the broader literature on race and emotional suppression. Black youth,
adults, and other people of color manage and present their emotions within tightly circumscribed
parameters as strategies to protect themselves. Communities of color must restrain emotions,
generally and particularly in response to injustice, or risk negative sanctions (Evans and Moore
2015; Ferguson 2001; Hughey 2008). Furthermore, Black men are penalized for expressing
anger (Wingfield 2010:200). People of color in “white institutional” settings face alienation,
ostracism, sanctioning, and firing for voicing opinions in response to unjust treatment: they may
be labeled “emotional” or otherwise problematic (Evans and Moore 2015).
As such, punishment creates overwhelming pressures for people of color to self-censor
their emotional expressions (Evans and Moore 2015; Hill 2005). As Ferguson (2001) argues,
“Black boys must learn to hide ‘attitude’ and learn to exorcise defiance,” (89) including
“internaliz[ing] a ritual obeisance… so that the performance of docility appears to come
naturally.” (87) Thus, Black parents train their children to not appear “defiant, angry, or uppity”
in white settings (McLoyd et al. 2000). Adult staff at a non-profit organization taught young
Black girls to regulate their feelings and were told to stop crying, to reduce “unnecessary
drama,” and to suppress resentment and anger so that they would not be vulnerable to
punishment by white teachers and staff (Froyum 2010). Black professionals must suppress
feelings around anger, race, and racism (Wingfield 2010). Black college men socialize each other
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to minimize and underplay their feelings, particularly anger—for example, by maintaining de-
politicized, easy-going demeanors (Jackson and Harvey Wingfield 2013; A. Wilkins 2012a;
Wingfield 2010). In particular, Wilkins (2012) finds that Black men exhibit “restrained, positive
emotional standards” and “moderate blackness” in order to distance themselves from appearing
to be angry or dangerous. Meanwhile, Black women are often expected to exhibit emotional
strength and care (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2007)) as “superwomen” who are allegedly immune to
weakness and pain (Wallace 1999). For example, Black women faculty must suppress frustration
about being deemed intellectually inferior by exhibiting “professionalism,” while abiding by
gendered expectations of providing nurturing care to students (Harlow 2003).
This emotional suppression exacerbates the tolls of racism in multiple ways (Evans and
Moore 2015; Ramos-Zayas 2011; Wingfield 2010). First, there are multiple detrimental
consequences to such emotional management. These expectations can suppress justifiable
seeking of help: Black women may be discouraged from soliciting support because they fear
violating these expectations (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2007); Asian American men who are
attempting to defy emasculation and emphasize their emotional and physical strength may
experience heightened stress (Lu and Wong 2013). Furthermore, emotional management
strategies include teaching people of color to “ignore, trivialize, and reinterpret everyday racism,
and to see white peers as (educable) allies rather than (hostile) enemies.” (A. Wilkins 2012b).
For example, suppression of racialized emotions revolve around emphasizing narratives around
overcoming racism (Hughey 2008), recasting racialized incidents as non-racist (A. Wilkins
2012a; Wilkins and Pace 2014), denying the impacts of racism on one’s own lives (Harlow 2003;
A. C. Wilkins 2012). and discouraging anger (Jackson and Harvey Wingfield 2013). These
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maneuvers to actively deny the role of racism can actively reproduce inequality by dampening
attempts at resistance (A. Wilkins 2012a). Such emotional realities create an impossible bind:
“People of color carry the burden of having to choose between tacitly participating in
their marginalization or actively resisting racist ideologies with the possible consequence
of institutional alienation, exclusion, or official reprimand… As a result of the additional
burden of emotion work for people of color in these racialized institutions, and the need
for people of color to sometimes choose an emotional strategy to not engage or challenge
racial oppression in order to succeed in these spaces, the racialized relations of power are
reproduced.” (Evans and Moore 2015)

Furthermore, history and the present tell us that suppressing and managing racialized
emotions are never adequate: no matter how “respectable” people of color act, they are still
subject to the same everyday policing and devaluing of their lives that will never be fully
protected despite their behavior (Benjamin 2018a). In short, then, the policing and surveillance
of people of color’s emotions amount to a form of “racial gaslighting” (Davis and Ernst 2017b):
“the political, social, economic and cultural process that perpetuates and normalizes a white
supremacist reality through pathologizing those who resist.” As such, speaking up and critical
consciousness are not always a panacea.
Together, these bodies of literature show us that experiencing, and having to quash
emotions in response to racism, takes an emotional toll—which has rarely been centered in Black
and Brown youth experiences of punitive school atmospheres. As such, this chapter centers
youth’s emotional responses and more informal experiences of discipline. I build off feminist
epistemology’s contention that emotions serve as “a privileged source of truth about the self and
its relations with others” (Swan 2008) and Jaggar (1989)’s argument that emotionality is a
strength, form of political analysis and knowledge that “provide the first indications that
something is wrong with the way alleged facts have been constructed, with accepted
understandings of how things are.” As such, I center the emotional tolls and the “complexities of
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[youth’s] lives, pain, and suffering” (Wun 2016). After all, adults’ vague feeling, or emotional
responses delineated by fear, grease the gears of the school to prison pipeline. That is, white
people’s emotions are normalized as a form of “hegemonic emotional domination” (Matias
2016). In stark contrast, people of color’s emotions are cast as “dubious” and unreliable
(Accapadi 2007): youth and adults of color are not afforded the same latitude in feeling—their
emotions do not constitute authority, or knowledge in the same way. The youth in my study push
extant literature and documentation on criminalization of Black and Brown youth—they both
argue that the numbers, and explicitly disaggregated numbers by race, are needed and that we
must investigate textures of their everyday school experiences not always captured in these
numbers. This chapter uplifts youth’s voices arguing that their experiences of injustice in school,
families, and other settings include ambiguous, affective, and emotional dimensions—which
have not always been understood nor taken seriously.
How Punitive Schools Feel: Hostile Emotional Cultures
Youth across organizations often discussed how schools treated them as objects to be
policed, surveilled, and regulated. As a result, they often felt dehumanized. Whether or not they
were individually targeted for harsh punishment, whether or not they became a statistic in
suspensions and expulsions: almost every student had someone to say about punishment and
control as the dominant texture of their school experiences. I argue that these experiences
demonstrate the complex feeling and affective structure produced by hostile schools.
For example, youth leader Leah was not deemed a “troublemaker” herself. Leah is
Filipina American and currently a student at a UC, but I first met her when she was a sophomore
newly joining YPEJ. She was especially involved her junior year as a statewide strategy intern.
She is talkative and oftentimes will say something that is incredibly poetic, stamping itself
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indelibly into your brain. She grew especially close to a Filipina American organizer who was
there for part of my time at YPEJ and became especially interested in learning more about her
Filipinx identity. As one of the few Asian American students in YPEJ, Leah and I often talked
about Asian American identity and our relationship to other communities of color.
One time in the fall of 2017, I was giving Leah a ride home from a YPEJ weekly youth
leader meeting. Gripping her frayed red backpack and pushing up her gold rimmed, round
glasses with one finger, she leans forward and begins breathlessly recounting her day to me. She
explains that several fights had broken out throughout the day:
“Our principal and staff were so aggressive. They ended lunch five minutes early and
when they got on the PA like they were so angry and aggressive. And then when we went
outside there were so many cops staring at us. It was like they wanted to control us!”
Leah’s accounting notably describes adults as “aggressive” compared to the literature
discussed above that depicts teachers and administrators’ assumptions that students of color are
aggressive. Staff and organizers helped support Leah to develop her responses to this day into a
powerful story that she told during a YPEJ mobilization at the State Board of Education:
On any given Monday, I walk through the hallway and see police officers staring at my
peers and I as if we’re a threat. On Tuesday, I hear my teacher frustratedly confess that
she is too swamped with work to be mentor figures to her students. She admits that after
classes, she sits in her classroom alone, with no students or teachers to interact with. On
Wednesday, yet another student of color is subjected to a bag check for simply wearing
her hood up. She confusedly looks at a staff member who zips open her backpack to
search for something that isn’t there. She leaves class with an embarrassed look plastered
on her face. On Thursday, a fight erupts during lunch and staff members rush behind
students in golf carts, yelling at everyone to mind their business and get to class before
they get cited. Students walk into class alarmed and unsettled. By Friday, I am not
surprised to see my peers with uneasy and disengaged faces, almost like they’re robots.
They simply follow the everyday motions with no means of reflecting on everything
that’s happened. We remain shocked and silent.

Leah’s story illustrates the multi-layered, emotional and affective dimensions of punitive
school discipline that are not easily captured in extant school climate surveys or data about
suspensions and expulsions. She discusses both the overt markers of a punitive school climate
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(police officers, bag checks) and the less formal elements and impacts on students such as
shame, being unsettled, alarmed, uneasy, disengaged, shocked, silenced. This speaks to a range
of emotions that includes those that could be easily dismissed as trivial, or not indicative of real
problems, especially given the easy discounting of young people’s emotions in this generation as
being weak “snowflakes” (Olson and LaPoe 2017). Yet, by naming this range of emotions, Leah
paints a lush and evocative picture of consequences for students’ orientations towards school.
She hints at students being silenced and simply going through the motions. Even if students do
survive and make it through school, or even succeed—there is clearly an understated toll that
youth experience from these hostile environments.
Mario, a student at the same school, is a gregarious young Chicanx man with transitional
glasses and short-cropped hair. He often makes me and other students laugh with random
observations and his obsession with racecars. Mario has no qualms about public speaking and
often volunteers to report back if we have broken out into small group discussions during YPEJ
workshops. Wearing a floral t-shirt, he jumped in to speak during a focus group with a litany of
his issues about school, marking both overlapping and personalized perspective that
complemented Leah’s:
Mr. [redacted] is always jumping to conclusions, thinking I’m stealing a Chromebook
when I’m next to a teacher and I have a shirt that says I’m with AP Seminar [and using
the laptop for that reason]. This other time when I got pushed down and I was bleeding
[school staff] were like trying to make sure I wasn’t gonna fight someone. When I clearly
wasn’t, like can I please get cleaned up already, I’m bleeding all over the place.
What else, the cafeteria ladies, there’s a few nice ones but when you’re getting cut in line
or whatever, nobody does anything to stop the chaos that’s going on in the lunch lines. Or
I’ll go earlier. The nurse is the meanest person I’ve ever met. I got pink eye and didn’t
realize till 2
nd
period and they sent me to the nurse, and she was like How didn’t you
know you had pink eye, she was like you shouldn’t have come to school at all. And I was
like, I didn’t know, I was brushing my teeth, I wasn’t staring at my eyes. She’s the rudest
lady. The other staff people are the rudest, they’ll run you over with their little carts. If
you go in the line and you don’t have your ID they’ll yell at you, like have your ID’s out,
come to the side, step to the side, why don’t you have your ID out! Nobody wants to go
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in school like that. If you get scared and you’re fumbling for your ID, they’ll make you
feel bad. The guys are nicer but they’re only nice to girls when they forget their IDs. My
friend forgets her ID all the time and they’re like ok what’s your first period room and
she said it and they let her go. But one time I forgot my ID, and that was not the case.
[Laughs] And they made me pay my money!

Mario’s story reveals more unambiguous feelings than Leah. Although Mario was not
singled out necessarily for suspension or expulsion, he nevertheless felt this punitive atmosphere
was amplified for him because of assumptions of criminality and malintent (that he was stealing
a Chromebook or fighting someone else, or purposely infecting others). Leah’s speech reveals
the generalized atmosphere, but Mario’s reveals what it looks like for his particular
positionality—in his view, young men were policed more in terms of identification than young
women. Even though Mario was a student deemed “good,” and was active in his classes and took
several APs and Honors, it was not enough to shield him from assumptions of bad behavior. His
reflections, like Leah’s, show the emotional tolls of constantly having the worst assumed of him.
Other students similarly felt that punitive environments treated students as an object of
suspicion and disregard, rather than worthy of nurturing. As a result, they felt disengaged from
school even if they were not specifically targeted. Sara, whom I first met when she was a shy
sophomore, attended an elite, relatively well-resourced school that was not immune from these
hostile environments. As she pointed out during one YPEJ meeting, school police “makes them
[students] feel like they’re just at school to get in trouble. When there’s police there it makes you
not want to go to school. It lowers fights but it also lowers attendance and graduation.” Sara
suggests that students felt as if police produced a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another student,
Iliana, who is outgoing, outspoken, and emanates warmth, pointed out that school police were
there because adults wanted to feel safe: “But the only people who feel safe [with school
resource officers around] is staff. And it makes us feel like the school doesn’t believe we can
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learn.” Similarly, Alex pointed out: “Walking around campus there’ll be a police officer there
and that doesn’t motivate you to do anything or make you feel safe.” Camila suggested, “it’s
like the more exposure you have to police maybe the more prone you are to do illegal things
because that’s the expectation.” These quotes from interviews and youth workshops and events
show the prevalence of students’ perceptions of heavy police presence as counter-productive,
demoralizing and de-incentivizing. While some students seemed to think there were some
productive aspects of school resource officers, such as reining in fights, others pointed out that
they felt more unsafe. These observations align with previous research: as Shedd argues, police
do not make students feel safe, but rather “makes them feel imprisoned” (2016:99). She
describes what students reflect here as mechanisms of social control in the form of “hierarchical
observation,” and students are being conditioned as suspects not just within school but outside of
school, in interactions with police.
I caught glimpses of these own feelings because I often went to Mario’s and Leah’s
school for lunchtime chapter meetings and had to make sure to get there well ahead of time so as
to avoid the rush of lunchtime, where students trying to leave for lunch had to flow through one
small opening in a large gate and have their IDs checked. I was struck by how stressful it felt
even to be there as an adult. During short lunchtime meetings, students often had to rush to get to
their class immediately after lunch in time. I was walking with one student, Alex, who has
several other siblings and is the child of Mexican immigrants, and he tells me that he wants to
become a Spanish teacher. As I’m walking with him on campus after the chapter meeting, he
suddenly realized that he needed to get to class, and blurted out a hurried, “bye, sorry, I gotta
go!” before breaking out into a full-on sprint to get to class across campus. This struck me
because of how Alex was kind, caring, and especially concerned about making others feel
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comfortable—he wouldn’t have done this unless he really needed to. Heading out the gate, I
notice that staff members are barking at slowly walking students, counting down the time they
have left. Leaving the school, I realized that I had experienced a small glimpse of what students
felt everyday—being herded by cattle, and a general sense of fear and anxiety about getting in
trouble for the most minor of “offenses.” Although it’s unclear what kind of punishment faced
students if they were really late, the general feeling of being overwhelmingly surveilled and
policed was clear to me.
Misprioritization of Resources
On top of all this, YPEJ students also had developed a political analysis through their
involvement that layered on another outrage. The heavy policing and surveilling presence in
schools indicated betrayed a gross imbalance of priorities on the part of school—further
illuminating how, in their view, school treats them as objects for regulation rather than subjects
for education. During one focus group, Cameron, who is generally soft-spoken and can take
some time to warm up, pointed out adamantly that school resource officers are “literally people
just in golf carts going around. What’s even their job? They’re like running us over.” Leah
interjected: “They don’t do shit!” Cameron shakes their head. “What do we even need them for,
we don’t even have textbooks for our classes in psychology.” Skyler, a lanky, often sarcastic,
and hilarious young man added: “That’s true in all my classes! We don’t have textbooks but we
have these random people [disciplining us].” As such, young people felt particularly outraged
that their educational experience embodied a paradox: on the one hand, they were utterly
neglected when it came to the things that mattered for their educational success, and yet deeply
scrutinized for things that simply did not matter, in their view.
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Students discussed how, despite overwhelming challenges they faced, supports for mental
and emotional health needs were first on the chopping block and last to be funded. As one
student put it: “in terms of students’ needs, like mental health I know is all the way at the bottom,
even like physical health, do we have a nurse?” After Parkland, students felt that this discrepancy
was even more glaringly unjust. As Laura pointed out: “We should talk about all these feelings
we have of anxiety and being scared. Because we need more counselors and psychologists at
school, or someone who knows how to deal with mental health issues before it gets as drastic as
it did at Parkland.” Sky pointed out that his school “cut funding for the care center… Everytime I
go, there’s a ton of students in there so I don’t know why the hell they cut funding.” Laura
shakes her head out of rage, spitting out the words: “Are you serious?? there are so many
students, like there are 600 freshmen alone.” These sentiments highlighted the structural,
systemic violence that was at the root of young people’s depression, anxiety and stress—even as
adults continued to focus resources direly needed for these issues towards policing and
surveilling them.
Another articulation of this sentiment also materialized around a disproportionate
obsession with dress codes, which clearly targeted young women of color. Alexandra, a SEAP
youth, reflected that there were gendered double standards that revealed a specific policing of
young women’s bodies:
It's just like literally a guy can walk shirtless and no one's gonna say anything. But if I put
my shirt up a little high cause I'm like, we're running in PE, so it's just like I'm wearing a
sports bra personally, so I'm not really showing much. I can't even lift my shirt up to fan
myself or whatever. But a guy is literally running half naked, sort of things.
Again, students also felt that this focus prevailed over more important issues: during a
youth vote turnout event in spring of 2016, PJ juxtaposed adult concerns with dress codes with
what they felt was desperately needed in schools: “the principal changed the dress code but not
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education…. We’re worried about [bra] straps when computer access isn’t enough.” Similarly,
Camila argued that adults “take more into consideration dress code than when [a student brought
a Trump flag]…. It’s offensive but he didn’t get punished. [But] I got in trouble for ripped jeans
and they warned me of defiance.” These are just a few snapshots of how students argued that
adults were hyper-focused on controlling their bodies and expression rather than turning their
attention to the real problems that posed overwhelming challenges for students. This disjuncture,
yet again, showed students that their education was less of a priority than their control and
suppression. The heightened gendered dimension of dress code policing also made young
women, in particular, feel targeted as subjects of a discomfiting gaze, as also discussed by other
scholarship (Aghasaleh 2018; Morris 2016; Raby 2010).
How students are silenced by these emotional cultures
These contexts rendered students silent. One day in October 2017, I was at YPEJ a bit
early before the core leader meeting. Cameron is angrily reporting back the details of their day to
Rocío, the organizer. At this point in time, Cameron has a chin-length bob and although the color
of their hair changes approximately monthly, at the moment of this incident it’s bleached blonde
with some faded magenta. Cameron explains that they got yelled at today because a fellow
student wanted them to pass handouts over, but there were several empty seats between them.
When Cameron got up to pass over then handouts, they accidentally slipped and fell backwards
onto the heater, making a big clanging sound. The teacher whipped around and screamed at
them: “Sit down and behave yourself!” Recalling this episode, Cameron fought back tears and
reflected with quite understandable, quiet rage: “She needs to retire, she looks like a corpse.”
Rocío, the organizer, looked a little taken aback and responded with an understanding, yet gently
admonishing tone: “Whoa okay, let’s focus on how she’s a bad teacher and doesn’t respect you,
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not how she looks.” Cameron went on: “I mean, I’m not a good student. But I do behave myself!
I behave myself so well that I’m invisible.” Later on, I asked Cameron to elaborate on this
comment during an interview, and they explained:
“I'm just quiet, I really just want to get through it and I know a lot of students are loud…
Also, sometimes it messes me up being quiet, because then I'm scared to ask the teacher
for help. That's a bad thing, usually on tests, too, I won't understand a question and I'll
just assume and I'll get it wrong… When I took French class, it was very easy to me, but
all the students around me would struggle, the teacher would ask a question and I'm like,
oh I know the answer. I would always say it under my breath, my friends would hear me
and she would say it and they're like, "Why don't you just raise your hand and answer?" I
don't know, I just get nervous.”
Cameron’s reflection demonstrates how these types of interactions with teachers wore on
them heavily and damaged their self-esteem and confidence in their own voice, opinions, and
knowledge. This atmosphere filled them with fear and obstructed them from asking questions or
attempting to answer questions. At the same time, even though Cameron is already quiet and
keeps to themselves, it is not enough to keep the teacher from assuming ill intention. Of course,
there are structural and systemic issues, including teachers being exploited, underpaid, and lack
of attention to their own mental health that I discuss more in Chapter 6. It is important to
foreground how YPEJ has sought to make sure that teachers are not blamed as individuals.
Nevertheless, students are directly harmed by teacher’s actions and assumptions.
As another example: in January of 2018, PJ, who is normally an exuberant YPEJ leader
radiating good cheer, storms in late when we are already almost done with the icebreaker, which
is youth going around and sharing their pet peeves. When it comes her turn, PJ blurts out that her
pet peeve is “shitty fucking teachers who don’t care.” She then explains the source of her anger:
“Yeah, so we had this new dance teacher. She has us doing extra. She acts like we’re
professional dancers.” PJ lists out the exercises the teacher demanded that students engage in.
“And one time I was rubbing my wrists because they were hurt, and she yelled at me and said, ‘I
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didn’t say you could get up!” PJ explains that because of the teachers’ creation of an atmosphere
where she didn’t feel comfortable and had to push herself beyond her limits, “I kept hitting my
toe and I knew something was gonna go wrong. And now it’s purple.” PJ’s story results in an
outburst of sympathy from students, who all at once express their outrage in solidarity as well as
advice. Skyler shrugs and crossing his arms, says: “It doesn’t matter what she said, you have to
take care of yourself. If you have to, you go to the office and then you lay down there.” “No, it’s
not worth getting in trouble and going to the principal’s office!” PJ rebuts. This particular
incidence shows how challenging it is for students to speak up for themselves even when they
are being hurt: the racialized and gendered implications of speaking up means that doing so can
be perceived as disobedience, which can have reverberating consequences for students of color.
PJ feels that she is unable to stand up for herself without being disciplined.
Finally, Leah explained how these punitive contexts tied her tongue and stomach up in
knots. At an illustrative story at a Board of Education meeting, she shared:
“As a freshman I was very nervous about adapting to a new school. I didn't talk much in
class because my anxiety caused me to feel nauseous and get massive headaches [I felt
like I was about to throw up just from speaking in class.]. I slowly began to speak up in
class, but one instance shut down my self improvements. One day, my English teacher
was calling out quiet students in class and she chose to pick on me. As I nervously
hesitated she screamed at me in front of all of my classmates saying, "You're never gonna
make it into AP seminar. "And if you do, you're probably not gonna make it "into my
class." I shut down. Perhaps my teacher was attempting to motivate me, but her approach
did the opposite. I was discouraged from participating in class and avoided asking for
help at all costs. However, I realized the impact that experience had on my grades and I
resolved once more to speak up in class during sophomore year.”
Later on, during an interview, I asked her to elaborate and share more on the atmosphere
at school beyond this specific action. Leah explained that a
“lot of teachers that I've witnessed are quick to judge other students and easily want to
scream at them which is like... it should just be like a last resort. And they shouldn't even
be screaming at them. It embarrasses students and it makes them feel less than they are…
Because if I'm going through something at home and I have a lot of homework slammed
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on me, that's too much pressure. So I should be able to confide with my teacher about that
kind of stuff.”
She then reflected that because of this, “at school, I feel like shit.”
Leah was not the only one. Other students whom I knew as confident and self-assured
expressed how this school environment engendered extreme anxiety. As Alexandra explained,
even though she emceed SEAP’s Yellow Lounge, a community event with at least 200 attendees,
she was “the most anxious” when she had to emcee at school:
“I think I was shaking at school because it was just like I don't like these people, like I'm
not comfortable with the space at school, because it's just like not [like SEAP]. It's like at
high school I feel like there's always this front of like, "Oh we don't really care," sort of
thing. Or like they care but they don't want other people know that. It was weird. Like I
didn't really like it and like I was the most anxious than I've ever been at that time.”
Alexandra’s story complements Leah’s. As she explained to me, “I had a lot of anxiety
over public speaking and like it's literally just simple as like having to read a paragraph in class.
My heart would just be racing and it's just like you're literally just reading.” These stories
surprised me because I knew Alexandra has a confident, outspoken leader; I got to know her best
as a senior, but I remember first meeting her during a doorknocking event when she was a junior.
Although students are often nervous, understandably, about doorknocking, Alexandra stood out
to me because she was so at ease.
Alexandra, Leah’s, PJ’s, and Cameron’s stories all speak to how school does not provide
a welcoming environment for them to speak up, even though public speaking is often a graded
expectation and assessment within classrooms. They demonstrate how they are caught in a bind:
on the one hand, they must speak up, but on the other they don’t feel safe doing so. And some
have even internalized being silent as a way to avoid garnering punitive attention—even though,
as Cameron’s story illustrates, Audre Lorde’s quote about silence not being protective is also
highly applicable. Again, none of the students here were suspended nor expelled, but they reveal
the textures of a punitive school environment that cause students to shrink themselves.
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Students confronted miasmas of hostility, punishment, and regulation that weaponized
their anxiety, assumed the worst, and silenced them even if they were not suspended or expelled.
These stories spoke to a broader culture in which students felt that they were often treated with
suspicion, their emotions and feelings treated as grounds for antagonistic responses. Students
explained that some teachers treated them as only capable of either deviant/ violent behavior, or
being invisible—that is, only one aspect of their emotional selves and humanity was expected
and thus pre-conditioned.
These anxieties stemmed not just from specific confrontations with teachers, but the
broader atmosphere in school that discouraged speaking up and collaboration between students,
engendering what students identified as a hostile and unwelcoming school environment. Of
course, it is important not to just blame their peers but rather to contextualize peer behavior
within the policy, systems, and structures that adults could better guide. Students often talked
about how they had little desires to even talk to their peers: Leah explained, “At school I don't
even talk to people. I don't have as much of a productive relationship with people at school as I
do at YPEJ. Because I feel like I'm a lot more comfortable in sharing ideas with the peeps at
YPEJ than I do at school.” Skyler similarly contrasted his experiences with YPEJ with how he
felt about students at school: “At school I don't know anybody, nor do I actually want to. I think
that feeling is largely mutual.” Imani, a longtime YPEJ leader who is thoughtful and careful to
make sure that everyone around her feels welcome, was especially vocal about the environment
at school, where she explained that students were relentlessly judgmental. She explains: “you[ll]
hear somebody say, "Look at that girl's skirt over there. That is so not cute. What is she doing
with her life? What is she listening to?" Her reflection further illuminates why and how this
environment impacts her academic experience:
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You'll talk to your partner every now and then. Or it's like, I don't know, I just dread it. A
lot of people they don't even want to talk to you. They say, "Oh yeah, do a group project,
or talk about this thing." And there will be literally the group will be silent, that's what I
hate. Because it's like I need to do my work, but you guys want to talk, and I don't want
to talk to you because I don't want you guys to think I'm weird. Like, "That weird girl
tried talking to me." Even though it's a group thing, and it's like, dang, you don't know
them…Basically yeah, you don't really know people in your classroom. Yeah sure, you
know their name, but you don't know anything about them. You don't know how they are.
Again, these issues should not be pinned on students, or even teachers as “bad apples.”
As discussed more in chapter 6, they indicate broader systemic, structural issues. Although
teachers do give them opportunities to collaborate with each other, they haven’t had structures or
space dedicated to actually relationship and community building with each other. The teacher is
not the only culprit here; there’s also a problem with accountability, continued focuses on
testing, large classrooms, and lack of support for teachers. As Camila pointed out during one
YPEJ core leader meeting, students needed a lot more encouragement to share and develop their
opinions:
“A lot of young people don’t talk out or speak because maybe in the moment they don’t
care. But if you give them an opportunity, they’ll talk and share what they’re thinking. In
a lot of classrooms they don’t give you an opportunity to voice your thoughts. Except
maybe in English where you’ll do a free write or something. But school really does make
student silent.” [emphasis mine]
Camila’s sentiment aptly sums up the affective atmosphere that I have highlighted
throughout this section as traced to policing (Bottiana et al. 2017). When students are made to
feel ashamed, hurt, and embarrassed for their opinions, their voice and spirits can be squelched.
This highlights the types of broader affective, emotional consequences that might not be
accounted for in numbers of suspensions, expulsions, and graduation and attendance rates.
Emotional Gaslighting & Silencing
When youth did try to voice their emotions, concerns, and needs, they frequently felt
dismissed by adults: as aligned with previous literature on racialized and gendered forms of
emotional suppression. During one YPEJ workshop, students were sitting around in circles to
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discuss their school experiences. Mario points out that his anxiety at school is so intense that he
can feel paralyzed: “And I want to say something but I feel like I really shouldn’t because I feel
like people won’t believe me and that teachers won’t believe me or they won’t do anything about
it.” Sitting next to him, Aurelia nods vigorously. “Me too! And they’ll say it’s just in your head.”
During another talking circle, Susan quietly suggested: “I feel like there need to be more things
[support, resources, spaces] for teens, like we’re low key slept on. Like adults will be like oh
they can deal, just go read a book or something.” YPEJ and Youth Committee leader, Laura, was
especially vocal about mental health. Unlike many other students who said that they came out of
their shell through their involvement, Laura was already politicized and opinionated even before
Cameron brought her to YPEJ. Laura has strong feelings and loves to be in the limelight and to
have opportunities to speak in public. As she explained,
“A lot of parents do not believe that their child is actually depressed. They don't believe
that their child actually has anxiety. They don't believe all these things simply because
they're like, "Oh, your brain hasn't developed yet. Why am I going to take you to the
psychiatrist to get medicine if your brain hasn't developed yet? That's not going to help or
whatever." And it's, "Don't want your child to be well?" I don't know, it's just a thing that
I don't understand. How could they not take that seriously? If someone is sick, of course
they're going to take them the doctor.”
Laura’s point expresses how adults only take physical health seriously, rather than
treating mental health as interconnected and just as critical. Hers and other students’ comments
highlight how adults constantly tell them to put mind over matter, believing that mental and
emotional health issues are trivial.
For youth, this silencing was especially egregious because their anxieties and depression
were rooted in systemic problems that, they argued, were often created by the very adults who
ridiculed their feelings. The previous section highlights plenty of reasons as to why youth feel
the way they do: depression is structurally induced (Cvetkovich 2012a). Furthermore, students
point out that “boomers” had created a situation where their generation was drowning, on fire,
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and feeling an immense weight on their shoulders to survive. Their dismissal of youth was thus
harmful on multiple levels. Leah reflected during a talking circle: “Adults don’t know what
we’re going through. Baby boomers, they think it’s so easy to just go to college. They don’t
know what it’s like for us.” As Laura passionately expressed during one YC meeting:
“I don’t give a shit about adults because they’re stupid! Especially baby boomers like
shut the fuck up! You fucked up the economy and you’re telling me to get a job or
whatever? It’s like, you’re gonna die anyway in two years. There are all these old people
voting on our future. They’re gonna ruin my future but they’re gonna die anyway, they’re
not gonna be there! It’s like… when you’re in a nursing home and voting for Turmp,
what the fuck are you doing, you’re not even gonna be here!”
Youth felt that they faced an infuriating paradox. “Boomers” were constantly giving them
advice to the effect of “suck it up,” when they effectively pulled up the ladder behind them, and
decimated the economy and earth to the point where young folks are forced to be at the forefront
of radically needed change. And yet, their efforts at speaking up attracted condescension and
silencing.
Gendered Emotional Silencing
Youth in SEAP’s specific context often highlighted specifically gendered dimensions of
silencing. I plan to discuss family infringement on boundaries in a future chapter, but here I
focus on broader cultures around sexual violence and exploitation of women’s labor on multiple
levels. For example, during one workshop, Gabrielle shared a story about how this manifested in
her life. Gabrielle is initially a bit reserved to strangers, especially when we first meet in the
context of tutoring, but eventually we develop a bond because she is one of a handful of queer
students in SEAP, and she expresses that she is grateful to have me in the space as a queer
mentor. An expressive and openly emotional person who takes pride in her dancing abilities,
Gabrielle can also be boisterous. During this workshop, she tells a story about how she walking
home alone from a school. A boy came up to her, continued complimenting her, and asked if he
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could walk her home. She responded, “I’m 13, how old are you?” And he said that he was 18, “is
that okay with you?” She declined and walked quickly by herself, and she kept looking behind to
see if he was following. She summed it up: “And I’m still scared to walk alone to this day.”
Gabrielle’s story shows how young women’s feelings about their boundaries and needs being
intruded upon is tied to a broader culture that demands women accept sexualization and men’s
desire—or potentially be met with violence (Roberts 1999).
Meanwhile, other young women spoke about how this issue also manifested in their
uncompensated labor in school: Pair says that her teacher might ask her to do a favor like go
hand in the attendance or something, and it’s hard to say no “because they’re the adult, they’re in
charge, so you don’t have an excuse to say no, it sounds like you’re being rude to an adult.”
Alexandra says she TA’s for class and the teacher asks her to stay during lunch to help, and she
feels like she has to say yes despite it being one of the few times that she can take a breather
during the packed school day. Organizer J explains that this also manifests in jobs: “I don’t
know… when can I say no, isn’t it supposed to be my job? And then I start rationalizing it like—
okay maybe this is an opportunity for growth for me, to overcome this challenge or take this
on…” Young women here are expressing how they are silenced and suppressed in such multi-
directional ways that they often police and regulate themselves in order to avoid sanctioning.
In short, as young women always tasked with relational care work (see the following
chapter on paradoxes of social movements), SEAP leaders felt as if even a simple assertion of
their own needs and boundaries was completely silenced or ridiculed in several spaces. This
previous section suggests multiple dimensions of how youth’s voices and emotions are
suppressed and silenced, particularly at the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and class:
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whether in terms of their mental/ emotional health needs, or how simple desires for boundaries
and personal autonomy were ridiculed.
Ridiculing Discussions of Race, Gender, and Class
Quite understandably, youth wanted to speak up about injustice in their lives and how
they felt about them. Take for example Karly, a senior during the 2016-2017 school year. She
had moved a few years from Chicago and got connected with YPEJ via CCEJ, another youth
organization in the city, which focuses more on consciousness-raising and educational
workshops than on organizing and advocacy. Karly was especially engaged during political
education discussions but less a part of the day to day organizing and leadership development
that some of the more involved interns. Part of her own political motivation stemmed from
feeling deeply alienated as one of a small number of Black students at a “good” school. Like a
handful of other YPEJ students who attended this school, race and class figured prominently in
their felt exclusion, especially in contrast to affluent white students who drove luxury cars. I
often chatted with Karly prior to workshops and in between sessions, where she openly shared
her frustrations with teachers, adults, and other students at her schools, whose racism was thinly
veiled. Most frequently, this culprit was her counselor, who seemed bent towards explicit racist
comments. During a formal interview we held at La Tierra Mia, she held a strawberry flavored
drink topped with whipped cream and peered at me through her red-framed glasses. She recalled
when her counselor discouraged her from attending a summer program at Princeton she had been
accepted to:
“She said it was a gimmick and said that I shouldn’t go, and I don’t know why I’m trying
to go anyway because my grades. But another girl that was like.. uh.. non-of-color, got
accepted to the same thing but at Stanford and literally all the teachers put money into
going.”
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Despite her experiences that gave her a firsthand look at unfair treatment, she pointed out
that other students readily rejected her understandings of her experience as indicative of systemic
inequality:
“Because the way they were brought up, some people think that everybody at [high
school] is treated the same. So they don’t see where I’m coming from, like if I told them
[this story], they’d be like oh my god, it’s not true. They’d be like [the white person’s]
getting treated equally as you, and you have the same thing as she has.”
Karlys reflection highlighted how emotional terrains at her school tended to gloss over
harmful incidents associated with race, gender, class, and more, by suggesting the solution was
to ignore the issue. She experienced a form of “racial gaslighting” in that her attempts to merely
speak the injustice of her experience were quickly met with protestations and vehement
assertions that she had not experienced racism. This pointed to a broader hostile environment
that dehumanized students, particularly marginalized students-- treating them as numbers rather
than human beings with autonomous thoughts and emotions worthy of consideration. As such,
young people’s experiences corroborates other scholarship that highlights the lack of space for,
and regulation of, people of color’s and students of color’s emotions especially in response to
racism (Jackson and Harvey Wingfield 2013; Morris 2016; Wingfield 2010).
Karly’s experience was hardly an anomaly. For other YPEJ students, bringing up issues
of racial and educational equity with teachers and other students—for example, when they
conducted class presentations for base-building purposes, recruitment, and outreach for their
action research—could subject them to apathy or even ridicule. Young people repeatedly pointed
out how they constantly butted up against vehement adherence to colorblind, meritocratic,
individualistic ideologies. Peers rejected any discussion of race as simply pulling out the race
card, or refused to recognize the unequal distribution of resources. As Nicole put it, students
often say: “I feel like school's fine. I don't see anything so I don't even know what you're talking
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about.' They can't see it so they don't think it's a problem.'” Similarly, Skyler pointed out that:
“Some people will always ignore you no matter what you say and be like, ‘We have the same
opportunities, we go to the same school, we live in the same city.’ Even though they’re in
wealthy zip codes and a better program in my school.” This pushback, centered around the idea
that racism or educational inequalities was not a real problem was also echoed by Sara, a senior
at the time, who recalled how a student responded to her classroom presentation about their
campaign to improve connections between students of color and their teachers with a scornful
rebuff in front of the rest of the class (at the same school that Karly attended): ‘‘I don’t get how
that works. At [our high school] a lot of youth aren’t white and have good relationships with
their teachers.’ He later pressed his point, rudely labeling their campaign as “a waste of time.” In
a later interview when I followed up about this story, Sara explained that students labeled their
campaign as
“dumb because you're just wasting class time trying to build relationships with teachers.'
But all the students who have said that are students that are up there and students that
actively try to get onto teacher's good side so they don't see the point because they're
already there but students who are troubled, they don't really say anything.”
Meanwhile, Imani explained that an AP student, whom she described as a “goody-
goody,” felt that students deserve to be kicked out, similar to Sara’s explanation of students who
justify the status quo:
“She was also saying, "Oh yeah, when teachers kick out students. That's okay, because
they're being bad. They're blah, blah, blah." But in actuality, I told her, "Hey, you don't
know what's going on in people's lives. It's not just they want to be defiant. It just
sometimes happens, you're having a bad day." And she was just like, "They're being
defiant." … But it's like she never experienced it, so she doesn't worry about it.”
These reflections on pushback from peers showed another dimension of failure in
education. Students are not being provided with the critical analysis tools to develop radical
empathy, or to think outside of their own experiences (or even to analyze their own experiences
critically). That some young people are pushing back vehemently against YPEJ leaders’
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arguments shows that our school system is not helping them grapple substantively with issues of
race, class, stratification, and inequality.
This issue was further highlighted when YPEJ students got flack for talking about race
and racism in any form at all. Laura shared that peers hypocritically exhibited consciousness
about race in contexts that they decried as “reverse racism,” yet refused to recognize racism in
contexts of white supremacy or police brutality: “They [students]’ll be like, oh he only got into
school ‘cause he’s Black and then when a Black person gets killed by cops they’ll be like, oh it’s
not about race.” Meanwhile, Sara pointed out that students will push back with their own
interpretations of data, arguing “low income students get suspended more but it's actually
because low income students have more population in the school district,” which to her, is an
indication that “they just try to pick a fight, you know what I mean? At my school, a lot of times,
students try to test how much they know by arguing with each other.” Imani explained that non-
Black students often used the n-word. Andrea reflected on how white students “were talking
about how they hated each other, and they were like, "Oh, you know, you better watch what you
say or else I'm going to lynch you." She intervened and told them to take the idea of lynching
more seriously. One of the students responded, “I'm going to be one of those [n-words] that
you're going to lynch." Imani explained that students more broadly policed each other’s opinions.
When she’d speak up about offensive language, students with respond with: "What? I can say
whatever I want, it's a free country." Again, these incidents illustrate the ongoing need for
substantive dialogue and grounding in anti-racist education, and a lack thereof in schools. It
wasn’t until students attended YPEJ that they were really able to critically grapple with racism in
particular. I re-emphasize that the issue to be focused on here is not with students’ deficiency but
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rather the gaping opportunities and need for critical analysis around race that are not being
addressed adequately in schools.
Students in SEAP shared similar experiences, although the specific type of targeting
differed and was often explicitly gendered. Young women in SEAP often told me that they were
met with everyday derision in response to any expression of emotion. During an interview,
Alexandra told me that young women were often told “you're on your period or whatever. You're
being emotional." This experience was echoed by many other SEAP young women, which they
translated into skits during their annual arts performance in the summer of 2019. Students
designed and acted out a skit as “PSA” with the refrains: ‘Just because I’m a girl” and “Just
because I’m a boy.” The skit involved Viet, also one of the emcees for the show, coming up to
Lizzie, a rising sophomore.
Viet: Hey Lizzie, did you do your homework?
Lizzie: Yes
Viet: can I copy?
Lizzie: no you always bother me! Go bother someone else. I’m tired of you taking my
work.
Viet: why is it such a big deal? Why are u so angry? Are you PMSing or something?
Lizzie: just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I’m always on my period. I’m entitled to my
feelings and shouldn’t be belittled for expressing them. I have my own feelings and you
need to respect them.
In another vignette, SEAP youth displayed gender-specific emotional silencing of young
men.
Viet: Why are u crying at school for?
Alex : Stuff at home, I don’t wanna talk about it.
Viet: c’mon stop crying. Are u a pussy? Are u a real man or what?
Alex: just because I’m a boy, doesn’t mean I can’t cry, hide my emotions, that I have to
man up. All people including boys deserve to be able to share their feelings and be
accepted for it.

Together, all students then said in unison: “All people are entitled to their emotions.”
More broadly, these two vignettes captured gendered policing of emotions and gendered
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emotional norms. By juxtaposing the two, SEAP youth pointed out that gendered policing
targeted and harmed not only women, but men as well. For young women, as consistent with
literature, it was assumed that all emotions were “hormonal,” a function of body over mind and
rationality. However, young men are also expected not to express emotions—doing so, as young
men in the skit pointed out, subjected them to criticisms of not being appropriately “manly” and
as indicative of femininity. Either way, SEAP youth sought to normalize the expression of, and
their entitlement to emotions.
Policing Youth Voices/ Activism
Young people’s understandable desire to speak up and act in response to issues that
concerned them were also met with direct suppression by adults. After the Parkland shootings,
YPEJ students excitedly discussed walkouts at their own schools, part of a national trend of
students rising up. But rumors also swirled around that students could potentially be suspended.
During a talking circle, students began excitedly talking over each other when the prospect of
walkouts, and potential punishment, was raised. Camila suggests: “In ASB, we talked a lot about
this and one student said oh well they do have to mark you down [as absent], like it’s mandatory
to do that. But if you’re concerned like it’s an issue for college you can explain in your essay like
why you skipped class, that it’s your political beliefs.” Nicole adds: “We’re lucky we go to a
liberal school district, but some said that if you walked out you would get suspended and the
colleges said they would support you.” A senior, Carlos, who only occasionally came to core
leader meetings and rarely spoke, raised his hand and, turning to the adult organizers, asks: “If
they do try to suspend us, can you guys help us?” Sofía, the organizer, nods and smiles: “I’m not
sure what we can do, but we’ll definitely advocate for you and support your rights to do this. But
definitely talk to your teacher first.” Adamantly, Laura insists:
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“But everyone in education is gonna support it because of course they’re gonna be in
support of the safety of our students! They’re not gonna be pushing for expulsions and
suspensions, like most are going to be pro a movement that is about school safety. But
it’s like oh if it’s against school safety versus attendance, I prioritize me and my friends
being safe at school. That’s more important than a frickin absence.”
The most hopeful of these ruminations, however, was quashed when the school district
finally released its official position on the matter. YPEJ students circulated and angrily critiqued
a screenshot of the email, which asserted that in service of a “safe and orderly learning
environment,” leaving campus during school hours to participate in political activity is not a safe
and responsible way to work for change…. The most responsible way for students to pursue
political change is to stay in school during school hours and pursue their political objectivities
here on campus in an acceptable forum.” For YPEJ students who had been exposed to a range of
different forms of political change via their involvement, this order was condescending and
authoritarian. It was especially infuriating for them because students felt understandably
heightened fear—and they felt unable to simply express their responses. Eventually, many of the
students ended up participating in the designated on-campus activities but disapproved of its
sanitized form. For example, YPEJ students were hoping for an explicitly political bent in which
they would write letters to Congress. However, the version of the event as planned by student
government was highly regulated—they ended up marching around the field, while the chorus
sang “Imagine” and a marching band member played taps. Compared to the original intention of
the walkouts—that is, to create a disruption that called attention to the overwhelming fear that
young people felt—this milquetoast event felt utterly disappointing.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided a glimpse into the array of reasons around why emotional
counterpublics are necessary. Young people deeply feel punitive and carceral landscapes, even if
they are not captured in suspension and expulsion outcomes, and even if they are “good”
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students in relatively “good” schools. Thus, I build on the rich extant literature of zero tolerance
policies in schools by centering the emotional tolls on students. Given these contexts, it is
unsurprising that young people feel anger, alienation, fear, and rage. Yet, I show how students’
attempts to speak up and push back against their contexts are met with racialized, gendered, and
aged dimensions of ridicule and silencing, creating yet another layer of emotional suppression.
This chapter sets up an understanding for why youth organizing groups are so critical—
certainly young people need spaces to express and develop feelings in response to hostilities that
they experience. However, as is hinted at here, resistance is not so simple. Rather, this chapter
shows why and how youth need emotional forms of resistance that help to heal the self, that are
interpersonal, and that translate into structural and systemic change.

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Chapter 4. Caring for the Self in Emotional Counterpublics: Bridging the Paradoxes of
Personal and Political

The previous chapter has helped make the case for emotional counterpublics by showing
how intersectionally produced injustice in schools damage youth’s well-being. This chapter
builds on that discussion by showing how social movements and youth organizing as
traditionally understood (in terms of cognitive and structural change) contribute to
transformation, but are insufficient alone, in addressing the wide-ranging consequences of
oppression. Instead, I argue that, even as youth organizing galvanizes political change to improve
youth’s circumstances, participating can both improve and imperil youth’s well-being
2
--what I
describe as the “paradoxes of the personal and political.” I argue that this paradox further shows
the critical importance of emotional counterpublics in the form of attending to the self in order to
manage this paradox.
Dante Barry of Million Hoodies Project summed up the life and death stakes of this
paradox when reflecting on the deaths and illnesses of Black activists in the Movement for Black
Lives: “Organizing saves people’s lives…But we also don’t do a good job of saving the lives of
the people who are organizing.” (Lowery and Stankiewicz 2016). One high profile case was that
of Erica Garner, who became a Black Lives Matter movement leader in the wake of her father
Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a police officer. She died of a heart attack at 27. Harris-Perry
(2018) diagnosed her untimely death in the intersecting convergences of mass incarceration,
Black women’s experiences of gendered racism, and stresses of activism. As such, understanding

2
I refer to well-being broadly according to meanings produced by the youth and adult allies in my research—that is,
states related to stress, anxiety, hope, despair, depression, physical ailments, and lack thereof
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this paradox and potential strategies to mitigate them have not only theoretical but real-life
implications.
This chapter argues that healing the self and self-care are a critical dimension of
emotional counterpublics that redefine social movement strategies. These practices de-normalize
self-sacrifice of individual participants’ well-being as a necessary side effect of collective policy
and other large-scale wins and contribute to a richer theorization of relationships between
individual and collective resistance by pointing to real challenges in aligning the two in actual
practices of healing. I argue that organizational participation can both rectify and replicate the
self-sacrifice demanded of young, low-income women of color in their everyday lives. In
response, I focus in this chapter on the recuperation of self within emotional counterpublics:
groups practice “self-care” in the vein of Black feminist thinking. Furthermore, organizations
must both race against stolen racialized, gendered, classed time to achieve long-term structural
change while addressing the socio-psychological, immediate needs produced by structural
violence. In response, their emotional counterpublics go against the grain of conventional social
movement cultures that demand burnout and instead reclaim time as a form of resistance.
Finally, political education can both liberate youth from, and compound the trauma of violence
against their communities. As such, groups both center and de-center personally felt pain via
expansive emotional cultures. I argue that groups thus stretched ideas and imaginations of
resistance beyond structural and policy change wins; identities/ consciousness that resist
controlling images and state-produced categories; and counter-ideologies and narratives.
Ultimately, however, their efforts to manage dilemmas were also fraught by inherent limitations
posed by pervasive roots of systemic inequalities.
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Centering Race, Gender, Class, and Age: Synthesizing the Literatures
Extant scholarship about activist burnout often diagnoses the problem in toxic movement
cultures of martyrdom and selflessness (Effler 2010; Gorski 2015; Gorski and Chen 2015; Kovan
and Dirkx 2003; Norwood 2013; Rodgers 2010; Vaccaro and Mena 2011). However, centering
participants’ racialized structural positioning adds depth and specificity to these analyses. Gorski
(2018) finds that “racial battle fatigue”—the stress linked with experiencing everyday racism
(Smith, Allen, and Danley 2007)—fuel racial justice activists’ burnout. Hope and colleagues
found that activism improved well-being for Latinx, but not Black, college student activists--
which points to an ongoing need for more nuanced understandings of differential racialized
contexts of burnout (Hope et al. 2017).
After all, women of color feminists have long pointed to how low-income women of
color are already burnt out from the daily grind of surviving gendered, raced, classed racism, and
the strains of the “superwoman syndrome” that demands they carry family and community
survival on their backs, at the expense of their own wellness (Abrams et al. 2016; Beauboeuf-
Lafontant 2009; Collins 1990; Geronimus et al. 2006, 2010; hooks 2001; Soldatenko 2002;
Wallace 1999; Woods-Giscombé 2010). Extant literature suggests, on the one hand, that social
movements can further replicate these dynamics by relegating women of color to invisibilized,
devalued labor behind the scenes even as male figureheads are publicly lauded for their sacrifice
(Ling 1989; Robnett 1999; Roth 2004). On the other hand, intersectionally-minded social
movement spaces can provide a respite from immigrant women’s obligations to sacrifice their
own personhood while caring for their family (Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013; Cossyleon 2018).
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Foregrounding Healing
Extant social movements scholarship, and many social movements themselves, often treat
self-sacrifice and damaged physical, mental, and emotional health as inherent, perhaps
incontrovertible side effects of social movements (Cullors 2019; Goodwin and Pfaff 2001). This
assumption is understandable when considering the brutal racialized violence that Civil Rights
activists faced in their everyday lives and in response to their endeavors for social change. At the
same time, this focus has limited the types of questions propelling social movements scholarship:
for example, studies asked how members were recruited to the Civil Rights Movement when
they had to potentially sacrifice their lives, or at least their personal well-being, for the
movement (Goodwin and Pfaff 2001; Olson 2014). Meanwhile, scholars have only recently
begun to ask about PTSD and other health consequences of participating in the Civil Rights
Movement (Koerth-Baker and Evol 2016; Thompson-Miller, Feagin, and Picca 2014).
Furthermore, movements and scholarship that have engaged in “healing” have attracted critiques
as an individualist strategy that de-politicizes and distracts from the “real” solution--collective
political action aimed at unraveling oppressive structures (Brown 1995; Echols 1989; Rapping
1996).
In contrast, this chapter illuminates how youth of color-led movements build on the
legacy of such movements that have promoted seemingly individual and internal healing as
transformative social change. Like previous movements, new efforts argue that policy change,
cultural transformation, movement survival should not come at the expense of individual
survival. Similar to previous movements, Black women leaders and scholars are mainstreaming
social movement ideas that redefine the purpose of movements altogether via theories of change
often described as “radical healing,” “transformative organizing,” and/or “healing justice.”
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(Armah 2015; Carruthers 2019; Chavez-Diaz and Lee 2015; Cullors 2019; Page n.d.; Social
Justice Leadership 2010). Indigenous feminists have also long argued for healing as a form of
social transformation (Jacob 2013; Million 2013).
These approaches argue that social movement strategies need to extend beyond
campaigns, collective change, political education, consciousness, framing, and even forms of
emotion work commonly understood as the purview of social movement organizations. That is,
movements cannot focus only either on structural change or individual, psycho-social well-
being, but must integrate these in more holistic ways. For example, the philosophy of
“transformative organizing” argues that in addition to policy/ structural change strategies,
movements also need to grapple with internally experienced suffering, including “anxiety, fear,
stress, disappointment, self-loathing, and other psychological and emotional conditions.” (Social
Justice Leadership Institute 2010) Similarly, the framework of “radical healing” (Ginwright
2015c) asserts the importance of grassroots organizing for systems change as well as strategies
focusing on individual and collective health, including how “systemic injustice and oppression
also cause psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical harm to individuals and
communities” (Ginwright 2015:6). As such, these philosophies build on legacies of movements
that intertwine individual and collective well-being, expanding the personal and political to
healing individually felt (albeit systemically produced) trauma.
Tensions between Individual and Collective Resistance
Extant scholarship points to the possibility that “healing” may be challenging in practice.
Studies tend to make the case for healing as a form of structural change (Whittier 2009). Yet the
intertwined prongs of healing (essentially, the outwardly politically oriented, and the personally
focused) do not always neatly align. Scholars often treat individual resistance as distinct from
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forms of collective action—that is, everyday resistance is more accessible, as not all individuals
have time nor access to engaging in collective action (Evans and Moore 2015; Fleming,
Lamont, and Welburn 2012; Scott 2016). Thus, we know far less about interlinkages (Lilja et al.
2017), and even less often, contradictions between individual and collective forms of resistance
(Prieto 2018).
Yet there are three main ways in which extant social movements scholarship suggests
tensions between individual and collective resistance. First, extant scholarship points to how
participating in collective action can lead to self-erasure or self-sacrifice. On the one hand, social
movements can metamorphize individuals’ stigmatized identities, self-blame, and shame into
proud collective identities and critiques of systemic deficiencies (Britt and Heise 2000;
Ginwright and Cammarota 2002; Gould 2009b; Rogers et al. 2012). Empowerment and identity
development (Bloemraad and Terriquez 2016b) can buffer negative health consequences of
discrimination and powerlessness, leading to positive health outcomes (Caldwell et al. 2005;
Christens 2012; Christens and Peterson 2011; Cooper et al. 2014; Sellers et al. 2003;
Zimmerman 1995). Some studies have directly found links between activism and improved well-
being (Ballard, Hoyt, and Pachucki 2018; Ballard and Syme 2016b; Hansen, Larson, and
Dworkin 2003; Hope et al. 2017; Jimenez et al. 2009). On the other hand, some studies point to
burnout: some social movement organizations practice a “culture of selflessness” (Rodgers 2010)
by erasing individual labor, treating fatigue as inevitable, and shaming self-care as unnecessarily
indulgent (Effler 2010; Gorski 2018; Gorski and Chen 2015; Norwood 2013). Activists may feel
pressured to be “superhuman” and over-extend themselves (Jacobsson and Lindblom 2013;
Vaccaro and Mena 2011) in their mission to effect structural change in social issues that others
tend to ignore or dismiss (Chen and Gorski 2015; Maslach and Gomes 2006). Given this context,
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it is notable that leaders in the Movement for Black Lives have argued that assumptions of
necessary self-sacrifice are no longer tenable nor acceptable (Chavez-Diaz and Lee 2015;
Cullors 2019; Woodly n.d.).
Second, there are tensions between social movements’ time needs and that of individual
participants. Extant studies on the role of time in social movements often underscore possibilities
and limitations of structural temporal contexts; however, these do not align neatly with
individually felt temporal duresses. Political process theory argues for the importance of relative
openness of political and legal environments and shifts in alignments among the political elite
(Andrews 1997; Meyer and Minkoff 2004). Rage and grievance in response to recent legislation
and other developments, such as anti-immigrant laws, may galvanize participation (Pantoja,
Ramirez, and Segura 2001; Ramakrishnan 2005). In short, temporal contexts uplift some claims
and relegate others to the backburner (Tarrow 1994)—making it strategic to act quickly upon
opening in some cases.
On the other hand, even if the time is ripe, the most impacted communities often have
less time. Time is racialized, gendered, and classed (Hochschild 1997; Mahadeo 2018; Vickery
1977). For example, Cooper (2016) asserts that white supremacy dictates the pace of so-called
“racial progress”:
“We black people have always been out of time. Time does not belong to us. Our lives
are lives of perpetual urgency. Time is used to displace us, or conversely, we are urged
into complacency through endless calls to just be patient.”
Participation in social movements, in some cases, seems to require free time and a lack of
constrictive responsibilities for engagement (McAdam 1986; McAdam and Paulsen 1993;
Putnam 2000; Schussman and Soule 2005; Verba et al. 1995)—although many with the least
time, the most responsibilities, the most ostensibly to lose (e.g. immigrant worker mothers) have
also been at the forefront of social movements (Chun et al. 2013; Milkman and Terriquez 2012;
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Pardo 1998). Furthermore, the same contexts that might galvanize urgent needs to improve
individual and collective circumstances also foster fear and the need for individually focused
survival (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008; Prieto 2018).
Third, although hope is critical to the emergence and sustainability of social movements,
individual emotional responses stemming from activism do not always neatly align with
collective emotions that propel collective action forward. Sometimes they align when
participating in social movements can lead to a type of “emotional liberation” (Flam 2005)—for
example, by engendering a sense of hope and possibility for an alternative future despite bleak
circumstances (Appadurai 2007; Dinerstein and Deneulin 2012; Gould 2009b). However,
engaging in social movements can also foster disempowerment and hopelessness from the slow
pace of social change, political losses, and constant pushback from those in power or even
supposed allies (Cvetkovich 2012b; Goodwin and Pfaff 2001; Gorski 2018; Kovan and Dirkx
2003). Jasper argues that these two types of emotions exist in tension: one pole might include
“hope for future change,” and the other “fear, anxiety and other suffering in the present.” As
such, despair is often linked with the decline of movements (Gould 2009; Macy 1993). However,
Gould argues that despair, powerlessness, lack of efficacy need not necessarily plunge a
movement into a death spiral, but can create new creative forms of protest that respond to
urgency and desperate need. The issue is not despair itself, but, as she identifies in ACT Up, the
limiting “emotional habitus” which silenced grief, which then became “individualizing and
depoliticizing.” (438) The simultaneity of emotions, including the victories, can make despair
feel even worse.
Extant scholarship thus highlights contradictions and confluences between everyday
resistance and collective action. However, these contradictions are often treated as separate and
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distinct, rather than as simultaneously existing tensions. By examining how they act in dynamic
tension, I broaden the full scope of challenges and possibilities that social movements experience
in grappling with multiple levels of systemic inequities.
Building on Extant Literatures
As such, this chapter builds on extant social movements, intersectional, and critical race
literatures in the following ways: first, it brings together disparate bodies of literature to show
how seemingly dichotomous outcomes can co-exist. That is, studies tend to focus on one
outcome or the other—social movements lead to emotional liberation, or they lead to burnout.
Instead, I point to how these divergent possibilities simultaneously exist, perhaps even for the
same individual activist. This possibility points us in the direction of new modes of resistance as
part of emotional counterpublics—although consciousness-raising and campaigns are still
effective and critical, extant literature suggests they may not be sufficient to address the
pervasive consequences of racialized, intersectional inequalities. Second, healing suggests new
questions, challenges, and possibilities in social movements that have been ignored when self-
sacrifice and imperiled activist well-being were taken for granted, a necessary part of social
movements. Indeed, shifting the frame to healing that has long been uplifted by Black,
Indigenous, and Latinx feminists fuels scholars to ask and explore different contours of social
movements that have been relegated to the background. Third, I theorize the contradictions and
tensions between healing and other, more conventional modes of social movements. That is,
despite the rise in discussions of healing, there are also real challenges in its ongoing
implementation and practice.
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Saving and/or Sacrificing the Self
The first dimension of the paradox between personal and political is produced by
intersectional contexts that could both assuage or compound self-sacrifice imposed on low-
income young women of color. Young women in these organizations bore responsibilities to care
for others—whether gluing together fragmented families in the wake of deportation or managing
the consequences of parents working extensive hours at low-wage jobs. Meanwhile, young men
rarely referred to expectations of self-sacrifice, suggesting highly gendered dimensions of this
theme. For example, youth and alumni in SEAP talked about the responsibilities associated with
being primary caregiver for family members, whose health had been attenuated by PTSD from
fleeing the Khmer Rouge, compounded by unrelenting poverty, low-wage jobs that further took
tolls on the body, and the heartbreak of losing family members to deportation. In some cases, this
meant that young women had to defer their own educational dreams, while juggling work and
family.
Camila, a YPEJ youth leader who is the daughter of Guatemalan migrants, shared a story
both resonant with SEAP members and distinct based on her own structural positioning. I first
met Camila when she joined as a sophomore, and she initially was a force of excitable energy
who would often joke around, while mentors would gently re-direct her attention. Ambitious and
intensely focused on school but also devoted to YPEJ, Camila eventually became a leader who
mentored and encouraged others and eventually attended a UC studying both Ethnic Studies and
Public Health. She often pointed to an overwhelming expectation that landed solely on her
shoulders: “I have to lift my family out of poverty.” Her father had recently died, and her mother
had only just become documented. Her family’s structural barriers to living-wage jobs and her
experiences living in cramped quarters where she often had to sleep on the floor were constant
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reminders of the need for a better life. This imbued every choice she made with high stakes, as
she had to not only succeed in school to attain acceptance to college as a ticket out of poverty,
but also bore emotional and material responsibilities for keeping her family afloat. As a result,
Camila constantly had to choose paths to better her family’s situation, even when causing her
deep personal pain. For example, this manifested in the high school she chose to go to:
“I could go to a school where I felt safe surrounded by people who looked like me or to a
school in a more affluent neighborhood with more resources to get students into college.
Because of feeling pressure to get my family out of poverty I decided to go to [the latter].
This choice really cost me. One day at school I encountered another student with a giant
Trump flag wearing it like a cape. When I saw that, my first thought was about my mom
and other immigrants like her.”
Camila felt that she had little recourse to explore her own personal aspirations. Camila’s stories
were far from rare; indeed, young women often pointed to how their responsibilities fast-tracked
them to adulthood and required them to constantly make decisions and redirect care towards
others—in other words, to erase themselves (Burton 2007; Epstein et al. 2017).
This theme also rang true for SEAP youth. For example, Ary explained to me during an
interview that she was the caretaker for her younger sister. Ary was jokingly referred to as the
“mother” in SEAP because she is maternal and expresses concern and care for others. She is
highly observant and attuned to others. During our interview, I forgot my wallet when I intended
to pay for both of our drinks at a coffee shop. By the time I returned, she had already paid (I
insisted on paying her back). This moment encapsulates Ary’ gentle kindness towards others.
During our interview, she explained that because her older sister and parents were constantly
working just so that they could make ends meet, she was responsible for taking care of her little
sister:
“I was in middle school taking care of my little sister, so that was kind of hard on me.
Being in middle school, not being the most steady person. Not being able to understand
why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling. Always fighting. My little sister was very active, and
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sneaking outside all the time, but our neighborhoods just isn't the best place to be in. She
would be out late at night, just running around the block, and I'm like, "I can't find you
sometimes. Can you come inside when it gets dark?" Taking care of her was really hard
for me as a middle schooler… I would pick up my little sister from school after I got out,
and would go home, and I'd make sure she'd eat, and she was clean, and she would go
outside and play for hours on end. Sometimes, I would go out there and play with her to
keep an eye on her. The older I got, I just didn't want to be outside anymore, because I
feel like I was very insecure at the time, and I wanted to be at the house where it was
safe. I went back to the house and watching her was really hard because she's very... Kind
of rebellious when it comes to me and her, because we're like a lot of siblings. We fight
over chores, we fight over the simplest things. Having the position of being a guardian
adult out of middle school is really hard, to be a parent.

When I responded that this was indeed very challenging, Ary nodded and said:
Yeah. I was just trying to do the best I can. There was just a lot of mental stress on me to
take care of myself. I have broken down several times in front of her, and now I'm closest
to her, because she has seen me break down so much about her. I don't know, taking care
of her is really hard. We are all five years apart, so she was in elementary school at the
time, and I was in middle school.
Ary’ and Camila’s stories demonstrate how structural violence as gendered, racialized, classed,
and intersecting with the systemic exclusion of refugees and immigrants, collude to produce a
painful fast-tracking and deprivation of innocence for young women. There was no luxury of
self-exploration or focus of the self, even for Ary as a middle-schooler, because of the immense
burden that the entire family faced just to survive. Ary and Camila thus demonstrate how, as
Laura put it in a talking circle: “it's really sad, it's really heartbreaking to see all these teenagers
going through all these things that they shouldn't be going through, because they're so young and
they're having to grow up so fast.” This is another side of “adultification” faced by Black and
Brown youth in schools. In short, these young people feel that they rarely get a break, or even the
nurturing of self that they deserve especially at this developmental period.
On one hand, the “personal as political,” as long practiced by youth and other social
movement organizations, recuperate an invisibilized self via leadership development, political
education and action, general support, and personal exploration, as I have discussed more
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elsewhere. And of course, this is deeply personally felt. Ary reflected, “[SEAP] saved my life”—
a sentiment not uncommon among other youth. She explained that
“If I was just stuck at home every day, after going to school, I would just lay in my bed,
crying, depressed, and going through this emotional outbreak in my room. Then there
have been a few times when I just wanted to quit.”
When I asked her to elaborate on if she meant quitting SEAP or quitting life, she stated:
“No, just to quit life, almost. I was a little suicidal. Just a little. Then I always told myself,
I'm needed. My parents need me to take care of my little sister. My little sister needs me
to keep her safe. My older sister needs me to help my little sister, and I'm just needed.
That kept me from keeping myself grounded, that I was needed. Joining SEAP made me
realize that mental help is very important, physical help is very important. The stuff that I
go through at home is not something that I'm going through by myself. I don't have to
keep it to myself. I can come for help. I can reach out for help. They really helped me
find my identity, and to be who I am.”

Note that Ary continues to think of her role as caretaker for her little sister, and how
her responsibilities in part are what keep her going. However, it has also been her connection
with SEAP, including the emotional support discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, that
reminds her that this burden is not hers to bear alone. She speaks to the structurally induced
despair and depression that threatened to put her over the edge. The organization as a whole
helped provide a home that kept her from stepping over the ledge, metaphorically speaking.
Of course, it is also important to point out that organizing and social movement building
is quite literally saving young people’s, and their families’ lives. As Ary points out, SEAP
supported her family when her uncle was under threat of being deported.
I really supported my aunt, trying to help her and her husband not get deported because
they were trying to just help each other. Me being a member of SEAP, it was really cool
seeing how SEAP really helps people not get deported. …[My uncle had become my
cousin’s] father figure, and it was just really cool to see a man who was willing to bring
in someone who had two boys, and they are not even two little boys. They are like, two
teens, and be able to, I don't know, keep them as his own. The fact that he was going to
be deported wasn't cool, because she finally found someone who was willing to take care
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of the kids, take care of her, and was willing to start life with her, even though he had his
own kid, and she had two kids. Sometimes my aunt would fly in to come for a court case
for his deportation.
He didn't get deported, just so you know. Seeing how SEAP really backed her up and
write up the information and all of the resources that she would need to help them.They
really kept me in tabs with, how is my aunt doing? How is my uncle doing? Is he going to
be deported? It was really cool, because I got to see, what were the processes of someone
being deported, and what was the process of trying to keep them here? So, yeah. They
have been reaching out to people who they found were going to be deported and try to
help them find these resources that SEAP had, because SEAP is like a really big network
now, where we have become pretty well-known out there now. So, we have different
connections and networking, and different connections to people that need help, and
people that have the resources to help that person. I don't know, networking here at SEAP
was really cool to see, and it saved my uncle's life.

Ary uses the term “life-saving” to refer to SEAP’s holistic support for her and her family. This
support is certainly emotional but it also involves the material aspects of legal and other support
to save her uncle from being deported, and in turn to preserve Ary’ family. This example
illustrates how the personal is deeply political, and how SEAP’s organizing and movement
building embodies that deep connection.
In previous chapters, I have discussed some of the ways that youth organizations have
linked the personal to the political, so I will briefly recap them here: first, adults help young
people identify and explore their personal goals which were often submerged to uplift their
family. Second, groups helped young people individually thrive by supporting skill development
that institutions failed to provide. Of course, this feeds into overall survival. As Camila reflected:
As it looks like right now, how my mom she didn't go to college and all of this. So, we're
kind of like, poor, I don't know. Low class, definitely. I don't want to keep living this
way, I want to have to be able to live comfortably without worrying about bills and
everything.
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Third, groups facilitated a different type of relationship between self and collective, focusing on
how personal experiences imbued young people with the power to transform systemic conditions
at the root of their lives. (Lin 2018; Noguera et al. 2013; Rogers et al. 2012; Terriquez 2015).
This chapter focuses, however, on how these traditionally understood deployments of
personal and political are not sufficient. The issue is not only with organizational cultures but
rather systemic contexts. The same activities described above could, paradoxically, could
occasionally compound the pain of self-sacrifice. Civic/ political education, leadership
development, and preparing for events such as city council hearings, delegation meetings with
decision-makers, and doorknocking were often empowering, but sometimes they also amounted
to another litany of responsibilities on top of what young women have already experienced.
Whereas previous studies have located issues of selflessness in social movement burnout
cultures, my participants pointed instead to how they already feel burnt out by life as young, low-
income women of color.
The issue is rooted more in a deeper systemic paradox of social movements: which are
necessarily led by those who are most impacted, who already carry so much responsibility. This
paradox was illustrated, for example, when I noticed that a usually outspoken leader named
Liana was uncharacteristically withdrawn, sequestering herself in a corner. When I came over to
ask if she was all right, she confided in a hushed voice, with tears welling in her eyes, that she
was exhausted after attending a jam-packed feminist empowerment conference out of town—led
by an external entity. The conference had been taxing: youth had scarce free time, were sleep
deprived, and pressed to share intimate details with strangers they did not fully trust. Another
member chimed into our conversation to point out that some youth sat out on a few sessions,
instead staying in their rooms and crying because they were so overwhelmed by the workshop
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schedule and content that asked them to dredge up traumas. Liana added that even “healing”
workshops were misleadingly labeled and did not offer the relief that she desperately hoped for.
She reflected on how the weekend prompted a broader questioning: “I don’t know if I’ll ever
achieve a balance between ‘work’ [she made air quotes with each hand] and academics and life.”
Liana deeply loved and was committed to her leadership, but there were painful moments
that she felt she was missing out on other aspects of life, like her friends going out when she was
away, having fun, and creating a whole lexicon of inside jokes from which she now felt
excluded. With a heavy sigh, she pointed out: “I feel like I’m being pulled by every limb and I
can’t breathe…I feel like everything’s moving too fast.” She articulates a desire to just be able to
“be a teenager,” which would look like sleeping or staying at home. Yet, when a fellow member
and friend came over to comfort her and reinforce that she needs to take care of herself, Liana
explains why this is so challenging: “But what if other people’s problems are worse than mine?”
Her desire to take care of her own needs conflicted with the strong gendered, classed,
socialization that valorized caring for others—indeed, she felt guilty about attending the
conference in part because her friends at home needed her emotional support.
Liana was hardly alone in her sentiments. Although young people deeply appreciated and
benefited from the new possibilities afforded by organizational participation, their commitments
could also sometimes produce stress in light of their myriad other responsibilities. Many
students also discussed challenges balancing schoolwork with their organizational
responsibilities. Again, this balance was complex. For many students, they happily chose to
spend time at the organizations even if it meant they would have to pull all-nighters afterwards.
At the same time, for others the balance could become overwhelming. As one student stated
honestly, youth are often put in a situation where they have to choose between their
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organizational commitments and school: “we're going to have to choose school.” She explained
that students “can only handle so much.” Furthermore, students often had to choose between
spending time at their organization and earning money. As Ary reflected, she had to step back
from SEAP for a while because she was attending nursing school: “I had to give up a semester
for nursing school, and I was so bored, because nursing school was so boring, and tedious… I
missed SEAP.” But when she came back, she explained that “I was like, "Oh yeah, this is what
I'm here for. I'm so excited to be back. I can't wait to share.”
Juggling all their school responsibilities and commitments to care for others sometimes
rendered organizational participation another form of self-sacrifice. For example, members with
family responsibilities often felt guilty and torn asunder—from SEAP member Erica who had to
constantly answer to her mother’s inquiries as to where she was when she was tasked with the
sole responsibility of taking care of her grandfather, to Leah, who brought YPEJ leftover food
home or bought some to persuade her parents to let her participate when it meant leaving her
autistic younger brother without supervision. As she explained it:
My parents didn't really like me going to YPEJ because during Wednesdays my parents
work, both of them. And whenever I go to my meetings, my brother, my little brother...
and he has autism but he's by himself in his house. So my parents would rather have me
stay with him…. But yeah, my brother's by himself and my parents just want me there
because he doesn't know how to handle stressful situations and all he knows is how to
cook cup noodles so he doesn't really handle himself that well.

When I asked her how she convinced her parents, she explained:
Well, I did a... what do you call it? A compromise with them. I kept bringing food to
them, like I would go to Church's Chicken after you guys dropped me off. Like I would
bring home dinner because my mom and didn't really leave any food for us and they
didn't get home until like 2:00 AM in the morning, so like I would just be cooking the
dinner myself…. also I've told them that YPEJ feeds me better than my own parents do.
Leah’s story speaks to how she sometimes had to take on an additional burden in order to
be allowed to go to YPEJ because it interfered with her caretaking responsibilities.
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Conventional political activities within the frame of the personal as political in and of
itself was inadequate to assuage the problem of self-sacrifice. Shifting the frame to
understanding individual activist well-being in the context of already extant self-sacrifice of
young women of color shows that seamless weaving of individual thriving with collective action
were not always guaranteed. Political education and skill development itself did not always
immediately engender a healed self when young women’s pre-existing burnout was not
accounted for and taken into consideration while planning. Such a reality pointed to how groups
had to manage burnout as intertwined in both internal and external dynamics in ways that
extended beyond the personal as political. Liana’s moment of exhausted frustration pointed to
the need for strategies within narrowly defined social change work that might be limited to
activities directly related to campaigns, leadership development, and political education.
Furthermore, these experiences highlight how burnout is also racialized, gendered, aged, and
classed—not only a matter of toxic movement cultures.
Self-Care as an Antidote to Self-Sacrifice
Young women of color’s structural position thus necessitated strategies that extended
beyond conventional understandings of social change, and instead pointed to healing and
recuperation of a sacrificed self as a necessary dimension of emotional counterpublics. For
example, organizers provided young people with a repertoire of self-care possibilities that they
might otherwise not have access to—whether teaching them about herbal tea or essential oil
remedies, or leading them through tai chi which often elicited uncomfortable giggles. As YPEJ
organizer Rocío explained, healing and transformative organizing were one way that the
organization tried to “actually change our way of being and existing”—in deeply personally
transformative ways that added to their systems and policy change work.
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Groups often framed self-care in terms of life and survival, as articulated powerfully by
Audre Lorde and other Black feminists. YPEJ’s wall was adorned with a handmade poster
featuring Lorde’s quote in purple marker, bordered by yellow sticky notes of affirmations penned
by youth: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of
political warfare.” This idea of self-care as “self-preservation,” whether in unspoken or spoken
contexts of young people’s devalued lives, was also echoed by youth organizer Rocío:
“As organizers it’s important for us to put self-care at the forefront. Because we wanna
see you live not just until you’re 21 but till you’re 100. Like it can be hard living in [this
city] and being a youth of color. So that’s our vision, for y’all to be able to be old. To be
abuelitas and abuelitos.”
Rocío’s comment encapsulates youth groups’ ideology that self-care is about valuing
young people’s lives against a context of almost pre-ordained circumstances of early death
(Michaeli 2017). It was necessary for youth to care for themselves, to reject the disposability
shrouded around their lives, in part because institutions and systems refused to care for them—
meanwhile, these systems also imparted upon them the expectation to neglect their own bodies,
lives, and selves in pursuing educational attainment and upward mobility in systems set up for
their failure. By caring for themselves, youth and staff were recalling Ahmed’s reflection on
Lorde’s conceptualization of self-care as redirecting care to bodies and selves otherwise deemed
unworthy of care (Sarah Ahmed 2014). This practice complements care for each other as
practiced by young people, described in the previous chapter. However, it also highlights the
specific aspect of healing and self-care that responds to paradoxes of organizing by addressing
potential erasures of self.
Organizations also refused dichotomies between personal care and collective, political
action. First, they pointed out that self-care is especially critical in contrast to “always giving to
others,” in movement work and more broadly. As YPEJ youth leader Imani pointed out, self-care
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is exactly what it sounds like but particularly poignant in light of self-sacrifice—“taking care of
yourself” might sound simplistic, but is necessary because “you’re helping everybody, your
momma, your friends, and you’re not taking care of yourself!” Unsurprisingly, young people
often defined self-care as taking care of these basic human needs. One time, as I crouch next to
Leah and Camila, who are half-heartedly discussing their self-care strategies and ask them to
share, they both giggle and in unison assert: “Crying!” Other times, young people often explain
that their form of self-care is: “eating,” “sleeping,” and exercising, or even “drinking water” and
“showering.” As Imani put it: “So my self-care is to shower, and after that I feel clean and
good!” That young people often equated self-care with taking care of basic needs further
illuminated how self-care bridges the paradox of personal and political.
These strategies thus recuperate self-care from a strategy that has previously often been
invisibilized or shamed as unnecessary in the context of campaigns and externally oriented
elements of social movements (Effler 2010; Gorski 2015; Norwood 2013). Black movement
women leaders in particular have led the way in calling for self-care as part of a holistic social
transformation strategy (Cullors 2019; Williams n.d.; Woodly n.d.). Similarly, Gonzalez (2015)
argues that self-care continues the lineage of women of color movements by creating alternative
value systems to “masculinist ethos” fixated on working oneself to exhaustion and even death.
Such philosophies betray how critiques of self-care and “therapeutic” cultures have not always
recognized the structural/ systemic realities faced by low-income young women of color in
particular. Instead, these youth-led groups recognized the failures of collective action at the
expense of already embattled individual well-being.
Young people did report that this discourse and daily practice shaped their attitudes about
self-care and practices. Imani explains that the normalization of self-care helped her understand,
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“It’s okay to step back and think about yourself, and not have to always [do] all this for
everybody else. You haven't done laundry, so you need to do laundry… Of course, my
parents tell me that too a lot, "Hey, you're doing for everybody else, but you can't even do
for yourself." So, it's like that's true. So, I always sometimes I need to step back and think
about priorities and stuff. I also tell that to my friends too. So, it helps them like others.
So, I'm like, "Hey, that boy he's calling you selfish because you're not showing him
whatever. But you need that," because I don't know. I forgot what I said, but I said
something like, "Hey, you need to think about yourself before you think about him too.
Because he's not your world."
As Imani explained it, self-care was something that took constant encouragement. Even
though she had heard these messages from her parents, she needed an environment of ongoing
reminders of normalization of attending to her self, rather than always diverting that care to
others, to begin really internalizing attention to the self as deserved. Similarly, Alexandra
explained how her perceptions of self-care shifted dramatically in part because of her
participation in SEAP. As she pointed out,
“I think I was taught not to take a day off, because my mom ... I really respect my mom,
but I really would not want to be in her shoes because there's just so much she's asked to
do and stuff. She kind of has to put everyone's needs and she forgets about her own,
which I don't like because when my mom's mad, everyone's in a bad mood.”
Alexandra’s mother’s response reflects the racialized, gendered, classed labor that is
disproportionately burdened unto women. As she points out, seeing and engaging in this
normalization also taught her that she should not take time off or attend to her own needs.
However, she explains that her experience with SEAP helped her re-form this relationship and
dynamic so that her mother began to understand the importance of self-care:
I remember, my friend telling me like, "Oh, you need to take a day off. You need a self-
care day," and I was like, "A what now? You want me to do what?" My mom would
never. Then I thought about it and then I just got really emotional thinking about the fact
that my mom would probably say no. The thing was my mom didn't say no. She knew
that I was ... Sometimes she can kind of tell if I'm going through something and she was
saying how ... Sometimes she reads my mind and it's kind of scary. She was saying how,
"Oh you were probably freaking out over asking me how." I was like, "Oh my God, I
was." I think it's because she had a breakdown. When she was leaving for nursing
program, because that was really stressful…It was just like, I felt like I was kind of taught
to not take a break or not take that time for myself. Now I'm telling my mom to do that
for herself now because ... She knows it more now since you went through it, but she's
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still learning as well. My parents are still learning and I think it's important both of my
parents acknowledge that.
Whereas previous scholarship points to how youth activists can politically socialize their
immigrant parents (Terriquez and Kwon 2014), the rise of healing practices demonstrates how
young people are also socializing and influencing their parents around wellness, as well as de-
normalizing sacrifice of the self.
Youth pointed out that it is important not just to talk about, but to actually practice self-
care. Ary explained that ongoing one on one checks in with her mentors were critical to helping
her understand that talking and sharing her problems was okay, and that she didn’t need to
contain them:
“it just really helped me talk about my problems. It was really good ventilation for me to
talk to someone about it, because I was talking to myself, and I would keep it quiet so I
wouldn't have to worry anyone and bother them. But they were very dedicated in having
a sit-down talk with me when I needed it.”
Students also enjoyed self-care and health workshops, such as those around herbal teas. Ary
explained:
We will go to places to go do yoga, and we'll go to recreational places that teach us things
about herbal plants, and what are edible, stuff like that. It was really cool just learning
about that, because you just gain more knowledge about the things around you and the
things that you can use to help yourself. We just have, every now and then, circle of
sharing. What's going on, how is everyone doing, and we hear what we have been going
on, and the stuff we have been doing, and we hear what other people have been doing,
and see how they are connected in some ways, and how we can help each other. At the
end we talk about, how can we help each other? How can we support each other through
these problems?
Alexandra reflected that SEAP’s wellness days helped her feel better in the moment: he
explained that self-care activities during stressful times in school helped her: “Even though it's so
interesting to learn, sometimes you need a break because it's kind of heavy stuff…. We get to
have a day where we just chill and just hang out with each other and I thought those were
important.” Similarly, Andrea from YPEJ reflected that she was not naturally oriented towards
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self-care. She is incredibly ambitious, both in her school work and as a soccer player:
I go on runs, I give myself blisters, I leave my knees aching at the end of the day. But
coming here is just like, I drink tea, I talk to people and then I chill out and then I'm good.
Myra told me different things that I should be doing instead of hurting myself. They told
me to press pause or just talking in general, actually opening up to people. Rocío
informed me on a lot of things that would be helpful.
As such, “self-care” in the context of youth organizations does not just align with neoliberal
wellness practices that ignore how structural violence burrows under the skin and predisposes
entire communities to premature death. Rather, it is that reality of structural violence, and the
inadequacies of traditionally understood movement building, that requires movements to
embrace and expand their understandings of what change entails. Self-care is far from an
indulgence, as Audre Lorde pointed out. Rather, self-care is one critical piece of survival, an
often otherwise missing piece of movements where paradoxes of the personal and political can
mean that engaging in social change sometimes deepens, rather than salves wounds.
Time Constraints
Youth organizations face structural temporal inequalities, creating a landscape in which
structural change is stuck in, and fighting an uphill battle against time. The “political”: that is,
organizations’ campaigns, often seek to disrupt what Cooper (2016) has argued constitutes the
temporal inequality of structural racism. The glacial pace of racial progress is dictated by white
decision-makers and everyday folks actively opposing change or dragging their feet. For
example, organizers often framed the Invest in Youth campaign as creating a visionary future for
members’ younger siblings, nieces, nephews, and communities as a whole. However,
organizations faced a latticework of time constraints, including the unlimited resources of
opposing forces who threatened to saturate airwaves and visual landscapes. Organizers often
noted that these forces set the parameters of debate that relied on and perpetuated an already
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ossified fear of Black and Brown youth crime via “doom and gloom” narratives about reduced
resources to fight violence and crime.
At another YC event, Sky, a queer Black woman, pointed out that decision-makers were
the ones who defined what the “right” time was.
“What impacted me most was going to City Hall and really seeing the adultism. Like you
hear about it, but wow, I really saw it…. We fought for this and didn’t give up, even
when they said, it’s not budgeting season, it’s not time to talk about it, it’s not time.”
In contrast, young, poor, immigrant, refugee, communities of color, had little ownership
over time-- and thus faced serious barriers to civic engagement (Sundeen, Raskoff, and Garcia
2007). Groups faced considerable structural time barriers in marshaling mass people political
power to challenge these cycles and narratives of punitive and carceral solutions and instead
assert visionary narratives of abundance and possibility for poor Black, Latinx, Southeast Asian,
Native American, and Pacific Islander youth. Grassroots community groups have limited funding
(de Graauw, Gleeson, and Bloemraad 2013) despite the need for more time, resources, and
targeted efforts to overcome these barriers. SEAP and their coalitional partners only had 6
months to gather 40,000 signatures for their ballot measures. Because of legal restrictions on
how much time and resources nonprofit organizations can devote to explicitly political activities,
only 10% of staff time could be spent on “lobbying,” which posed challenges for partner
organizations’ staff time, especially if their own organization already was engaging in electoral
organizing. Furthermore, legal restrictions further systematically excluded youth: those under 18
were not legally allowed to hold the ballot, which meant adult allies needed to be recruited to
help canvass. Young people had to attend specifically planned door knocking sessions that could
only happen when organizations knew there were enough adults to attend. And creating
campaigns that are youth-led require time, including preparing young people to facilitate
workshops, emcee events, phone bank, and door knock.
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The cycles created, set, and concretized by those in power further illuminates how poor
Black communities do not own their own time, but rather experience “stolen” time (Cooper
2016; Mahadeo 2018). Systems like the school to prison pipeline “adultify” Black boys and girls:
that is, they are assumed to be older, less innocent, and unworthy of protection. This manifests,
for example, in the disproportionate suspension and expulsions of Black and brown students,
funneling them in a school to prison pipeline that further steals away their time (Cooper 2016;
Ferguson 2001; Morris 2016). Stolen time also manifests as “refugee temporality”—what Tang
(2015) refers to as an “ongoing sense of entrapment” and subjection to seemingly new but
familiar forms of captivity and power even as refugees seem to escape horrendous conditions.
Southeast Asian American, Black, and Latinx youth are caught up in familiar, cyclical forms of
repression due to ongoing resistance to their efforts.
A dilemma, however, is posed by how to respond to these structural temporal inequalities
when young people experience immediate needs and threats to their personal well-being. The
pressure of having to achieve the impossible within limited time has, in some movements,
engendered burdens for social movement participants to burnout by working harder, longer, and
faster (Gorski and Chen 2015; Maslach and Gomes 2006). However, young people experienced
everyday, personally immediate needs that required structural interventions, but cannot always
be immediately resolved even when policies were won.
In short, there is a temporal disconnect between the personal and political: even though
winning the Invest in Youth campaign was about securing a better future for younger siblings and
loved ones, SEAP and YC members needed both a better present and a better future. Youth
members still had to struggle through the educational system as it currently exists, even as they
fought for policy changes in service of racial and educational equity. Once when I inquired about
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a regular YPEJ youth leader who had disappeared, an organizer sheepishly explained that he
needed to concentrate on his studies and that it didn’t make sense for him to be spending time on
campaigns for educational equity when he was himself getting straight D’s and on the precipice
of failing out of school. Campaigns oriented at long-term change and rectifying intersecting
racial, ethnic, socioeconomic inequities and institutional failures to prepare low-income students
of color for college did not always immediately ameliorate symptoms that impacted young
people’s mobility and well-being on an everyday basis. YPEJ, for example, publicly critiqued a
“belief gap”—that is, assumptions from teachers and counselors that Black and Latinx students
were not prepared to go to college. Many students felt that their schools were anemic in college
support even as teachers piled on more work in a supposed simulation of college academic rigor.
For example, in one meeting, YPEJ seniors shared the stress flowing from limited time they
faced to apply for college:
Charlotte expressed her stress about applying to college, panic flooding her voice: "I'm
not ready! ‘Cause I got too much work, with and outside of school.” Camila nodded
vigorously and interjected, her eyebrows knitted together: "And teachers don't care!"
Charlotte shook her head: "They're like, that's what they require in college. So I have two
projects due Wednesday.” Tia, also a senior at the school, shrugged with a slight smile:
"That's why I don't do my homework, I try to focus on college applications.”
SEAP and YC members voiced similar sentiments. They experienced compressed “time
horizons” wherein they had to work twice as hard as white peers, who enjoy more time and
opportunity, only to still be perceived as inferior (Mahadeo 2018). This pressure is created from
institutional failure, and deepened by the hopes and expectations placed on them to secure
mobility that has been so thoroughly denied to many, although not all, of their parents.
Alexandra explained that she felt “unnecessary pressure” form her parents:
I remember in middle school when I'd gotten my first B. It was in history, too and my
parents like history and I was so scared and I didn't know what to do. I was crying and
my mom was just, "Yo, what is this?"… And that was my first time dealing with it. So I
guess I was more susceptible to their reactions. And then when I got to high school, I
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kind of started to manage it myself. And then I even realized it's okay to not do your best
academically sometimes because realistically, we can't always be there .But I mean there
was always that pressure, especially since I'm the oldest of my mom's side, so all of the
aunties and uncles are "Yo, Alexandra, what are you going to do? You're the oldest. You
have to do a role model." And yeah, I don't know. So I wanted green and gold [tassel for
graduation], but that's not high honor roll. High honor roll is gold and I literally got into a
fight with my mom because I wanted the green gold one. She said, "No. You need to get
the gold one to show everyone you got high honor roll." And I was, "Are you serious? I
know what I achieved. I know what I got. Does it really matter?" Because when I hang it
up in my car, who's going to ask me? "OMG, what is this?" or who's going to ask,
"OMG, you've got high honor roll." No. No one cares.
These immense academic expectations voiced by Alexandra and echoed by others, reflected
similar contexts to self-sacrifice. Students had to shoulder the expectations of transcending their
parents’ situations through educational mobility. And yet, they were deprived of the institutional
and structural supports to succeed.
The self-sacrifice delineated in previous sections compounded with “compressed time
horizons.” As Camila put it: “I’m supporting [my mom], but I’m also supporting myself, I’m
also supporting my friends, I’m supporting others. And there’s only so many hours in a day.
There’s only so many things I can do in one day.” Leah, another YPEJ member, told me that she
hated “wasting time”—because there was so much to do, she was constantly working even when
taking the bus. During another healing circle, she commented:
I feel like I’ve become a workaholic and I’ve really neglected my mental health. Because
I’m like I just need to push hard and – I need to get my education! And my parents keep
emphasizing I need to work hard so I’m really working hard to meet their expectations.
But then I feel like mental health isn’t important to me and I end up neglecting it. Like I
definitely don’t get enough sleep.
There simply wasn’t enough time--and the convergence of disinvested schools, pressures
on youth to lift up their families, and limited time engendered sleep deprivation, exhaustion,
digestive issues, insomnia, stress, anxiety, depression, muscle pain, and other physical ailments.
At one youth committee meeting, a new youth member Gabe told me that he wants to work on
time management, because he goes to bed at 12 am and wakes up at 5 am for badminton practice
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(they have a different schedule for badminton). He explains that there’s too much homework to
do. “I used to do that,” Angela chimed in. “but I couldn’t anymore because I needed sleep.”
Similarly, Cameron explained that one of the hardest parts of going to school was:
waking up early, it's a struggle to stay awake in class. This school year I would spend a
lot of time on homework, I wouldn't go to sleep until 3, sometimes. That was when I
would have to go to sleep late, and then wake up early. I'd run off of 2 hours of sleep. I'm
trying to fix my sleeping schedule. I've been going to sleep at 4. I think, what really
stresses me out is the homework. I know when I sit in class, and I listen, I learn. Usually
the homework is what bothers me, I have so much of it, and I only have so many hours
after school. Teachers assign like, two hours of homework. That's what really bothers
me… But, assigning so many hours of [homework], there's really no mind to it…Yeah, I
had like 7 periods, we're about to have 7 periods. But this kind of swap scheduling, but
you have so many periods and ever teacher tries to assign you homework, like an hour.
That's already 6 hours of homework.

The health consequences of normalized sleep sacrifice were prevalent and constant. Once Susan,
a soft-spoken YPEJ senior, groaned that she was already feeling so ill from fatigue that she
couldn’t imagine feeling worse with a cold: “I can’t get sick or I’ll die!” SEAP and YPEJ youth
both told me they couldn’t afford to take a day off from school when they were sick because they
would miss so much content and fall irreparably behind; one SEAP youth told me he was glad
that he got sick over the weekend so he didn’t have to miss school. This fatigue further hampered
students’ ability to focus and perform in school, which only deepened their stress in a toxic
cycle. Mario, a YPEJ youth, pointed out how his anxiety and panic attacks stemmed from school
pressures: “Like in AP Seminar, we’re doing presentations, my emotions can’t handle it and I
start freaking out and having panic attacks like oh my god this is literally worth 33% of my
class.” He flapped his hands and shakes his head rapidly, in a blur, embodying the chaotic panic
that he experiences in schools. Others spoke about destructive coping mechanisms. Cameron
reflected about a time that they were unable to get access to a computer and internet for a
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homework assignment: “And I literally broke down because I couldn’t get it, and I physically
hurt myself. Just for one little homework assignment.” Laura, an opinionated young woman with
constantly changing hair color, points out: “A lot of youth have unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Like 99% drink, do drugs to cope. That’s why so many of us smoke and go out to party, because
they’re trying to relieve negativity.” As such, young people also required immediate support and
relief that could not always be met by campaign work for the long haul.
School’s inflexibility around time also hurt young people’s well-being and academic
success in other ways. Laura explained how during her sophomore year, she was hospitalized for
a week, and missing a week of school completely derailed her academic progress:
It just threw off my entire school year, it threw off all my grades. All my grades went
down to Fs and that one week that I wasn't there, because mind you, I was in the highest
program at Lakewood taking two AP classes, a zero period and I was doing improv too,
which was an extracurricular. And it just completely threw me off of everything and I
was like, "What do I do now? It's the end of the semester, there's nothing I can do now."
And so end of the semester all my grades are horrible. I think I got some of them up to
Cs, but I couldn't get any higher than that because I just couldn't catch up.

She then had to miss another week of school later in the year because she had broken her
ankle and missed another week of school: “I entered with bad grades and I started off with Fs
and I was like, "That's it. I can't do it. I can't do this. I need to get my grades fixed from last
semester and also fix these grades." When she asked her counselor about options to remedy her
grades, he suggested a homeschooling option. She submitted her paperwork but did not hear
back from them until a month later, when they stated that she was unable to use this avenue. She
explained, “But they waited an entire month in which I thought that they were processing the
paperwork and whatever, they waited an entire month to tell me that [I wasn’t eligible], so that
already put me way behind, entire month more behind.” For Laura, being able to catch up was
timely and urgent. The pace of school meant that even one day missed put her behind—let alone
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the amount of time she had to miss for health reasons. Yet this urgency was not felt at all by her
counselor or the homeschooling option. Despite their lack of urgency or attentiveness to the
matter, this could have changed Laura’s educational trajectory for the worse in an indelible way,
potentially irreversibly damaging her academic career. Although Laura was able to bounce back
and eventually attend CSULB, she had to fight an expedited race against time.
Therein lies the paradox between personal and political: young people’s anxiety and
stress only further emphasized the necessity of organizations’ campaigns to dramatically re-
shape conditions and roots of educational inequality and disinvestment in Black and Brown
youth. Yet solely focusing on campaigns was not sufficient because youth were already aging
prematurely, robbed both of their present and future. Intersecting inequalities took visible tolls
on their health (Gee et al. 2019, 2019; Geronimus et al. 2010), corroborated by scholarship that
shows that Black and other non-white folks consistently get less and lower quality sleep for a
number of reasons, including structural inequalities that exclude them from comfortable sleeping
environments and excessive work (Hicken et al. 2013; Ruiter et al. 2011). Accordingly, groups
had to be expansive with how they reclaimed time rather than being only oriented towards the
future. And yet, groups already face structural temporal constraints—how can they manage
immediate needs while fighting for long-term change, which is already beset with challenges and
comes with its own constantly immediate and pressing needs?
Bridging Temporal Disconnects: Slowing Down
In light of this challenge, self-care bridges temporal disconnects between the personal
and political-- in this case, policy campaigns or victories and everyday lived experiences.
Organizers planned self-care well ahead of time or spontaneously in response to urgent stresses
that stemmed from young women of color’s intersectional positioning of extant life burnt out.
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One October, YPEJ juniors were inundated with stress about impending PSATs, AP and honors
classes work piling up, family and other obligations. At the same time, they led YPEJ’s
basebuilding and recruitment activities, voter-registration, and ongoing campaign work. In
response to an atmosphere thick with stress, youth organizers decided to devote half of their
weekly meeting to self-care. Two organizers and I transported youth to the beach, where
Kristine, an organizer, led young folks in a breathing exercise, followed by a ritual where they
wrote down their stresses on scraps of paper, then burned them collectively in a white bucket.
Kristine explains the rationale for this activity:
“The point is to really make sure that we’re making self-care a priority. Y’all are going
non-stop and trying to balance being a student, with your family life, and holding the
work that you have at [YPEJ]. So we really wanted to take a minute to connect and push
pause. A lot of times we glorify working non-stop but that’s actually what we want to
make sure that we don’t do.”
Self-care thus responded to immediate temporal dimensions of structurally induced
stress—even if temporary, it was critical considering young people’s somatized stress. First, self-
care activities were often framed as a needed intermission to disrupt how organizing could
inadvertently compound already being “stretched by every limb,” as Liana had put it. The rest of
these meetings were generally dedicated to activities that were more conventionally “political,”
for example, debriefing voter registration activities and planning for a workshop on their Invest
in Youth campaign. In contrast, these activities recognized the need for a more expansive
repertoire of being to address deeply, personally, individually felt angst and stress.
As such, organizations re-defined what was necessary and strategic for their long-term
goals by attending to the immediately personal. They did so even despite immense pressures that
warrant constant breakneck speed to keep up with constant crises, and even though they were
structurally “behind” time (Cooper 2016; Mahadeo 2018). This context makes it all the more
striking that organizations chose to re-allocate time from activities more closely tethered to
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normative ideas of the “political.” Indeed, they recognized that young people’s lives were
already at risk: and collective victories were neither possible nor sustainable in the long-term if
they came at the expense of young people and staff already suffering from structural silence.
Reclaiming time, stillness, and resistance was a way of centering the needs, experiences, and
healing of young people in contrast to suffocation associated with everyday survival, as well as
within social movements.
The importance of reclaiming time (Wingfield 2019) and rest as resistance has been
argued by several Black feminists. For example, niv Acosta’s and Fanny Sosa’s “Black Power
Naps” exhibit, as Francois (2019) argues, is about “rest,” “reclaiming time,” and “restor[ing] our
capacity to dream as Black people—to imagine a future of Black rest, relaxation, and idleness.”
After all, young people’s exhaustion from racing time was physical and psychic—getting less
sleep, and the present-day imperative to be “woke”-- hinders the capacity to dream on a
metaphorical and literal level (Benjamin 2018b). Doing so helped recuperate young people’s
humanity beyond expectations that they be hyper-productive, model capitalist tokens in a system
set up for their failure. Organizations proposed different choreographies for young people to
orient their bodies to enact and articulate different possibilities rather than rush, eschew joy and
pleasure, and remain mired in survival modes. In short, they dissented against demands that
youth of color bear unsustainable burdens that wear down their bodies, souls, and minds.
Naming Trauma
Political conditions and collective action produce a broad range of deeply personally felt
emotions: on the one hand, political action fed into possibilities of rectifying personal conditions;
on the other, political action compounded trauma anger, despair, frustration already experienced
in everyday lives.
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On the one hand, young people generally reported feeling healed from trauma by
alignments of the personal and political. In one YC meeting, youth reflected on the hundreds of
surveys they had collected, which had been officially filed by the city council and led to
establishment of seed funding for a youth development fund. Amanda, a SEAP leader, shared:
“[SEAP] created a space for me to come into power, I didn’t realize how much youth have been
involved in local policies, and there are ways for us to have our voice heard.” Similarly, Laura,
an outspoken YPEJ and YC youth leader, adds that her involvement helped her overcome her
alienation and cynicism that had been engendered by her social positioning as a bisexual young
Latina and a child of parents who are not eligible to vote:
[YC] shows me how much I can truly do to fix things. Before I was like, ‘Oh the system
is fucked, but I’m just 16 so what the fuck am I gonna do, I guess I’ll just have to live
with it.’ But now I can do something about it and I got to speak to councilmember,
mayors, and other people who have power. I didn’t know we could get something done
so fast, like we got the fund accomplished, it’s crazy. We did that and our research did
that, from going door to door. Change can happen--and we’re just a group of kids!
Laura’s and Amanda’s comments resonated with other themes that emerged from my
observations and interviews: engaging in campaigns, seeing actual policy and base-building
victories, winning over adult allies, and other elements of youth organizing imbued young people
with a sense of hope in their political action shifting their personal (and family and community’s)
plights.
Furthermore, links between the personal and political could provide hope and possibility
in bleak times. Right after the 2016 presidential election, of course, new YPEJ members were
buzzing with palpable anxiety and fear. After a workshop where they learned about California’s
own regressive, xenophobic, and racist barrage of propositions and elected officials in the ‘90s—
and the role that young people and social movements had in turning the political tides, Camila
and Cameron responded with excitement, a renewed sense of purpose, and empowerment in a
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sense of political knowledge. Camila, excitedly bouncing on a yoga ball, proclaimed, “I didn’t
know that California reversed like that!”
On the other hand, these same activities could compound trauma in part because the
personal became a political target: engaging in delegation visits to decision-makers and testifying
at city council meetings also deepened exposure to disrespect, devaluation, and dehumanization.
During some city council meetings, I witnessed some elected officials blatantly ignore young
people while they were testifying and block their efforts to establish seed funding, later
chastising them by telling them they should be grateful for their victories. Isaac pointed out: “As
a queer, trans person of color, whose English is a second language, all my identities are against
me. And meeting with elected officials, there was never a time that I felt respected.” Later on,
Sky added:
“I’m from the hood too and it’s like fuck the government, they don’t care about us.
Thinking about it makes me angry, but I have to do it so that things can be better for us.
It’s like, I hate it still but I also wanna fix it.”
Sky and Isaac were thus painfully reminded of their chronic, systemically produced exclusion
and policing--directly enacted by elected officials who made decisions for the entire city, but
represented affluent, white, elderly communities. They had little understanding nor concern for
the experiences and needs of low-income, Black and Brown, queer, gender non-conforming
youth. A similar sentiment was voiced later by Kamaria, a Black woman who had been involved
in YPEJ as a high school student and periodically came back to work on civic engagement and
support summer programs. During a talking circle after the killing of Nia Wilson, a Black
woman high school student killed by a white supremacist, whom some of YPEJ’s students in
Oakland knew personally, Kamaria pointed out:
“How many more times does this have to happen before change? ‘Cause we been going
through this for a longass time and it’s like, they just expect us to sit back and be quiet
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about it, wait for us to step back. But hell no we have to step forward or else this shit is
gonna keep happening.”
Later on, she extended this thought by pointing out that despite all the marches, the protests,
nothing had changed or seemed to make a difference. “I don’t know what else we can do, we’ve
already done everything,” she said, defeated. Trying to make a change, when met with more of
the same by the powers that be, only compounded the trauma of already being rendered
unworthy of life. Not only did Kamaria and other Black women have to bear the constant
impacts of police brutality on their lives, they also had to experience the dehumanization
involved with the blaring message that their lives didn’t matter when efforts for change were met
with deaf ears.
Political conditions, then, sometimes warrant a departure from political action to preserve
well-being. In YPEJ’s case, youth were often still active but emotionally isolated themselves as a
form of protection. During one YPEJ core leader meeting where young people talked about the
violence faced by migrants—often women and children-- trying to cross the U.S.- Mexico
border, Camila reflected again on the disjunctures between political conditions and their personal
well-being:
“I’ve just been so into my own life lately. [She refers to college applications, senior year]
And then I looked at it and saw all this stuff happening on Twitter. I’m getting
desensitized to everything our country does—it’s trash. But I know it’s happening it’s
just like—I’m so into what I’m doing right now, I don’t know what else I can do.
Cameron raises their hand and concurs; “It’s happening a lot—it’s like, we see things like this
and it’s just like oh, it’s happening again. And I was watching this show about immigration—it
really got to me, to my heart.” They put a hand on their chest. “It’s like—we want to keep up
with things but it hurts too much to keep up with them.” Being constantly tapped into the pain of
their communities was deeply challenging and sometimes compounded trauma: personal well-
being sometimes required shielding from political pain.
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Over the long term, holding, containing, harnessing this often relentless frustration could
wear over time, potentially leading to departure from movements. For example, YPEJ organizer
who had been a youth member, Cedric, experienced years of passive aggressive blockages from
school administrators who eventually blocked the group from having a school-based chapter. He
and the other organizers believed that the administration viewed them with suspicion; when they
tried to make amends to help with outreach for a meeting, they were rebuffed and told their
assistance was not needed. After this encounter, Cedric paced the floor with his arms tightly
crossed and a deep sigh:
“I'm just so tired of this. I'm so frustrated. I knew this was going to happen. I told y’all!
They’re blacklisting us just like they did at [other school]. I've been doing this a long
time, and it's the same thing over and over again….I just feel so frustrated, like I keep
doing the same thing and nothing's ever going to change. What's it going to take to get
someone on our side? Like we have LCFF, Jerry Brown, all that. But I’ve been doing this
for a long time and the same thing keeps happening….You can change policies all you
want, but things don't necessarily change."
He stops pacing and reflects: “With our jobs, our organizing, this doesn’t end at 6 PM. This is
our lives. If I was working at Burlington, it’d be a pain, but at the end of the day, if the clothes
don’t get done, then it doesn’t matter.” Cedric’s many years of relentless frustration with the
stubborn opposition from school and district administrators eventually wore on him enough that
it (among other factors) fed into him eventually leaving YPEJ to become an exterminator in the
Inland Empire. His narratives thus center the human emotional costs involved in resistance—
even after winning policy campaigns that might otherwise be measured as victories and progress.
As he pointed out, power structure and harmful ideologies bent against low-income youth of
color persist in ways that are deeply painful.
Furthermore, speaking up and challenging systems of power can be both personally
liberatory and draining, when considering how trauma inflicted on intersectionally marginalized
communities persist unabated. Sometimes empowerment and hope flowed from feeling that
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politics could help one transcend their structural positioning, and sometimes anger, despair,
frustration sparked from how political action compounded the challenges already faced in young
people’s personal lives. Liberation from, and exacerbated trauma, are closely intertwined and
deeply rooted in the complexities of low-income, youth of color trying to infuse equity into
systems set against their thriving. These nuanced emotional landscapes of hope and frustration
suggest that consciousness, knowledge, and having a voice can simultaneously improve and
imperil personal sense of well-being. The problem, then, is not to instill hope rather than
negative emotions, but rather how to create openings for a myriad of complex emotions.
A full spectrum of emotional humanity
In order to address the bind of healing and compounding trauma as closely intertwined,
organizations had to also practice self-care as a broader spectrum of human expression that was
not wholly defined by injustice, reaction, and responsiveness to trauma. Likely more than adult
organizations, these youth groups were invested in the importance of fun, aesthetic, and
enjoyment. The ED SEAP pointed out that their organization takes the importance of “creat[ing]
fun and play” for young people, which “we forget to do that for our older youth.” As she pointed
out, this is especially critical for “interrupt[ing] our cellular memory of trauma.”
“Fun,” though it might seem silly, is also essential on many levels—it is also a critical
part of why young people stay and remain in the organizations. Fun manifested in part as carved
out time for play—for example, during summer sessions, SEAP and YPEJ would take young
folks to local amusement parks. YC’s end of the year celebration was at a Skyzone, where young
people bounced on trampolines and battled each other in dodgeball. “Fun” also manifested by
infusing hilarity and interactivity to everyday organizational activities. Physically active
icebreakers were key to building relationships and breaking down walls of shyness. “Fun” was
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critical to the curriculum. For example, YPEJ often had young people illustrate concepts in the
form of skits. During one hilarity-evoking prompt, young people were asked to make a
commercial highlighting different aspects of their Relationship-Centered Schools campaign.
The ED pointed out that SEAP thinks about the role of “scent and sight and smell” and
giving young people a respite from their claustrophobically dense neighborhoods. SEAP’s walls
are plastered with beautiful, vibrantly colored butcher papers and decorations. Some of their
events are immersive experiences involving a complete transformation of their space. One yearly
event, for example, is the House of Horrors, which involved weeks of visually overhauling the
space. One year, I helped set up a maze where the walls were completely papered over in black,
with black and white style mugshots to highlight how youth get “lost” when they’re not invested
in. Funnily enough, despite my complete lack of artistic ability, I spent a lot of time supporting
youth in creating art. I worked together with the arts & culture committee for the annual
Wellness Week, which involved creating cards with beautiful illustrations of women of color
created by one SEAP youth, painting a large cardboard skyline of the city, and painting a large
butcher paper with silhouettes of women. SEAP’s enduring focus on aesthetic and art displayed a
commitment to youth culture and the expansiveness of embodied healing and joy that do not
always have a valued place within movements for racial justice. Furthermore, all these activities
were essential given contexts where young people of color are denied possibilities of having fun
and being children—“fun” recognizes that the political as personal is not always sustainable if it
amounts to drudgery and work. In many ways, youth organizations creatively bridge that gap by
recognizing the necessity of fun that is often ignored in adult organizations.
Groups also addressed paradoxes of the personal and political centered personal pain
produced by oppression. I argue that these activities centered deeply personally felt pain, rather
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than just treating it as instrumental to the political. For example, in one leadership retreat,
organizer Rocío asked a mix of new and seasoned students to think about a time they felt
oppressed and to mark down where and how it made them feel on an outline of a body. To my
surprise, participants look befuddled-- even though many of them are highly eloquent in
discussing systems of oppression. Sensing their confusion, Rocío shares an example of a time
that they went to Whole Foods wearing a hoodie, and a white woman next to them at the cashier
kept casting suspicious glances their way, claiming that they were making her feel
uncomfortable: “So for me for example, I’d mark a fire or heat by my head, because in that
instance, my head gets real hot.” Everyone is still hesitant, including two of the more seasoned
youth, Nicole, who says, “I don’t know if I can think of a time I’ve ever been oppressed.”
Cameron, at the time a younger youth, hesitantly explains that they can think of a moment, but
they’re not sure it qualifies as an example of “oppression.” Rocio sits down next to Cameron, PJ,
a Latinx, self-assured senior, eagerly scoots up to the butcher paper on her knees, and, tightly
gripping a red sharpie, starts swiftly drawing bold red X’s everywhere—on the head, multiple
places on the chest, on the arms and the wrists, on fingers, on legs, near the groin. Following her
lead, Nicole tentatively draws cyan blue, thin, question marks in the head. Imani draws green
lightning bolts shooting out the fingertips. Camila draws purple wavy lines on the hands. Miguel
makes a few black small tear drops by the eyes. PJ then furiously draws a a big oval with small
dots inside on the stomach.
Upon sharing back, PJ ’s hand shoots up, explaining she was thinking about a time where
a Hot Topic employee followed her around the store and another when she and her dad were
told: “‘Go back to Mexico, your girlfriend would like that! And I was like, ewwww.” She
crinkles her face in disgust. Her voice drops in tone and volume as she somberly reflects: “When
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these things happen, I don’t keep it in my head. I keep it in my heart. And it goes from my heart,
through my arms and through my hands and through my body. And in my stomach it feels like…
not like butterflies but like a zoo. And I get really angry and do things I shouldn’t do, so that’s
why I put X’s all over the place.” Another youth Imani talks about living in fancy apartment
building in a white/ affluent area, where she, her stepfather, and mother share a studio. They only
have one key fob, so she has to hang out and wait for either her mom to buzz her in or to come in
after somebody who opens the door. She recalls that one time that another resident wouldn’t let
her in, telling her only residents could come in. After interrogating her about where exactly she
lived, he finally allows her in. She reflects: “And I saw that he followed me! Like he was
peeking, and I let myself in right away. And for some reasons my fingers start tingling when I
get scared….”
These activities thus centered personal embodied consequences of trauma-- . As Rocío
points out: “Our survival strategy is often to be like ehhh, like oh it’s not a big deal, shrug it off
[shrugging motion]. But these things really to live in our bodies.” After all, Black folks have
been constructed—and treated accordingly as supposedly immune to pain (Lawson and Schrupp
2018; McCottom 2019); Black women’s knowledge of their own bodies and pain are routinely
ignored. Black and other people of color’s painful experiences of racism are also often
dismissed, deflected, treated as signs of their, rather than systemic deficiencies (Evans and
Moore 2015; Wingfield 2010). Organizations thus expanded traditional understandings of
political education and analysis and questioned dichotomies that cleave the “cognitive”/ mind
from body and soul, in a broader tradition of Black feminist epistemology, women of color
epistemology and movements that foreground and center rather than silencing and absorbing
pain and other emotions (Hancock 2016; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983).
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Tensions in Practicing Self-Care and Healing
As part of a paradigm shift that refuses self-sacrifice to the collective good as the norm,
groups re-defined the meaning of “strategic” by being slow and taking time when necessary—
which also pointed to underlying tensions between healing and other modes of social change.
Within the frame of assumptions around collective action goals that emphasize structural change,
being “strategic” might entail racing against time to achieve policy change. But groups redefined
“strategic” as firmly rooted in their members’ needs. The SEAP ED pointed out that taking time
for activities that might not seem politically expedient was necessary. That is, groups recognized
they needed to practice feminist temporality,” including “the coexistence of past, present, and
future” (Bryson 2007). That meant claiming youth as present leaders with present and immediate
needs that are already being stolen—rather than how Latinx youth, for example, are perceived as
bearing only vague future potentiality that naturalizes the inequality present circumstances and
continues to defers claims for social inclusions. (Rosa 2015) Similarly, YPEJ staff pointed out
that the constant recurrence of traumatic events—whether in the form of police brutality taking
Black and sometimes Latinx and Southeast Asian lives, mass deportations, mass shootings of
high school students and LGBTQ folks (e.g. the Pulse shootings)—necessitated making more
substantive time for healing. Devyn, YPEJ organizing director, reflected that before YPEJ took
on transformative organizing, their approach would involve “a ten-minute check-in and then
mov[ing] on…. [now] we prioritize time and…. cancel this thing to have a talking circle.” They
recognized the need to be nimble and flexible with time, which could manifest as scrapping the
day’s meticulously planned workshop to dedicate time to processing trauma impacting queer,
immigrant, communities of color.
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Embracing a feminist temporality manifested in organizational-level decisions. For
example, each SEAP program had “wellness days,” where members engaged in non-organizing
activities such as yoga, going to dinner, movies, aquarium trips, or taking the day off. The
executive director pointed out that during annual weekend retreats, “we would never fill up the
retreat agenda with all work…at least a quarter of the retreat agenda is about play and rest.”
Similarly, while planning the YC retreat, Sebastian reflects on how youth’s feedback pushed
them to create ample time for rest to take full advantage of being in nature, which was a rare and
appreciated occasion for young people.
At the same time, self-care and related strategies also contained their own dilemmas as
inherently limited. Rocío’s formulation of self-care as critical to longevity also points to the
problem that self-care alone is insufficient to rectify racialized, classed, gendered inequality
baked into neighborhood and zip-code level disparities that conspire towards lower life
expectancies of youth members. After all, individuals cannot exfoliate their way out of structural
racism, poverty, patriarchy, and xenophobia. As such, there is also a disjuncture between
individual well-being and collective action. Battling the structural roots of early death (e.g.
environmental racism, income, healthcare, education disparities) requires what youth groups
have already long been doing: building political power of those most impacted and mustering up
political will to change policies, systems, narratives, and structures. Many youth had asthma, a
symptom of the city’s long history—and visible resistance to—environmental toxins and
pollution engendering higher rates of asthma and other health/ breathing related issues. During
my fieldwork, there was at least one time where wildfires caused hazardous breathing conditions.
Young people took pictures of the apocalyptic sky, ablaze with orange and grey streaks from the
bare safety of their classrooms, which themselves also seemed barely a respite for breathing. As
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such-- remembering to consciously breathe certainly does not necessarily change the reality of
the air that one breathes in.
Second, organizations face materially limited time to simultaneously grapple with the
immediate and long-term. These paradoxes, and efforts to manage them, illuminate the difficult
tradeoffs that organizations have to make. Although resistance involved expansive, nimble time
reclaiming strategies, as Camila noted, there are only so many hours in a day. There were
contradictions, then, between everyday individual strategies and their collective action efforts.
There is limited time to meet immediate needs, accomplish campaign goals that are also urgent
yet stretching across timelines, and to carve out time for rest to stave off burnout. For example,
Alexandra noted that SEAP stopped doing wellness days so often in the middle of campaigns.
Resting or being slow is not generally an option for young people: slowness could jeopardize
young people’s chances at college, and resting from responsibility can negatively impact those
relying on them for survival. Young people had complicated relationships with self-care: some of
them engaged in their own practices, and some of them saw it as another thing that they “should”
do, but often couldn’t. For example, Leah reflected during a discussion of self-care: “I know
we’re supposed to get sleep but that can be so hard for us because there’s just so much to do.”
That is, organizational foci on campaigns, leadership/ political development still
generally took precedence over taking substantive days off and time for wellness. There just
wasn’t enough material time to fully reclaim time in all the literal and metaphorical ways that
organizations needed to. Again, these dilemmas point to the need to disrupt cycles of structural,
intersectionally formed temporal inequality.
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Discussion and Conclusion
I have argued for a conceptual framework of paradoxes between personal and political in
the form of contradictions between collective political action and personal well-being. I argue
that these paradoxes further show the need for “emotional counterpublics” in ways that push our
understandings of social movements. Additionally, practices of self-care and healing illuminate
how organizations’ emotional counterpublics recuperate the self. I argue that this conceptual
framework makes three main contributions to social movements theory.
First, I challenge conventional notions of social movement goals and strategies that have
treated individual well-being as a necessary sacrifice for “real” structural change. Instead,
building off women of color-led movements, I highlight how youth-led organizations shift the
frame to dilemmas and concerns that become clear when taking individual well-being seriously.
Uplifting healing as critical shows how organizations need to make difficult decisions balancing
policy/ structural change and unintended consequences for young peoples’ well-being. That is,
even though normative conceptions of the political, such as policy change, might traditionally
put pressure on individual activists to overwork themselves, a view towards individual well-
being recognizes that this is not a sustainable, nor desirable model. Instead, these dilemmas point
to disjunctures between the personal and political. Traditional ways of linking personal pain to
political solutions did not always ameliorate the self-sacrifice imposed on young women of
color. Political timelines did not map neatly onto pressing personal needs (even when they were
rooted in socio-political causes). And political victories or setbacks could produce complex
personal feelings—that is, staff had to manage precarious emotional balances, which sought to
acknowledge the complexity of feelings—for example, cynicism as coexisting with the need to
fight. Sometimes this involved absorbing and containing emotional fluctuations and emphasizing
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encouragement, hope, and possibility, which could also sometimes wear on organizers and
eventually lead to their departure from the movement.
Second, strategies to manage these dilemmas illuminated tensions between everyday
resistance and collective action. Groups practiced radical, embodied self-care and rest as
resistance to forge movement cultures that are not centered around further disposability and
exhaustion—which young people already experienced in their everyday lives. Doing so was
especially notable given limited time and collective demands for achieving structural
transformation. On the one hand, these modes of resistance constituted paradigmatic
interventions refusing the devaluation and lack of care afforded to low-income youth of color.
Claiming time for rest pushed back against the assumption that young people should work
themselves towards premature deaths in quests for upward mobility. However, these forms of
resistance were still inherently limited by need for structural change. Slowing down for a
moment does not change the requirements on an expedited timeline that young people must meet
to get into college. These dilemmas only further underscored why campaigns for long-term
policy/ structural change were vitally necessary. Demands associated with efforts at holistic
transformation precipitated the need for slowing down and self-care, but also limited their
applications. That is, there simply wasn’t enough time for self-care when campaigns were also
pressing, urgent, and constant. Organizations have to do it all, but they also have finite time,
energy, capacity, resources to do it all.
Third, I argue that this paradox of personal and political is rooted in intersections of race,
class, gender, and other forms of inequality. My findings complicate previous scholarship on
burnout that diagnose issues of organizational cultures of selflessness or external backlash
(Gorski 2018; Rodgers 2010). Instead, I show how closely burnout and empowerment are
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entangled in part because of intersectional inequalities, simultaneously produced by the
involvement in campaign, political education, and leadership development. Recognizing this
need for balance thus points to forms of resistance that organizations engage in—such as self-
care, rest, emotional management—that have not always been recognized as integral to social
change. Young women of color experience stolen time and self-sacrifice as they must care for
others to mitigate the consequences of intersecting inequalities bearing down on their families,
while also struggling for upward mobility via education. The latter takes even more time because
of generations of disinvestment. Subsequently, youth members have little time to care for
themselves: they are squeezed by ever-enclosing deadlines, wearing on their bodies and minds.
Organizations thus face a dilemma of intersectionally wrought burnout from everyday life. That
is, youth members gain respite and an opportunity to focus on self-development while also
working towards transforming the conditions that engendered their constricted time and self-
sacrifice. Yet their efforts towards transformation could sometimes inadvertently exacerbate
their already limited time, stress, and giving of self to the collective. As such, organizations had
to balance a thin line between improving both individual and community well-being.
Ultimately, these practices extend sociological understandings of intersectional,
racialized resistance—beyond extant understandings that focus largely on the structural and
cognitive, such as identity, consciousness, and ideologies. Nevertheless, structural support—for
example, strong allyship and solidarity of those from less impacted communities, while still
following the leadership of most impacted communities, can help relieve the exhaustion and
trauma compounded by activism. I argue that these dilemmas and their attendant strategies for
management nuance these traditional arenas of social movements. Organizational strategies
challenge respectability politics that have often invisibly constrained possibilities for resistance:
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that is, refusing pressures for youth of color to “excel” by being selfless and working harder,
longer, and faster. Youth-led social movements thus are grappling with intersectional injustice
beyond the terms of those in power—creating different possibilities beyond the dehumanization
they encountered on a daily basis.

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Chapter 5. Interpersonal Dimensions of Emotional Counterpublics: “We’re Creating
Something Different”*
*Quote by YPEJ organizer Rocío
This chapter focuses on the interpersonal dimensions of emotional counterpublics. I argue
that youth organizing groups enact alternative emotion norms in the spirit of Black feminist and
feminist of color practices of care. These prefigurative practices, or social movement practices
that embody the types of changes they want to see in society (Leach 2013), counter both
structurally imposed emotional suppression and more rigid structures that accompany leadership
development and political education.
I outline three ways that youth and staff practiced interpersonal dynamics of emotional
counterpublics. First, youth practiced a collective emotionality—or shared understandings of
expression and ways of being with each other—as guided by community agreements, reminders
of consent, and embodied forms of support. These practices are in stark contrast to what students
perceived as arbitrarily and punitively enforced school rules that neglected their voices or needs.
Second, groups encouraged unfiltered expressions of emotions and ideas through healing circles
and collective and individual check-ins. These practices countered not only spaces where young
people felt stifled, but also contrasted with other dimensions of organizing including highly
structured political education and leadership development workshops. Third, groups practiced
affirmative aspects of support and appreciation for each other, a form of “affective capital”
(Hordge-Freeman 2015) that showed how civic skills and leadership development also have
critical emotional dimensions. Ultimately, I argue that these practices extend our understandings
of emotions and social movements as they show that the importance of alternative emotion
norms are not contingent upon whether or not they fuel organizing, mobilizing, consciousness-
raising, and/or policy change. Rather, this chapter emphasizes that these practices are important
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in and of themselves because they enable youth to embrace their full humanity and to imagine
and enact different forms of care that are elsewhere precluded.
Alternative emotion rules in social movements
Some social movements forge alternatives to dominant “feeling rules,” or social
guidelines around how we should feel (Hochschild 1979) and emotional cultures, or “group
expectations and rules about emotional expression” (Guenther 2009). Movements can allow
participants to express taboo emotions that are otherwise suppressed in “oppressive emotional
culture[s]” that “constrain the non-normative expression and experience of emotions” (Hercus
1999). For example, feminist movements allow women to express a range of deviant emotions
such as anger (Holmes 2004; Rees 2010; Taylor 2016; Taylor and Whittier 1995). Taylor (1996)
examines, for example, how mothers share taboo feelings that they came to collectively define as
postpartum depression, constituting an alternative emotional culture that in turn fueled
commitment to the movement. Recently, women’s anger has received more attention in popular
press. Ahmed (2015) refers to anger as a “call to action,” and hooks describes anger as
potentially useful, but only when connected to “a passion for freedom and justice that
illuminates, heals, and makes redemptive struggle possible.” (hooks 1996) Cooper argues for a
reclamation of the “angry Black woman” trope, pointing out that anger can be revolutionary
(Cooper 2018). In the wake of the Trump elections, Traister and Chemaly also point to how
women’s “dissatisfactions and resentments” have always propelled social movements, in part by
reclaiming anger as seen as symptoms of hysteria and unruly womanhood (Chemaly 2018;
Traister 2019).
Such “deviant” emotional expressions pave the way for “feeling differently” as a form of
feminist epistemology (Hemmings 2012) and “inaugurat[ing] a new constellation of feelings,
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emotions, and emotional postures.” (Gould 2009a:39). Openly airing out—and claiming and
harnessing as powerful—elsewhere silenced, ridiculed emotions can induce a form of “emotional
liberation” (Flam 2005). Women have redefined emotions as valuable by making “a resource out
of feeling” (Hochschild 1983). By practicing and legitimating new emotion cultures in a form of
“emotional prefigurative politics” (Taylor and Whittier 1995)—that is, practicing the types of
emotional expressions and relationships they would like to see in the world, feminists also
challenge cultural ideals about gender and emotions more broadly. For example, the international
women’s movement staged emotionally expressive public rituals of reconciliation between
warring countries and embraced actions of love and care that were often derided such as rose
bouquets, hugs, intimate friendship (Taylor and Rupp 2002). By practicing more expansive
emotional expression, women have redefined care, emotional expressiveness, and feminine logic
as holding value and transformative potential rather than as something to be ashamed of (Ferree
and Martin 1995; Taylor 2016; Taylor and Rupp 2002).
Feminists of color have also highlighted how these types of spaces are especially
important for girls and communities of color, practicing what Patricia Hill Collins descibes as an
“ethic of caring” central to Afrocentric feminist epistemology (Collins 1990). “Homeplaces” are
sites of resistance for girls and women of color to resist dehumanizing sociopolitical
environments (hooks 1990; Nakkula and Toshalis 2006; Ward 1996). These places are also
defined by peer support, including mutual empathy, respect, and emotional understanding
(Mead, Hilton, and Curtis 2001). Homeplaces have always been about more than the nuclear
home, including extended family, communities, and church (Collins 1990; Thompson 1998).
Collins describes Black women’s role as “othermothers” as a response to the structurally induced
need for mutual support when nuclear families are torn apart or otherwise incapacitated to
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provide care. Indeed, care has been necessarily about survival for Black folks: as Thompson
(1998) argues,
“Caring in the Black family has had to be, in part, about the surrounding society, because
it has had to provide children with the understanding and the strategies they need to
survive racism. . . . [Thus] love and caring [in the womanist tradition] do not step back
from the world in order to return to innocence, but step out into the world in order to
change it” (p. 532)
After all, racism involves a hoarding of empathy and care for white people (Benjamin
2018b) and systemic lack of care that we can clearly see in the lack of water in Flint, Black and
Brown children continually relegated to dilapidated schools, and nonchalance around children
being locked up in cages at the border, with children being forced to become caregivers for
infants (Collins 2018). Accordingly, systemic vacuums of care and love for Black and Brown
young people and communities illustrate the deep importance of prefigurative practices of love,
care, and support for each other as a form of “social transformation and world remaking” (Moore
and Casper 2014). This strategy highlights the role of alternative nurturing and caring practices
that are not only about surviving the outside world, but also creating a salve and at least
temporary respite.
I build on extant literature in this chapter in the following ways. First, much of the social
movements literature, although acknowledging the role of alternative emotion cultures, is more
concerned about how movements translate those deviant emotions into something that is
ostensibly more productive. There is a prevailing focus on how movements harness, reshape, and
channel “destructive” or “inhibiting” emotions (e.g. fear, depression, and shame) into more so-
called productive ones, such as those conducive to protest, mobilizing, framing, and so forth
(Ganz 2011; Jasper 1998, 2011; Ruiz-Junco 2013). Even scholars of feminist movements have
focused on this aspect of emotions; Taylor, for example, argues that “feminist organizations aim
to channel women’s fear, shame, and depression into feelings conducive to protest and activism
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rather than resignation and withdrawal.” (1995: 229) Similarly, much of the social movements
literature on emotions has focused on typologizing and categorizing the different types of
emotions that feed into these established dimensions of social movements. This prevailing focus
implicitly assumes that emotions are important only insofar as they matter for mobilizing,
organizing, policy change—in short, an assumed “real” and critical work of social movements.
Doing so ignores the broader transformational, prefigurative elements of movements.
Assumptions that emotions are only important insofar as they fuel these other elements of social
change enforce a hierarchy of “real change,” and that further assume that care for each other is
unimportant.
Instead, I build on the relatively neglected strand of literature on how feminist
movements redefine emotional norms, and the scholarship around how new emotion cultures can
offer new, more transformative ways of being and doing especially in relationship to each other
(Cvetkovich 2007; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). That is, I am less interested in naming and
defining the types of emotions that youth reclaim here, than the micro-politics of how they do so,
and the everyday organizational practices that provide alternative possibilities of engendering
love and care, even if they are not explicitly, politically productive.
I also extend the current literature by considering the challenges around practicing
alternative emotional norms. After all, social movements can also reproduce inequalities around
emotional expression. Women in social movements, such as the animal rights movements,
expressing anger are still often seen as “excessively emotional’ and “irrational” (Groves 1997),
whereas men are seen as legitimate, “rational, professional, even scientific” when they express
the same emotions. Likewise, women’s emotional expressions can continue to be
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subject to ridicule, ostracism, and dismissiveness (Hercus 1999). I build on the literature about
these dilemmas by pointing out how norms around collective emotionalities, unfiltered
expression, and affective capital can also produce new, unintended challenges.
Collective Emotionality: Community Agreements, Embodied Support, Consent
The first theme by which staff and youth practiced alternative interpersonal relationships
and emotional cultures was via collective emotionalities, which countered how young people felt
that their emotions were policed via top-down rules with little regard for their consent or needs in
schools. I show how collective emotionalities are comprised of community agreements, forms of
embodied support, and reminders of the importance of consent.
Community Agreements: Encouraging and Practicing Youth Voice
Community agreements were backbone to collective emotionalities, as non-punitive,
democratically formed guidelines for how youth and adults could “share space together,” as
SEAP organizer Soph put it. At the beginning of a new program in the fall, spring, or summer,
organizers would facilitate youth generating a list of community agreements. Students who came
in after would be oriented towards these existing agreements and periodically given opportunities
to revise them. In YPEJ, students created a small sign illustrating each community agreement
with an accompanying picture, while each program in SEAP had a butcher paper of community
agreements that they would post during meetings. Almost every meeting, organizers would
dedicate time to students reading and explaining community agreements.
Organizers and youth firmly established that community agreements are not school rules.
As YPEJ organizer Rocío explained it, community agreements are “not rules…. We run away
from ‘rules.” Instead, they elaborated that community agreements were at the crux of practicing a
prefigurative space:
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“It’s not a class, so there’s no assigned seating, things like that. This is supposed to be a
different space than the others that we navigate everyday. We’re creating something
different. So we can’t get into a space of being cynical, like things are always like this,
people are always gonna be talking over me, stuff like that… it’s important to
acknowledge that and together, decide what we want to do to really make core leaders so
it’s a space where people look forward to coming.”
Rocío points out that community agreements help to create a nurturing antidote to the silencing
and hostile environments that young people reported experiencing in school. Furthermore, these
practices are a reminder that the emotional dynamics that youth experience elsewhere are not
natural nor inherent to human nature. As Sebastián pointed out to Youth Committee before a
weekend retreat:
“The policies that we want to challenge, that we want to create in the world—we want to
practice that in our space too. We want this to be a microcosm, I dunno if you know what
word means, but like a lil’ mini world.”
As such, community agreements were key to the prefigurative politics, or micro-politics that
organizations practiced as they still endeavored to win externally wrought change.
Community agreements enshrine a key approach of youth organizing that uplifts youth
voices and decision-making. As Imani explained, YPEJ’s centering of youth voice counters the
ageism she experiences as a young person:
“Most of the time the adults are running everything. They're telling us that we need to do
this, need to do that. But how come students and our age, how come we can't be part of
that process?... But we are the ones in the classrooms, and we are the ones experiencing,
going to the actual school. And you guys are just in office making these decisions.”
Community agreements translated YPEJ’s student voice campaigns into its everyday emotional
architecture by ensuring that young people were heard and centered. For example, two frequently
used community agreements across organizations were “one mic” and “stepping up/ stepping
back” (later on revised to be “make space/ take space,” in order to counter assumptions that
everyone can necessarily “step up” or back”). The former asserted that people speaking should
be given undivided attention by the rest of the group. The latter encouraged young people to be
cognizant of when they were talking too much, or “taking up too much space,” and conversely to
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challenge themselves to speak if they felt shy or nervous. During one core leader meeting, when
YPEJ had just moved to a new office, Rocío expressed the need to revisit community agreements
because of turnover and concern that group dynamics had devolved. They asked: “How many of
y’all have anxiety when there’s too many people talking at one time?” A couple students raise
their hands. Rocío asks, “How many people have been spoken over?” Several more raise their
hands. Rocío asks, “How does it feel?” PJ shouts out, “I wanna punch them in the face!” Rocío
smiles and adds on: “Yeah, so I wanna give a shout out to Imani and Skyler, who have both
facilitated in this space. It’s not an easy thing to do. And this is not high school, this is not that
scary place. This is our space, and you should feel comfortable getting up here and facilitating.”
Again, Rocío points out how community agreements enable young people to feel safe in contrast
to the dynamics described in chapter three, where young people described feeling disincentivized
and demoralized about speaking up in class while also penalized for not speaking.
The process of constructing community agreements reflected consensual processes: more
senior youth leaders often expedited the community agreements discussion at the beginning of
programs by suggesting agreements they were already familiar with. Oftentimes this involved
proposing rules that adults would not have thought of. For example, Lotus Leaders youth
proposed having a check-in every week led by youth leaders, as well as a buddy system. Youth
organizers emphasized youth voice and authentic agreement with the guidelines. For example,
during the first day of SEAP’s summer program in 2019, I observed how Soph facilitated the
process with a much larger group than Lotus Leaders, including juniors and seniors but also
more reserved, younger members. When they asked for examples of community agreements,
more confident juniors and seniors jumped in with community agreements. Soph asked each
youth, per usual, to explain the community agreement they proposed, an example, and to discuss
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why each one was so important. One notable sticking point came with a community agreement
that SEAP practiced, but YPEJ did not: “Rainbow.” When someone shouted “rainbow,” students
were supposed to get up, rearrange themselves, and sit next to someone different than they had
sat next to before. This particular “community agreement” responded to unique conditions in
SEAP, which had a much larger youth base than YPEJ, often prompting youth to stick together
in their particular social groups out of safety and familiarity. “Rainbow” was designed to
encourage students to get to know each other more broadly, to break out of their cliques.
In this instance, however, Soph follows up by asking the student who suggested
“Rainbow” if they want to try out this new community agreement. When the student hesitates,
Soph looks around the room and reminds students that community agreements must be “agreed
upon as a community…So do y’all wanna do it?” When she is met with silence, she walks down
to the community agreements, holding up the marker to the butcher paper of community
agreements. She suggests: “I’m gonna cross it off… until somebody says no…” Finally, one of
the students shouts out, “Keep it!” and Soph points out, “Okay so we gotta do it, rainbow!”
There are a few scattered loud groans but eventually almost all the youth get up and eventually
settle down into a new seating configuration. Soph wraps it up: “Thank you those of you who
moved! And if you didn’t move and somebody came to you, Thank you for doing that.” This was
a rare moment of disagreement or tension that surfaced while creating community agreements,
but it emphasized the importance of students actively consenting to agreements as collective.
Consent was also a community agreement in and of itself. During one youth committee
meeting, for example, we gather into small groups and answer questions such as: “what’s one
thing you want to do that you haven’t done before?” “What’s your wildest dream?” “What’s one
thing you would change about your school?” The facilitators ask for share-backs afterward and
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remind participants of the agreement to ask for consent before sharing their stories. When one of
the youth blurts out that another youth wants to be a Tik Tok star, the organizer gently
intervenes: “So I actually wanna model it because we don’t often practice this—so for example,
Audrey, you said something that was really powerful when we shared, do you mind if I share?”
Audrey consents, and Sebastián shares that she had a dream of living off the grid completely.
Rather than shaming students for not following the community agreements, organizers
acknowledge that young people may have few models for how to act differently in relationship
to each other according to these agreements, so they try to model and reinforce in positive ways.
Consent also becomes a topic for some of the workshops—for example, Lotus Leaders
had a workshop led by a partner organization on consent and boundaries. Afterwards, youth
reflect on how they’ve learned strategies to ask for consent and to say no without feeling as
guilty as they normally would. Amanda says that she’s really thankful for this workshop
“especially now when people are getting exposed [re: the Me Too movement] ! And women
should be able to stand our own ground—no should be enough.” They also reflect on how they
have learned to change their own behavior. Gabrielle shares that this has happened and that one
time she put her arms around a girl that she liked: “’Because I’m touchy feely,” and I didn’t ask
but then afterwards I was thinking about it and I felt bad about it and so I asked her and she said
“Oh no it was totally okay,” but I was still feeling bad about it. So I told her to let me know if
she ever feels uncomfortable.” Youth share that it’s important to apologize. Soph points out;
“Remember what they need! So they don’t have to tell you over and over again.” Recurring
workshops such as these helped young people practice an alternative to the lack of personal
autonomy experienced in other contexts, and to build more consensual relationships in practice
with each other.
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It is important to note that community agreements, of course, do not immediately
engender a utopian vision. Rather, new practices can also foster new tensions and struggles that
must be worked out. For example, although community agreements encouraged all youth to
speak, there also wasn’t enough time for each youth to speak as much as they wanted. As
discussed in the previous chapter, time is at a premium. Thus there is an inherent embedded
paradox: the “one mic” rule could be difficult in part because this was supposed to be a safe
space that young people enjoyed. Sebastián explained during one YC meeting that youth
understandably wanted to talk with their friends: “because this might be the only time you get to
see your friend and of course you want to chop it up.” Increasing comfort levels might mean that
there is less time for all students to speak. So these prefigurative spaces also required a delicate
balance between allowing youth to speak freely and enforcing boundaries. In the later years of
my fieldwork, a new type of community agreement emerged: “ELMO, or Enough, Let’s Move
On.” Similarly, a youth leader suggested: “Land the plane,” which he explained was to try to
make your point succinctly. As Sebastián added, this meant to “be brief, be brilliant.” A few
minutes later, as Sebastián is extensively explaining and adding onto some of the other
community agreements, he laughs and points out that he’s taking too long—“So like me, I’m
gonna model—Enough Let’s Move on,’ and shut up!” This did not always work, and organizers
understandably felt uncomfortable about policing or cutting students off, but they did apply it to
themselves—adults were careful not to take up too much space. As such, community agreements
were a continually evolving process attempting to balance different possibilities and unintended
consequences.
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Community Agreements as Collective, Supportive Endeavor and Not Punitive
Another aspect of the collective emotionality of community agreements was that, as adult
organizers often reiterated to youth, they relied on collective support rather than punitive
measures on individuals who violated them. During the SEAP summer organizing institute, Soph
reminders the youth members that agreements are not rules because “it’s not on me to enforce
them, it’s on all of us. We’re not about rules at SEAP--we’re about supporting each other. And if
our whole team is weak and we’re slacking on a rule then we gotta get together.” Similarly,
during a youth committee meeting, Sebastián explains that it’s about a collective agreement: “it’s
a challenge for us, as a group, to be better if we’re not being good at following the agreements.
Like everyone in this group should be empowered to raise their hands and point out, hey, we’re
not following the community agreements.” The language used by these organizers points to how
organizations were trying to practice alternatives to punitive discipline such as restorative justice
that organizations were advocating for in schools. If someone causes harm, as Sebastián pointed
out: “We don’t want to punish people or be like oh, you cussed, so you gotta come home. We try
to address it within our community.” This approach incorporates a restorative justice philosophy,
which recognizes the importance of developing strong relationships to both pre-empt, but also
manage harm in ways that strengthen relationships and people’s commitment to the collective,
rather than excluding them via punishment (Davis 2019).
Of course, this philosophy required constant modeling and practice, as students often
understandably defaulted to the antagonism that they saw practiced in school and elsewhere.
When Skyler facilitated weekly leadership meetings in the 2017-2018 school year, he once dealt
with a close friend jokingly pushing back: “I don’t wanna!” in response to his comment that he
was going to facilitate an icebreaker. Looking over at Rocío, Skyler joked but with a serious look
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on his face: “There’s a disruptive student, can I suspend them.” Shaking their head, Rocío
calmly said: “Naw, we don’t believe in that.” In another meeting, one of the students pulled out
her phone and started watching a video while Skyler was trying to facilitate. Looking over,
Skyler crossed his arms and stated: “Looks like at least someone found something entertaining
to look at. Would you like to share with the class?” At another meeting, Camila was practicing a
classroom presentation and other students were encouraged to act like their peers might in an
actual classroom. Some of the students start raucously making obnoxious sounds, such as
erupting in fake laughter. In response, Camila glares back, her knuckles on hips: “Would you
like to share? I’m gonna take points off,” mimicking a teacher who responds to behavioral issues
with a promise to dock students’ grades. Rocío, who has often taken note of these tendencies of
youth to mimic authority by jokingly cracking down on their peers, points out: “Dang, y’all are
traumatized!” These moments reflect how students internalized their experiences of punitive
school environments. What they constantly saw modeled by adults in schools and elsewhere was
punishment as a knee jerk, and template of a reaction to conflict or other challenging dynamics.
Young people had limited exposure to different repertoires of communication, which trickled
into their initial ways of acting with each other in organizations.
In contrast to these punitive, shaming dynamics that students were accustomed to,
organizers invoked community agreements as gentle reminders to support each other. Once one
of the students jokingly tells another to shut up, and Rocío interjects, “Hey, that’s mean.” Imani
offers from the corner: “Throw glitter, not shade!” Youth and organizers often draw upon this
community agreement to remind each other to affirm and support each other. One time, a student
is teasing another for being short, and Kristine overhears and smiles, gently suggesting: “We
must love each other and support each other, right?” Although teasing was often lighthearted,
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and as youth members pointed out, an indication of their love for each other, sometimes
students’ feelings would legitimately be hurt. These dynamics were gendered and racialized.
Skyler one of the few cis male leaders, often teased Imani for being consistently spacy. One
time, this goes too far when he hints that Imani is less competent. Her eyebrows knitted together
and her mouth drooping down, she speaks up, clearly upset: “Hey! You can go kick rocks.”
Rocío steps in and intervenes: “You’re all competent! You’re interns.” A smirk curling up on his
lips, Skyler starts —“Actually I was looking for a less offensive word, but….” Rocio shakes their
head and reminds them about throwing glitter, not shade. Although students might have
inadvertently, or purposely caused harm, the focus again was not on punishing them but
reminding them to re-commit to the community agreements and collective emotionality
including affirmative, active support.
However, restorative practices also have their limits. Sometimes organizations had to set
hard boundaries around who was allowed or not allowed in the space in order to preserve safety
and adherence to values. One student reflected on how her friend was asked to leave one of the
organizations. She described him as “a little odd, mean person.” Although the organization gave
him several chances and support over multiple years, he repeatedly showed that he did not align
with the group’s values. The student whom I interviewed advocated for him fiercely, explaining
that he was dedicated and had come to every meeting and event. She also pointed out: “his point
of view helps us see what is the negative side of what we're doing, and what are other people
seeing?” However, this person also contributed to a hostile and unsafe space for some of the
other youth members. When his friend pushed back and advocated for him to staff members,
eventually staff members agreed to give him another chance, but the youth member refused to
come back. This story demonstrates how challenging it can be to maintain a safe space while
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also remaining open to different viewpoints. Nevertheless, it also demonstrates that adult staff
members were listening to youth and to give them multiple chances, even when they had caused
harm, unlike school contexts.
This issue of balance between giving youth several chances and creating a safe space was
also echoed across organizations. As one youth reflected: “The staff are really lenient on what
students do because they don't want to drive students away and sometimes there's things going
on where people don't make the space safe and for me, I don't care. If you're making this space
not safe, I'm going to tell you something.” Youth reflected that sometimes community
agreements, such as “one mic,” were easily forgotten, and students would still talk over each
other: “I get hurt because I'm like, aren't you guys supposed to be my people?” These glimpses
show that creating emotional counterpublics is not always perfect nor easy, but that youth spaces
still attempt to do so even despite imperfections and contradictions.
Embodied Practices of Collective Emotionality
Youth groups also tried to practice collective emotionality in embodied ways,
reconfiguring bodily relationships as an extension of the self-care, embodied practices of
slowing down discussed in the previous chapter. For example, in one activity during a YPEJ
retreat for interns, organizers asked us to pair up and mirror each other so that one person’s foot
is forward, and the other is back, kind of in a contrapposto stance. The other person mirrors this
stance so that their forward foot is next to the foot of the person put forward. Then, after asking
for consent, the person who’s listening puts their hand or both hands on one or two shoulders.
Sofía, the organizer, prefaces this activity by explaining that “It’s awkward, but we want to
really embody and practice active listening and show that we’re supporting each other.” During
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the activity, one of us is supposed to speak in response to a prompt, uninterrupted, for one
minute, while the other maintains steady eye contact. Then we switch.
As another example of embodied support, during one of the intensive summer programs,
Sofía asks students to pair up with someone they don’t know well and to sit facing each other in
chairs. Asking for consent to teach the other person on the shoulder, she explains that after
designating a “person A” and “person B,” Person A is going to close their eyes if they feel
comfortable, or if not, lower their eyes. Partner B is going to look partner A. Although most
dutifully follow instructions, a few of the youth immediately begin giggling. Sofía smiles and
encourages them “to keep a straight face.” She explains that partner B should look at, become
conscious of the breath of partner A, and try to breathe at the same rhythm. She then asks partner
B to place one hand on one of partner A’s shoulders. Some of the youth rearrange themselves;
some lean forward awkwardly; some scoot their chair forward, some extend their arms. Sofía
reads out loud a list of statements:
“This person has fears and worries just like you. This person hurts if they make mistakes, like
you. This person has self doubt like you. This person has hopes and dreams. This person
loves and is loved. This person is vulnerable and tender sometimes. This person is committed
to justice.”
Sofía explains then that they’re going to send good vibes and energy “to fortify them through
hard times so they feel supported even when times get rough.” Some again start giggling at this
point. Sofía says to send their last “Namastes and prayers,” and tries to remind them to “stay
attuned” to each other. They then repeat this activity, with partner A and partner B switching
roles.
The discomfort and awkwardness of these activities showed how YPEJ was trying to
stretch their prefigurative politics in somatic forms, to quite literally embody a different reality.
As Sofia prefaced some of these activities, these were a way for YPEJ to practice the future they
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wanted to accomplish because “We want the school and district to see your full selves and affirm
your existence.” Another organizer, Kristine, reflected on how she also engaged in some of these
practices during the retreat for new organizers and that she had a similar feeling of
overwhelming unease at having to look at someone closely and maintain eye contact for an
extended period of time: “I did it at the organizer retreat and even the human touch-- usually
when I look at people I don’t keep eye contact. I was hard to look at them, like wow, you see me.
And maybe it’s that I’m not used to being seen.” Similarly, Cameron reflected: “I’m an awkward
person, and I tend to avoid eye contact. But being that close… And it’s like, I don’t like it but I
wanna build connections with others so I have to get used to talking to people.” This sentiment
of being invisible, or not being seen, echoes comments like Cameron’s from chapter 3—of youth
trying to remain “invisible” as a protective strategy. In overcrowded and under-resourced
schools, students could feel both invisible and over-surveilled. So for students, to make a
genuine attempt to look at and see each other was a way of embodying collective emotionality
about sincere support and concern for each other’s humanity.
Embodied practices also reinforced the importance of empathy as alternative forms of
relationality. For example, Camila suggested that this activity helped remind her to get out of her
space of personal pain solely and recognize connections with others:
“I always forget I’m not the only person in the room! And this was like whoa, other
people experience what I do, and they have their own experiences too. Just looking at her
I was like wow, we share our pain.”
Many young people appreciated the embodied elements of support, even if they felt initially
uncomfortable (Organizers always asked students to ask each other for consent before teaching
each other). Amal explained, “I liked when my partner put her arm around me, I felt more
comfortable because before I was feeling awkward, just being looked at.” Camila reflected that
Leah, her longtime friend, “and I aren’t like touchy, we don’t touch and hug so we were like”—
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she pulls her mouth back in a grimace—“uhhh. But then, we held hands and it was new for us. I
liked it.” Charlotte reflected: “I liked it, I felt the warmth of her hand on my shoulder and I
dunno, I just felt soothed.” Kamaria says she liked receiving because she felt loved, “Knowing
someone was giving me good energy and vibes.” These comments point to how embodied
practices encouraged young people to stretch their understanding of, and commitment to,
collective emotionalities in ways that extended beyond the verbal.
Valuing Full, Complex Humanity
The second theme of interpersonal emotional counterpublics were spaces in which youth
could share unstructured, emotional, unfiltered reactions. Not only did these spaces allow youth
to share emotional responses that were discouraged elsewhere, they also contrasted with other
highly structured, carefully timed aspects of organizational practice. That is, political education
and leadership development workshops, although designed to elicit youth discussion and
engagement, were also geared around specific objectives and questions. Organizational
workshop scripts often sought to drive home specific learning objectives around critical analysis
and thinking. Furthermore, skill-building aspects of activities also tended to focus on polishing
young people’s public speaking and storytelling skills in ways that were tightly constructed to
drive home certain points that would hold sway with adults and the public at large. Considering
the tensions described above about balancing youth voice and ensuring that as many people
could speak as possible, healing circles and other forms of unstructured sharing expanded
repertoires of political expression within YPEJ and SEAP.
Healing Circles
Youth organizations engaged in “healing circles,” which are also practiced as restorative
practices in schools. Groups often organized healing circles especially in response to traumatic
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events, of which there was no shortage during my time with organizations (including several
murders of Black folks and other community members, the murder of Nia Wilson--whom youth
leaders in one of YPEJ’s NorCal chapters had gone to school with, mass shootings at Pulse and
Parkland, mass deportations, the election of Donald J. Trump, and more). SEAP also regularly
held healing circles for specific youth caucuses, such as “sister circles,” where young women
across multiple programs came together to discuss certain themes, circles for the young men, and
for queer and gender-non-conforming Southeast Asian youth. Increasingly, YPEJ would also use
circles for proactive reasons as well—for example, to share their reflections at the end of a five-
week summer institute, or simply to share what was ailing them as youth generally even if
something specific traumatic had not occurred.
Healing circles come from a range of Indigenous practices throughout the world (Pranis
2015). During healing or talking circles, all participants arrange themselves in a circle. There are
a clear set of fixed guidelines: only one person—the person holding a talking piece—speaks at a
time. The talking piece is usually something of personal import to the facilitator, or otherwise
something that is quickly chosen on the fly. The facilitator offers a prompt for discussion, and the
first person who would like to respond will raise their hand, and the talking piece gets passed to
them. Afterwards, the talking piece is either passed in a circle, where the receiver can either
speak or choose to pass, or folks will raise their hands and have the talking piece passed their
way. Sometimes this became a point of chaos, as sometimes young people would start hurling
talking pieces to each others, at which point organizers would usually gently remind them that
the “rules” entailed always passing to the left, with the talking piece being handed person to
person until it reached the person who wanted to speak. Usually most of the students will say
something rather than pass, so they’re only able to get through a few questions.
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These healing circles allow young people to speak from the heart without censoring
themselves. Introducing a talking circle during a chapter club meeting about school climate,
Laura read and riffed off a script:
“Talking circles are a traditional way for Native American people to solve problems and
promote healing…We practice this because harm and trauma hits our communities hard
and can affect the way we move in the world. It can affect our moods, our actions and our
thoughts.”
The structure of the healing circle encourages young people to speak “without rehearsing” and to
practice actively listening to each other. Indeed, three of the four ground rules emphasized the
importance of simply sharing thoughts and feelings without needing to sharpen them: “Speak
and listen from the heart; no need to rehearse; and say just enough.” As organizer Sofía explicitly
points out: “When we’re in the circle, we remove barriers and we can express ourselves with
complete freedom.” This idea of free expression, of course, contrasts with the previously
discussed community agreement of “landing the plane” and “enough, let’s move on.” While
youth were also encouraged to say “just enough” during circles, they were rarely regulated when
their thoughts did get longwinded.
Students often reflected on how healing circles positively impacted their well-being. PJ
explained in an interview:
You actually let go of your emotions, you don't, I feel like in the moment you don't really
care whether or not they see you as weak, in a way, if that's what you would call it. They
see you as human, you have emotions, you're able to let go and not only that, but you're
also able to let go your own anger, your own sadness… You see, this is the way I like
wording it, you see the scars you never even knew were there. Yeah, because it's your
personal story that you're going to be using while you're here anyways, so you know. I
feel like a healing circle for me was an opening to being able to use my personal story
when I'm out there speaking, whether it was me emceeing, or city council, I took my own
personal story about me and my relationship with my sister because she's undocumented
and she was brought here at a young age, so it wasn't her fault.
PJ describes how circles facilitated a form of vulnerability and exposure to one’s whole, messy
humanity that was not always available even in other aspects of YPEJ. Her comments resonated
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with youth and organizer’s observations that healing circles generally helped students release
that they otherwise tightly contained (understandable, given the contexts described in chapter 3).
In an interview, Leah explains to me that healing circles are an important place to release and
vent frustrations: “so you don’t bottle it up.” Kenyon, one of the youth organizers during my first
few years at YPEJ, adds that healing circles are “super super powerful” for “our students and
they’re really able to let go of a lot of emotions in that circle once they trust people. And we also
talk about some of the solutions in that too. While other students are sharing their stories too. A
lot of students will say I feel much better, it’s a relief, I finally got that out of me.” In contrast to
environments in school and elsewhere that shame them for expressing emotions, YPEJ youth are
encouraged to express their feelings even when not perfectly formed into sharp political analysis.
These unstructured, yet structured spaces, constituted alternative emotional expectations
in contrast both to school and to other organizational dimensions. They also demonstrated how
young people could also support each other by listening and speaking to shared and deeply
individual experiences. As Laura told me: “And when we did the talking circles about all these
things, it was great. It was like, ‘Oh, that's a really good form of therapeutic self-care because
you're able to talk to a lot of people and you're able to relate and feel all these people care about
you.’ Leah reflected on the healing circles after Trump’s election:
it was really enlightening and honestly I've never felt such love from an organization like
YPEJ has. I feel like I'm in a family, you know? After the Trump election it was just an
emotional blow for everyone there so I feel like that healing circle was well-timed. It
healed my heart a little bit. It eased my thoughts because I was kind of like anxious about
how... about how he was going to be our president. Like dictatorship, like fascist... I don't
know the worst things were in my mind but during the healing circle they were like it's
okay, we'll move past this and we'll do more to actively combat his dictatorship.
Leah points out that healing circles after traumatic events reminded her of possibility, love, and
community. Rather than simply “moving on” after a brief check-in as the organizing director
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pointed out previous practice had been, taking substantial time to share unfiltered thoughts
helped young people unearth their real concerns—an act of love in the form of bearing witness to
pain, however youth wanted to express it.
These practices also helped forge deeper bonds. As Skyler reflected in an interview:
I don't like crying. It's uncomfortable. I don't like doing that. I think it's a good thing that
I did, it's good that I was actually able to…It shows that I'm so close with these people
that I'm so comfortable with these people that the one activity that I barely even took part
in was able to touch me emotionally like that. I literally started crying just because
everybody else was talking about troubles they faced and because [my friend] started
crying… I think that was a good activity. It was healthy.
Skyler points out that he dislikes crying in front of other people (as most do), but YPEJ’s loving
atmosphere helped him feel comfortable to express his vulnerabilities. Again, this contrasts with
environments discussed in Chapter 3, wherein young people feel wary about expressing even
simple opinions because of potential ridicule. Instead, healing circles allowed young people to
express “taboo” emotions. For example, another time, a youth member apologizes for crying and
Rocío reminds them that they don’t have to apologize: “We got to normalize crying.”
Healing circles also carved out possibilities for voicing ambiguous feelings that did not
align neatly with legible emotions, nor YPEJ’s political paradigms. During one healing circle,
Cameron—who, at the time, was the student intern in charge of core leader meetings—designed
a healing circle based on cultural backgrounds and connections. Whereas SEAP emphasizes
Southeast Asian and specifically Khmer culture, cultural expression is somewhat less of a focus
in YPEJ (save for talking about cultural erasure engendered by colonialism, genocide, and white
supremacy). Identity was often discussed in YPEJ in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, but less
so around ethnicity and culture. Cameron’s designed activity stood out to me because it enabled
members’ discourse in ways that may not have normally found voice in YPEJ political education
workshops. For example, students shared their curiosities and lack of knowledge about their
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ethnic identities and cultures. That day was a small group, and we had all gathered around a
woven mat that Kristine had brought from the Philippines. The mat has green and grey
alternating stripes, and the grey stripes are outlined in black, with hourglass and diamond white
geometric shapes. Cameron has asked each of the students to bring something that represents
their cultural background and to explain why they brought it.
Putting down a small color print out of the Guatemalan flag that she has just printed and
cut out at the office, Camila shared:
“I don’t know that much about Guatemalan culture [where her family comes from]. I
know that all Latinos are similar in specific things but I don’t know what’s specific to
certain groups, like Guatemalans or Hondurans or El Salvadoreans.”

Next to her, Susan, who didn’t bring an item, softly voices something similar:
“I feel like I don’t know a lot about my culture, like my dad is Honduran but he doesn’t
really talk about it. So from what I know, he’s always been here. And my mom’s
Salvadoran but she doesn’t either. I do know that I went there when I was little and I saw
my cousins and my aunts and they STUFFED me with food, like pupusas.”
Imani, after digging around in her wallet, produces a rumpled $2 bill to reflect her
uniqueness: “I’m Black, Salvadorean, and Puerto Rican. And I know a lot about the Black side
but not about the two other sides. And I would like to… but I can’t. So I dunno it’s like I claim
these sides, but I also don’t know much about them. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Black side—
Black power!” She throws up a fist. “But I’d love to know more.” And Skyler, who has come in
late, blurts out “I have nothing, no culture. Literally. Like I’ve been thinking about this ever
since you said we were gonna do this for core leaders, and I can’t think of anything….” When
Cameron suggests, “What about American?” He responds adamantly: “I hate this country!”
Skyler’s comments do prompt a thoughtful and immediate response from young folks,
who contextualize why a young African American man’s cultural identity might be erased or
deemed to be devoid of culture in line with what they have learned via YPEJ’s political
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education. However, none of the comments seem to appease Skyler. But the point, in part, is to
allow him to express this very understandable feeling without necessarily needing to channel it
into a sophisticated critique. And the rest of the talking circle included young people sharing
curiosities about ethnicity and race that did not necessarily align with YPEJ’s approach to race as
a social construction. For example, Camila shares that she learned from her father that she’s a
quarter Filipino, which she explained she knew nothing about:
“Yeah, I really want to do one of those DNA tests, like what percent white, what percent
other things I am, what is it that makes up a human? And it’s so interesting like how we
ultimately come from the some place but really it’s that the places that we come from
have different powers. So those that were able to get power and land put down other
places. Really there’s no difference between us except for melanin and hormones. And
it’s just like people from different places, they came together ….”
These comments highlight how healing circles, and the topic chosen and designed by Cameron,
allowed young people to expand and steer their conversation towards topics that sparked their
interest, broaching race in perhaps uncomfortable ways that nevertheless sparked young people’s
curiosities. It was particularly interesting, for example, that young people brought up fascination
with ideas of race as biological—very much counter to how YPEJ thought of and treated race.
The agreements of “speaking from the heart” and “not rehearsing” allowed young people to
ruminate on complicated emotional and affective landscapes. Here, emotions did not always
neatly align with anger, grief, or other feelings we might expect. Instead, young people generally
discussed simply not knowing—which was not necessarily attached to a legible emotion or
critique of injustices. At the same time, the talking circle illuminated confusions, questions, and
curiosity about race. Of course, Skyler and Imani’s comments about not feeling that they “have”
a culture, as well as everyone’s observations that they don’t know about their cultures, are deeply
entangled in white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and other processes. However, whereas
other activities might have delved specifically into unpacking the oppression behind these
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processes, these healing circles allowed young people to broach curiosities and questions that
might otherwise need to be debunked or challenged in guided discussion.
Other forms of unstructured sharing time: SEAP
I also witnessed other practices within SEAP’s regular programming that allowed for
young people to share how they were feeling, without a pre-determined agenda or ultimate goal.
When I was observing Lotus Leaders, youth had asked for a practice of conducting a
“temperature check,” which allowed the members to transition after coming in from school and
to honestly share how they were feeling. For example, one day Pair, who came from Thailand in
middle school and still remains deeply connected to Thai pop culture and politics, led the
icebreaker. Pair has a calm demeanor he explains that the point is to “understand the energy
we’re bringing in that day so they feel seen and heard so that we can jump in.” As the organizer
Soph added on, this helps us understand “how we’re feeling” and “what we’ve been up to”
because young people are leading full, busy lives outside of SEAP. An example from one
weekly meeting:
After Soph reminds them that we’re doing the temperature check, everyone looks around
to see who will start. Usually I try not to go first, but Ary says, “How about May?” So I
share that I’m feeling stormy/ turmoil about something happening tomorrow. Soph asks
everyone to send me good vibes, so everyone looks at me and wiggles their fingers to
show how they’re sending me good vibes. Then we continue in a circle. Evie is to the left
of me, so she goes next. A senior at the time, Ash is in drama and is confident and
tomboyish. She is absent for several weeks during the spring semester because she is
busy with drama and theater. This issue is foreshadowed when she explains that she feels
kind of like a sunny day with some clouds, “I’ve just been named AD [assistant director]
for one of our plays and there’s a lot going on, I’m kind of panicking cuz what if it
conflicts with SEAP?” Soph says, “we’ll figure it out,” encouragingly.
Alexandra goes next: “it’s cloudy but I want some sun. I have APs and I need to maintain
my grades.” “Y’all are fighters!” Soph says.
Gabrielle says that it’s windy and sunny, “I’m in 2 dance clubs and there’s a lot of
freshies and we spend a lot of time catching them up but it’s like what about the OGs, we
need to practice our formations and stuff, we’re spending too much time on them. And
then there’s just school work and it’s a lot.” Yvette says that she feels like there’s a
rainbow and she keeps wanting the sun to come out. “Maybe cuz I’m on my period!” and
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everyone laughs. “But no really I’ve been happy lately and I’ve been gaining weight, I
know I actually wanted that to happen but I didn’t expect it to happen. And then, I hate
all my teachers.”
Audrey says she feels kind of like the weather, like, “its’ cold and cloudy, I hate
chemistry. I’m sitting in that class and I don’t understand what’s going on, I failed my
math class.” Soph points out, “I’m gonna plug the LIFE program, May is offering
tutoring. We don’t want you falling behind on your classes and having a lot on your plate
senior year.” Audrey asks when it was and said that she didn’t get a text. Ary says that
she feels kind of like California weather, like sunny and hot one day and rainy and windy
the next. She says that she just got a new job at a homecare facility, Mondays,
Wednesdays, Thursdays and some weekends. Because she was at training, she missed
some days of class and she’s falling behind government, which she hates. Soph plugs the
LIFE program again and points out she used to hate history but now she feels like she can
help and is willing to take some time out of her Monday. Ary adds that she misses her
boyfriend who’s been gone in Cambodia since February 28
th
.
Pair goes next and says she feels like it’s a tsunami: “I’m just absorbing everything and
I’m gonna explode.” Soph asks if this is something that some sleep and rest would help
with, and Pair makes a funny face. Soph says, “Okay, we’ll check in about it.” Amanda
goes next and says that she feels like it’s humid, “because it’s like you’re being attacked
by a lot of intense things but you don’t feel like it’s necessarily violent, you’re just in it.
Like there’s school, and boys are stupid, and I have honors choir but it’s the same day as
AP review. And I feel disappointed in myself because I just go home and fall asleep until
the next day but I have all this anxiety the next day, I’m panicking because I feel like I
might have missed something.” Soph says sympathetically, “cuz you’re so tired.” Soph
thanks them for sharing and Ary prods her to also share.
Soph says she feels similarly, reflecting the weather—“it’s been a long 2-3 weeks of
work and I have tomorrow off, yay.” She goes on to explain, “So I recognize that y’all
are holding a lot and doing the best you can. I’ll try to keep this in mind, balancing
keeping it light with what really has to get done.”

This moment showed how even a quick icebreaker could allow young people to honestly share
how they were overwhelmed. This collective atmosphere normalized their feelings of anxiety,
fear, and depression. In contrast to the adult responses in chapter 1, wherein young people were
scolded for exaggerating or advised that their stress could be overcome by mind over matter,
these temperature checks allowed SEAP youth to share all the converging forces and pressures in
their lives and to provide a release valve for the heavy, complicated, sometimes rollercoaster
emotions of the day. Here Soph, the organizer explicitly tried to provide solutions for young
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people’s issues (e.g. offering tutoring). However, young people also appreciated simply sharing
their unfiltered feelings.
Affective Capital: Organizational Emotional Terrains & Loving Leadership Development
Finally, youth and staff practiced affirmative forms of support that suffused young
people’s affective experiences of organizations. This general climate kept them coming back and
provided a crucial affective dimension of skill-building less frequently discussed in social
movements literature. Hordge-Freeman (2015) coined the concept of “affective capital” to
describe “the emotional and psychological resources that a person gains from being positively
evaluated and supported, and from receiving frequent and meaningful displays of affection,”
which can generate positive emotions and “personal resources linked to greater creativity,
resilience, and emotional well-being.” (19) In this section, I bring the concept of affective capital
to bear on leadership development and civic skills.
It was not coincidental that adults in YPEJ and SEAP provided young people with
“affective capital” that they were sorely missing elsewhere. During interviews, when I asked
youth why they kept coming back after their initial contact, they almost all described the warmth
and support provided by the youth organization. As Ary points out: “we have become family.
Everyone says, "SEAP is like my second family." We always have someone to go to. You
wouldn't expect that two people that really hate each other at the end of SEAP, they're like best
friends, or like sisters, siblings.” Similarly, Leah described YPEJ as a “second home”: “I feel like
if I ever have a problem at home, then I could go to YPEJ.” Although students often described
organizations as a second home or family, many also pointed out that they could discuss things
that they couldn’t at home, or that sometimes it was a primary safe space taking precedence
above home. Sara explained:
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Sometimes it's hard at home, you know? Sometimes you don't want to go home,
sometimes things happen and just coming to the hours or the core leader meetings, it's
just a little bit away to get away from that and that's made me happy… sometimes it's just
like you don't feel good and you're just sitting there [at the meeting] and then something
pretty good happens like something funny or something that you hear makes you feel
good, and I feel like that can heal too.

And as Skyler shared in his interview:
Before I started coming here I was very depressed. I didn't have a whole lot of reasons, I
just was. When I came here part of the reason was because I never really felt like I
belonged anywhere. When I started at [high school] that feeling went away slightly
because I was around people I could relate to, but I still didn't feel like I was supposed to
be there. When I came to YPEJ like I said I feel very comfortable here. I feel like this is a
place that I'm supposed to be at that I could be at for a long time. Honestly, I don't know
what the hell I'm going to do with myself when I graduate.

These quotes describe how community agreements, healing circles, and other everyday practices
in YPEJ and SEAP, including kindness and care exhibited by staff and other youth, created an
emotional and affective atmosphere of warmth and love. It was clear that the emotional terrains
left an indelible imprint. Just like many of them knew exactly how they felt at school (generally
bad), they also knew how differently they felt at YPEJ and SEAP, even if they couldn’t always
specifically name it.
Peer Support and Relationship Building
Furthermore, young people practiced different types of relationship building and
friendships that they could not easily do elsewhere. Leah reflected:
I'm not really that type of person to make a lot of friends but YPEJ has helped me with
relationship building with making friendships more so, and I have a lot more people who
care for me than I ever did before I was in YPEJ. It makes me happy.
In her interview, Ary explained that SEAP students proactively support each other by staying in
contact even outside of SEAP programming:
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“We’ll say, "Okay, what can we do to help this person?" We will give each other's
numbers, and say, "How are you doing? Let's go meet up somewhere." Just keep in
contact with each other, because a lot of us have seen very internal about our problems,
and not really talking about things. So, we will plan our days, just go out and meet each
other, or go get something, and just talk about what our problems are, and just relate to
each other.
Skyler recalls that he was scared to go to the statewide leadership retreat but that other
students helped him feel more comfortable: “I was like really scared. And Imani eased me into it.
She was like, just stick with me, stick with me and Lisa. And Lisa also helped me with that too.
Like she eased me into SLR, I felt the love. And I was a lot more excited to go to SLR.”
YPEJ and SEAP’s foci on peer support and affirmation was especially given the
racialized, gendered, and classed elements of differentiated self-esteem. As Camila explained:
“In middle school, girls don't really like how they look. [But] here, there's quotes around
and we learn about... it's the whole "We shouldn't hate on anyone" and "Throw glitter, not
shade" and all that. Keep an open mind, all those rules... agreements, coming to
agreements… there's people who can bring you up and there's people who accept things.”

Another pointed out that YPEJ helped them learn “body positivity”: “I feel like I'm more open to
liking or loving myself because of the messages that the organizers say and the kids here say.”
These efforts were critical because youth often pointed out how they were treated as unworthy of
praise, unless they were tokenistic excellence. In contrast, youth organizations tried to
proactively practice affirmations and appreciations for each other. As YPEJ organizer Rocío
pointed out, “throwing glitter, not shade” meant not just avoiding critiquing or tearing each other
down, but actively “encourag[ing] and appreciat[ing] other people.”
Organizations frequently built in activities where young people would give each other
appreciations and affirmations. For example, at YPEJ, young people would write and put post-it
notes with specific affirmations on each other’s back. As the organizer explained, they did this
activity because “there are so many things that systematically bring us down, like teachers and
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coaches, and make us feel bad, so it’s really important for us to uplift each other.” This
recognition, then, was more than a feel-good activity to evoke positivity, but recognized that
systemic inequalities filter down into negative self-perception and self-esteem, which in turn
have their own consequences. At the end of the year for the program I sat in on, Lotus Leaders,
Soph dedicated the whole day to affirmations among seniors and explicitly framed appreciations
as a specific skill: “It’s not like [the younger programs] where you’re just like oh I don’t know
how to give appreciations, y’all should really know how to be specific now that you’ve been in
SEAP for so many years.” We spent over two hours sitting in a circle of 10 in a grass, where
each person (including me) sat in the middle of the circle, and the rest of the group went around
and gave specific affirmations. I was struck by the specific and highly tailored ways that young
women affirmed each other. For example, one youth remembered how Yvette had brought an
extra swimsuit when SEAP took a field trip to the lagoon in Pacific City so that one student who
didn’t have one was able to participate. Others affirmed and appreciated each other for their
support: “Thank you for always being there, for giving me a hug, and being here for me.” Others
appreciated each other for not hiding their feelings and “asking for support.” Others pointed out:
“As much as you don’t think you got shit together, you do.” These activities demonstrated how
“throwing glitter, not shade” encompassed everyday practices for young people and staff to
instill alternate forms of value that were not always uplifted in other settings.
Support from Adults
Supportive peer relationships mirrored the holistic forms of support that youth received
from YPEJ and SEAP staff. PJ reflected that Rocío “helped me out a lot this year and I was
going through some pretty bad stuff and they taught me to open up and to know that it's okay to
be vulnerable, that it's okay to break down, I'm not supposed to be holding a lot of emotions
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inside anyways and… Whenever I'm angry, same thing, that I shouldn't really hold in any
emotions, that it's okay to let go.” Nicole shared that:
“Whenever I'm going through something I know I can count on Mariana. She's always
there and she asks me questions about how I'm doing and things like that. So it's pretty
cool because my mom, she's not a very emotional person so I have Mariana.”
Both Nicole and PJ point out that youth organizers differ from other adults who don’t always
provide them with expansive repertoires for addressing emotions. Students explained that during
one on ones and elsewhere, they could talk to organizers about everything going on in their lives.
As Sara added:
“Even if I don't get direct help, they always offer it. They're like, 'If you ever need
anything, or ever need any help, just tell us and we'll always be there to help you.' I've
seen people go and talk to the staff because they're having a hard time and the staff really
take their time and really try to fix their problem, even if a meeting's going on because
they want to make sure that student's okay. They want to make sure that student's not
going to do anything drastic and I've heard from other students who are like, 'Oh, we love
you because you always help us and I always could go to you and talk to you whenever I
want.'
Students also pointed out that organizers support them in multiple ways: as Camila shared:
Even at SLR we learned to have one-on-ones with people. If you see something that's
different about someone, or someone has a problem, something happened in the family,
YPEJ people notice and they want to talk to you. "You're not alone" kind of deal, there's
someone here to talk to. If you need help, even...I was really stressed about my final for
Spanish and I needed a canvas. Rocío was like "We have one right here, you can take it!"
Even just supplies or something, talking to people, that really does help. And getting
inspired; I remember one time I was talking to Rocío about being stressed about what
college I wanted to go to at the time.
Camila and other students’ reflections highlight how these forms of support are multi-layered
and included taking care of basic supplies needs—something that is not trivial, considering that
many students are low-income and gaining access to supplies can sometimes be out of reach. As
young people shared, there was no problem too big or too small for YPEJ organizers to tackle.
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Of course, sometimes interpersonal dynamics and conflicts came up as well, which were
inevitable. YPEJ and SEAP mentors would also guide youth in mediating conflicts. Two
students who had been really close shared how they had drifted apart over the years, but Soph
encouraged them to address the conflict and to share what was going on with each other in order
to repair and strengthen their relationship. Amanda pointed out: “I just gotta thank Soph because
low key if she hadn’t hit me up and told me about this, I wouldn’t have acknowledged it was
going on. I have to recognize not everyone’s quiet like me”—“Keeps it in,” Yvette says.
Amanda nods. “Like Gabrielle is more sensitive and so I had to trust her and hope that she would
trust me too.”
Young people brought these communication and conflict mediation skills to their family
spaces. Ary explained that SEAP helped her figure out coping mechanisms around difficult
interactions within her family:
Just calm down, or just do what you've got to do, and I do find myself doing that a lot
now. Instead of staying in the argument with my little sister or my family, I just don't
want to be rash and yell at them, or say something I didn't mean to say. I will step aside,
and calm down, and just think about, what's happening at the moment with what we're
doing? Then come back and be a better, be a bigger person a little bit…. [SEAP] helped
me see the things I do, how to make other people feel? It made me double check, what
am I doing to make this person really feel? What's something I can do to change this
argument with them? So yeah, it gave me a lot of different views about everyone's
perseverance, I guess, and how certain reactions can bring other reactions that are really
the cause and effect.
This also looked like complex forms of intergenerational empathy. As Ary pointed out,
this looked like balancing respect for the struggles their parents had endured, while not accepting
the pressures put on them wholesale:
[Talking to my parents, as encouraged by SEAP] would make me understand why she
would have these expectations for me. It made me vocalize to her, things are different. It's
not that easy as it used to be, and there is all these other factors that are coming into the
pathway that you are trying to choose for me. I can't really handle it all the time.
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Since we are all Khmer youth, a lot of us relate to how our parents are refugees, and they
come from Cambodia, to here, to bring us a new lifestyle, and they bring on all of these
expectations on to us, because they wanted the life that they were giving us, and there
was a lot of this huge pressure to do things that is easier said than done. It's just a lot of
judgment that they don't have the intention of hurting us and trying to give us a hard time
about it. They just want the best for us, and to give us this, I don't know, pre-made route
to success that they wanted, that they couldn't have.
They tell us that everything they did back then, they did for us to have this life now. It's
not like we don't appreciate it. We've just learned that it's different, that we do hear that
you want us to succeed, and we want to succeed ourselves, but it's a different pressure
with you telling us, "I didn't get to do this, but you did this." What about, where is my
choice? What if I don't want to do this? What if I want to go a different route? They
really help us learn to communicate how we feel with our parents. I feel a lot closer to my
mom because of SEAP. I realized that although we have this huge generation gap, and
they have grown up very different, we have very similar intentions and views of, how do
you say it?
Alexandra, in her interview, shared a similar story:
My mom kind of had to grow up at a young age too. It's just like when you have to do
that at a young age it kind of takes a toll on you. That's kind of why the way she is now
and stuff. It's like those circumstances of having to assimilate in America had a toll on
both of my parents. They kind of learned to just deal with it…. I mean now like my mom
... Okay, first of all, when we had a fight, she purposely said this just to get on my nerves,
because I think I was crying or whatever, and she was like, "Oh, get over it." I was like,
what. .. After we were talking or whatever, she said she just said that because she knew it
would like get on my nerves.
Many other SEAP members reflected the same issue: they had both intellectual and
emotional empathy for why their parents pressured them to do well in school, which SEAP
helped them develop. They understood that their parents had suffered under systemic, structural,
and deeply internally felt forms of violence that fueled their intense hope for their children to
have a better life. At the same time, they felt that these pressures could be soul-crushing—that
perhaps they might want to pursue a different career path, or that it wasn’t enough to just receive
pressures to do well in school without actually getting supported to do so.
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Furthermore, SEAP youth learned to walk a delicate balance between learning more
about their family history and understanding that sharing this history could be re-traumatizing for
their family members: Ary explained that
[SEAP] really brought me to encourage me to just ask about a couple questions, see if
they are cool with it. From that, my mom has answered, like all of the questions I have
asked about what it was like being a refugee. What was it like in Cambodia? What was it
like in Khmer Rouge? She would tell me all of these things here and there.
As Ary pointed out, however, her mom did not always want to answer the questions, and
sometimes these questions would elicit tears.
Alexandra reflected:
I think there's a lot of a disconnect between generations sometimes. So it's like they kind
of shifted the focus to why we're struggling the way we are and how it affects us and our
parents. I mean I'm just glad that my dad was able to sort of talk to me about it and stuff.
I'm pretty sure he wouldn't just randomly start talking about it. But I'm glad that I was
able to even bring it up I guess. Because I know some people it was tough, because SEAP
had encouraged us to sort of talk about it with our family and find something like their
perspective on it. Because we can learn about it in our history textbooks or whatever, but
we still have a personal connection to it.
SEAP members show how the prefigurative norms that they practice in spaces help inform their
relationships outside of SEAP—but in nuanced ways. SEAP has been invaluable to these youth
members because they have been able to talk about intergenerational trauma as it manifests in
their lives, threading back throughout history. Also, this empowers them to start conversations
with their families, but they find that discussions are not universally empowering. As such, the
alternative emotion norms also entail understanding how such practices may not translate neatly
or universally, and must be modified when considering trauma experienced by SEAP’s parents
and grandparents.
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Leadership Skills Support
Finally, I argue that there are emotional dimensions of support that are less discussed in
previous literature on youth organizing leadership development (Dasgupta 2019; Kirshner 2013;
Terriquez 2015). I argue that these dimensions are especially critical, given the fear that young
people face around public speaking in denigrating environments. As SEAP organizer Soph
explains, community agreements are also about “support[ing] each other….[to] build our
confidence, let’s build the best versions of ourselves.” This plays out during the first youth
committee meeting of 2019, for example, when I’m in a small group with (Cindy), adult ally,
Sara, YPEJ alum and now justice fellow, and two new young folks: one is Gabe, who is short
and with neatly coiffed hair slicked back with hair gel, in 9
th
grade, and Angela, an 11
th
grader in
SEAP. Gabe says, in almost a whisper, that he wants to improve his “communication” skills—
like talking to other folks, maybe even speaking on stage. Angela chimes in that she also wants
to do so. Later on, when Angela shares this back with the larger group, Soph says
enthusiastically – “Like, you want to do some public speaking?” Angela hesitates, but a seasoned
Invest in Youth leader encouragingly points out:
“I never thought I’d be doing this… speaking in front of city council. But the thing is, we
get a lot of opportunities, and sometimes it’s like something you get 2 days advance but
then you really get the support you need to feel prepared and confident, and if you wanna
do, we’ll make sure to be in the audience and to cheer you on.”

This vignette illustrates the broader affective and emotional forms of support that involve
deep mentorship, encouragement, and constructive feedback to help students constantly grow in
their skills. For example, Leah from YPEJ pointed out that the organizing director will always
check in with her after delegation meetings: “when she gives out constructive criticism she says
it really nicely in a supportive way. It makes me feel happy low-key. I don't know I'm always
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kind of hard on myself, but she helps me cope with that.” For young people, support involves a
recognition around what they did well but also a deep investment in their growth and well-being
that also includes supportive suggestions on how to improve—unlike what young people often
felt were the binary aspects of school, of punishment or pre-existing excellence.
A SEAP workshop where youth members practiced their facilitation skills provides
another example. The organizer has planned for youth to conduct short, engaging presentations,
essentially mini-workshops, that share back the knowledge they gained in the previous week
about the campaigns that SEAP is working on. The workshop is also meant to practice their
facilitation and public speaking skills. At the end, Soph reflects:
“So thank you all for trying this on. I was really worried that y’all were gonna come and
be like ugh I don’t want to do this, it’s a Tuesday. Or I was nervous you were gonna be
like oh we have to do reading, this is another assignment, it’s homework. Y’all really rose
to the challenge!”
Alexandra says she was proud of herself because this isn’t something that they get to do in
school. “So I feel better, like not all delirious and goofy,” Soph adds. Evie weighs in-
“I appreciate that you really make it motivating for us to do good and hyped us up. It’s
not like at school where teachers are like—” she adopts a droning voice—“do this, this,
and this. And then they’re just sitting at their desk on their phones, not helping.” “They
have so many students though,” Ary adds. “But that’s the excuse they always use!” Soph
interjects, “Hey we love our teachers! Imagine, they’re being squeezed both from top and
bottom—from their bosses and then their kids are yelling at them too!” Ash joke, ‘I
would never!” “It’s kinda like me at Lotus Leaders, like I’m getting squeezed from the
top by SEAP but then also for wanting to make it good for y’all. It’s like—facilitating
takes a lot of work man, this is just a little glimpse. Imagine having to do that everyday,
day in and day out… “ Alexandra adds, “Also you give us constructive criticism. It’s not
like that at school where teachers don’t realize how much anxiety we have about public
speaking. They’re just like oh, you’ll get better if you just practice and they give us all
these assignments and exercises but it’s like why would I even want to talk to my
classmates? I don’t even like them.”
This exchange reveals how YPEJ, SEAP, and Youth Committee encouraged development
of skills in a fun, supportive, and engaging environment. Here, Alexandra echoes her point about
feeling heightened anxiety around public speaking in school, and students’ fear that arises from
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hostile school climates. They point out that having concrete support and constructive feedback,
in contrast with a school environment where teachers have little capacity to offer guidance and
mentorship, also help them overcome these barriers around public speaking.
Another community agreement that aligns with the concept of supporting youth
development is “popping the bubble,” or demystifying terms. As Alexandra explained:
“I remember Jen talking to me about all the abbreviations like, "Oh yeah, we just be
saying like all these abbreviations, everyone just knows what it means," and stuff. But it
was just one of the things in our program was like to ... It was basically to like, I forget
what it's called, but it's basically like not to like use the biggest jargon. [Pop the bubble]
really meant to take a break sort of and digest the information; and if you had a question,
ask it sort of thing. Because sometimes everyone's kind of like glazed over, especially if
it was after school. So someone might be, everyone might just be too tired to even like
stop the lesson or like activity and stuff. But like once someone said that the rest of us
were by like, "Oh yeah, we kind of did need that break." Like if you go over it too fast?
People might not like pay attention to it too much.
Alexandra suggests that even though SEAP and other youth organizations tend to use more
engaging and supportive approaches to education, young people are already fatigued by a long
school day. So building in the expectation that everyone is there to learn and grow and
normalizing asking questions, rather than having to pretend that one knows everything, is a key
way to create an affective atmosphere of support. For example during one youth committee
meeting, Soph explained:
“We use a lot of acronyms, we did it even when we were introducing our organizations.
And we’re gonna be talking about a lot of things like different campaigns and
propositions and all that. So we want you to make sure to ask questions, pop the bubble
because we don’t want you to just be sitting there with everything going over your head
and not absorbing it. We’re totally okay with slowing down so that everyone can
understand what we’re talking about.”
Later on, for example, as we’re giving background on what the youth committee is,
someone uses the term “political power.” Sebastián and Soph use it as an opportunity to model
“popping the bubble” by asking youth what they think political power means. When it’s quiet,
Soph explains: “We can also split the word, like what does political mean, and what does power
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mean?” As this moment demonstrates, part of this is about inclusive pedagogy: ensuring that
students feel supported and engaged no matter their level. Again, these community agreements
align with organizations’ broader mission, vision, and structure that seeks to support youth.
This contrasts with a dominant narrative that youth need to simply “be better,” but that
improving requires collective accountability and support.
As a result, in both organizations reflected that these community agreements—as part of
broader organizational cultures—indeed encouraged them to speak up, to ask questions, and to
engage in learning in a safer space. When asked about how organizational involvement shaped
them in interviews, students often stated that they broke out of their shell. Alexandra told me that
SEAP pushed her to “be more social,” in large part because community agreements enabled
students to “feel more comfortable… We will share stuff and it's like people aren't really going
to laugh at you because everyone might be thinking the same thing if you ask a certain question.”
I asked her to elaborate:
May: I mean because you strike me as someone who is like, you seem very at ease with
public speaking. To me you feel very outgoing and social, so how did SEAP support you
to flourish in that way?
Alexandra: Yeah. If you met me four years ago you probably wouldn't think so. Like if
you talk to [other staff] knew me when I was a freshmen, so it's just like she saw
everything that happened… it was both like a sort of push and the direction to be able to
talk; because it's just like it's going to have to happen, you know? But yeah.
I feel like at SEAP they kind of saw more of like me, they saw more of me than I saw of
myself back then. Those parts of me that were really outgoing, I feel like I've always sort
of been like that way around family, but I didn't really know how to like be myself
around other people. So they could tell that I cared about it and like I don't even know,
because since I'm older now and like I just look at the younger members knows, I'm like,
"Oh they're going far though." You can tell somebody who are quiet but they do care
about it, and I think that's one of the most important things, but it's just like teaching
people that they have a voice and that they can use it basically.
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I think that they saw that I had a voice but I wasn't just using it, you know? It was like
them pushing me and like having me acknowledge that I did have a voice, which was
very important. I think that just goes to say like the type of space, like who you're
surrounded with in your environment does affect how you portray yourself, or how you
carry yourself for the day.
Although there were specific ways that organizers encouraged Alexandra (for example, in
helping her develop public speaking skills), these community agreements bolstered an overall
atmosphere that encouraged her informally to speak and to break out of her shell. Indeed, many
students explained to me that YPEJ and SEAP helped them come out of their “shells.” Again,
these dynamics contrasted sharply with school contexts that engendered anxiety about speaking,
or SEAP members’ experiences of being expected to speak even when they didn’t want to in
homes.
Students also reflected on how community agreements helped create a more democratic
co-construction of knowledge that also helped them feel safe to speak. Alexandra reflected:
“I feel like the school tried to force knowledge or information down your throat for you
to throw it back up on the test and then forget about it. But I feel like SEAP sort of lets it
simmer, like you get to marinate on it a little more and take it in and you get to ask
questions, because it's a safe space, you know?... and I always liked how we would learn
stuff that we didn't learn in school. It was space to talk about like what's actually
happening in the world. But like schools sort of like teaches us stuff that like when am I
going to need this? Sort of thing. Some of it's useful, but SEAP more provides stuff
around our community, like literally living in Cambodia town and stuff.”
Community agreements helped bolster an environment where students felt more engaged in the
material, offering a corrective to the disengaging dimensions of school. As Imani shared, unlike
school, YPEJ was a space “where you can be yourself…. I’m more myself at YPEJ; I don't have
to worry about someone being like, what she wearing? She not wearing the newest Jordan's, or
what are you doing with your hair? Nobody care in there. They're like, "Girl, your hair look
nice." Imani’s comments reverberated across the themes of many students’ interviews, and
during their reflections in workshops and organizational spaces. They felt that these spaces
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enabled them to fully become themselves and to explore parts of themselves and self-expression
that they did not always have access to.
Dilemmas: Cognizance of Emotional Labor
Even as organizations emphasized emotional support in contrast to the lack of support for
students in schools, they also recognized that emotional support entails labor that is often
inequitably imposed on women.
Healing circles, for example, used a format that involved distributing emotional labor as a
collective endeavor, rather than expecting women and non-binary folks to manage and hold
others’ feelings. Organizers and youth would often emphasize that everyone is equally distant
from each other in a circle format. Another time, Laura points out: “A circle has no beginning or
end, and all the points are the same distance from the center. So we’re all sharing a part of this
and we’re all taking up the same space.” As such, everyone is equally responsible for listening
and holding space for others. Sofía emphasizes: “everyone in the circle is welcomed, belongs, is
respected and listened to. It’s a safe space so even though it’s called a talking circle, it’s more
about listening.” In asserting that “holding space” is the crux, she points out that they’re not
supposed to respond to each others’ comments because “When we hold space for people, we
open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgement and control. We simply
listen and reflect.” As such, healing circles are also an opportunity for every person to practice
listening and hold accountability and responsibility for listening to others.
The importance of distributing emotional labor was illuminated by organizers’ and
youth’s reflections on emotional labor. Organizers faced a dilemma around emotional labor: on
the one hand, it came with rewards and was inherent to their job, but it also fueled burnout (as
elaborated upon in the next chapter). Soph often reflected on the delicate balance around
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emotional labor. After Lotus Leaders’s first meeting of the semester, she explained that she was
stressed out because one of the members had just quit, and some of the seniors started leaving the
meeting early because of an event at school but they hadn’t told her beforehand. Soph explained
that she was working on boundaries: “I’m working on managing my empathy and sensitivity”
because sometimes she felt too attuned to members’ energies in ways that made it difficult for
her to keep going on. Soph tells the youth that she’s constantly working on this:
“I’m an empath so usually it’s like if you’re having a bad day in the past I’d be having a
bad day too. But now it’s like—you can be having a bad day and I can hear you and
support you but I won’t be having a bad day myself, necessarily.”
At the same time, it was her deep emotional connection to youth that made her a
powerful organizer:
It’s like learning how to be professional in that space but also very familial and I see in
myself. I look at them and all of them feel like my little cousins. Navigating that
relationships—I’m their professional staff and I’m supposed to be in a professional role
as their mentor, but I’m also like, a lot of us know half their families.

This is what makes organizers especially good at their job: SEAP and YPEJ’s focus on hiring
organizers who have come up through these organizations themselves as youth, or otherwise are
deeply connected with the community, enables them to resonate with youth’s experiences. But at
the same time, it also means creating careful boundaries between self and youth.
Soph’s consideration of both sides demonstrates how there is a lack of clear cut
understanding of when and how to impose boundaries in the context of this work. Organizers do
not want to deprive youth or others of support—emotional labor can also be rewarding. But
creating and practicing emotional counterpublics is especially challenging when considering
these dilemmas, as well as the further strain on women and especially women of color.
Alexandra raised a similar nuanced perspective during a Lotus Leaders discussion, after
considering the importance of boundaries around emotional labor:
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“Is that something that’s okay for us to do, like troubleshoot and give other solutions
even if we can’t help? Cuz like that’s something that happened with my parents, someone
needed something and they’re not the type of people to just turn someone away, they
wanted to help. But then I was like, I don’t know if that’s the best idea because it would
have impacted me. So then I found myself wanting to give like other solutions, but… it’s
a lot of emotional labor. So what do we do with that?”
Soph responds that she can’t say if it’s good or bad but that at the least you need to give
yourself permission to walk away if you can’t handle it. I respond with saying that it’s tough
because we want to help and I think a lot of the SEAP young folks are people who want to
help—but we also have to recognize that sometimes this can be really taxing on us and we just
want to give and give. And so sometimes we need to acknowledge or recognize what our own
needs are—because you can’t give from an empty cup. The external facilitator nods vigorously
and says, “Yeah I was gonna say pretty much the same thing. Like self-care is super important—
you can’t help others if you don’t help yourself first.”
These dilemmas thus reveal how support, love, and care also come with their own
challenges. Although providing support and care can be rewarding for organizers and for youth,
it can also be draining. The implications of this dilemma, especially for teachers, is something I
explore in a more structural and systemic manner in the following chapter.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have focused on the interpersonal dimensions of emotional
counterpublics. I argue that youth organizing spaces practice prefigurative politics by embodying
the types of relationships they want to see in society more broadly—relationships that are
defined by love, care, support, and consensuality for youth who are denied these in other spaces.
I build on and extend current literature that points to how feminist movements in particular
enable women to embrace deviant emotions such as anger and to redefine emotional norms.
Rather than identifying and typologizing emotions to explain how they fuel mobilization,
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collective identities, or other aspects of social movements, I center the alternative emotion
cultures themselves. That is, I address how youth-led social movements practice different types
of relationships with each other, and the complexities and challenges of doing so.
I argue that these interpersonal emotional counterpublics are comprised of: shared
collective emotionalities via community agreements, embodied support, and consent; spaces to
share unfiltered expressions that may not align neatly with the proper political analysis; and
affirmative peer and adult support that translates into “affective capital” (Hordge-Freeman 2015).
In light of the previous chapters that have described why emotional counterpublics are direly
needed, as well as the power and limitations of traditionally understood ways of linking the
personal and political, I argue that this dimension of emotional counterpublics helps to
immediately enact new, more caring possibilities. At the same time, the dilemmas and tensions
raised—particularly those around emotional labor—also point to the need for systemic change
outside of organizational office walls. That comprises the focus of my next chapter.

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Chapter 6. Show Youth the Love, Show Youth the Money: Emotional Counterpublics and
Institutional Transformation

In this chapter, I show how groups’ emotional counterpublics extend into institutional
transformation. Youth argue that caring is an active verb that requires institutions to put their
money where their mouths are—or to put it more politely, to translate stated commitments into
actual investment. After all, there are tensions between movements focused more on diagnostic
and prognostic paradigms of redistribution (“a more just distribution of resources and wealth”)
and recognition (such as cultural identity, representation, and so forth) (Fraser and Honneth
2003). At this moment of public outcry for change, many have noted the hypocrisies of a chasm
between a stated politics of recognition and redistributive action: for example, in cities painting
“Black Lives Matter” on the street even as they continue to direct the majority of the budget
towards policing and suppressing Black lives, ignoring calls to “defund the police” (Sadon,
Schuster, and Blitz 2020), or endless corporations making statements in support of Black lives
mattering even as every other action they take contributes to the exploitation and dehumanization
of Black lives (Abraham 2020; Paul 2020)
In this chapter, I argue that YPEJ and SEAP instead argue that care must be more than a
mouthpiece but rather, institutionalized and backed up with funds—building on Black
abolitionist, feminist, and intersectional scholars. First, I show how they do so by centering
Saidiya Hartman’s contention that “care is the antidote to violence” (BCRW Videos 2017). In
their respective campaigns, youth show how and why the “public sphere” of policy-making must
be informed by the supposed “private sphere,” emotions, and socio-psychological well-being.
Being disinvested in, neglected in cities and schools harms their emotional and holistic well-
being, but the ways that teachers’ and organizations’ acts of care help to mediate these broader
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hostile contexts enact the possibility of a different reality. Thus, they challenged prevailing
criteria defining “good” teachers, schools, cities, and accompanying solutions to socioeconomic,
racial, and educational inequality. SEAP pushed back against punitive solutions, and YPEJ
pushed back against neoliberal assessments of schools and teachers. However, some dilemmas
that YPEJ faced around uplifting teachers’ care work ultimately pointed to the importance of
broader structural support for care. Second, I argue that YPEJ and SEAP pressed for budgetary
justice as a way to scale up and institutionalize care. They faced challenges because budgets
comprise an arena where schisms between supposed intention and action manifest painfully and
starkly. As such, both groups demanded that structural care take the form of actual school,
district, and city budget allocations. For SEAP, this also looked like scaling up care via political
investment in their communities and alternate frames of abundance. This chapter thus seeks to
put to rest or at least advance ongoing debates about the limitations of “therapeutic cultures” in
social movements. It is clear that at least for these youth organizations, the dynamics prefigured
(as described in the previous chapter) do not stop at the boundaries of organizational walls.
Instead, they translate into a refusal to accept institutions’ negligence, and furthermore to push at
the boundaries of what is acceptable change.
Centering Care, Redefining youth needs: Relationship Centered Schools & Invest in Youth
Both YPEJ and SEAP foregrounded youth’s knowledge about the importance of care as
an “antidote to violence” (BCRW Videos 2017; Kaba 2017), thus going against the grain of
prevailing wisdom around punitive or neoliberal solutions to social ills. SEAP’s Invest in Youth
campaign shows how youth need care and nurturing rather than suppression and punishment as
they sought to redefine how cities should attempt to address crime and deviance. Of course, this
philosophy rings true with the slogans that have gained more prominence in the current calls to
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defund the police, such as “Books not Bars,” “Care not Cops,” and “Counselors not Cops.” This
chapter shows how these slogans did not just appear out of thin air—rather, groups like SEAP
have locally been voicing these frames of “healing not harm” for a long time, and their
approaches stretch back even further to longstanding theories of Black abolitionist thinking on
care rather than punishment.
Invest in Youth: Healing Nor Harm
SEAP’s Invest in Youth campaign sought to move public understandings of youth
deviance, deficiency, and social problems from individual deviance to heartfelt, bold indictments
of pathological systems. As movement leaders and organizers have long argued, neoliberal
policy has imprinted the idea that “wicked problems” of poverty, crime, gaps in wealth,
education, and occupational status are a matter of individual personal responsibility (Harvey
2007; Hong 2015). Yet, as one SEAP alumni testifying at a city council meeting pointed out:
“Poverty is not a crime. Youth are not the problem. Not having resources, or support, or a budget
to invest in youth and families is [the problem].” This statement succinctly encapsulated long
legacies of thought and organizing that pushes back against pathology of individual,
impoverished Black and Brown folks towards a critique of structures as the source of pathology
(Knopp et al. 1976). The problem, SEAP and Youth Coalition leaders argued, was not youth’s
lack of humanity but the lack of care and humanity in systems, structures, and agentic decision-
makers who continued disavow the value of these young people’s lives. At the same city council
meeting, Sara from YPEJ, who was also involved in Pacific City March for Our Lives, argued
that seemingly individual violence should be understood instead as structural violence.
Highlighting shootings that have disproportionately impacted communities of color, she asked
pointedly: “Did they have access to prevention programs and services? What safe spaces did they
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have access to that made them feel seen and empowered?” Again, Sara’s point expands the circle
of concern from locking up violent individuals, instead asking us to zoom out and situate their
behavior within a broader social ecology. Meanwhile, Khean’s testimony expanded on how
ascriptions of community violence gang activity must be contextualized within structural
violence:
Growing up in [Pacific City] was hard for me because I experienced a lot of hardship like
gangs, shootings and drugs and racial profiling…When my parents came as refugees they
didn’t know English or how to get food. They struggled to find work or even get income.
They worked in low paying industries like garment factories and donut shops. Many in
their generation had a hard time making ends meet so they turned to robberies and selling
drugs and joining gangs. Had there been a youth fund or other resources like mental
health services, job training and English learning, my parents’ generation would have had
an easier time adjusting to America and options other than gangs. These issues in the
community impact me as a youth by causing me to move to multiple schools and gang
violence that still occur in my generation like in the past.
Each of these students argued against the narratives that have long focused on “moral
panics” about youth (Zatz 1987)—for example, scripting of Black and Brown youth as
“superpredators,” the multiple ballot initiatives in California and laws elsewhere sentencing
youth as adults, the panic about Asian-Latino gang violence in Pacific City (Bazelon 2000;
Jennings 2014; Lopez 2003; Needham and Quintiliani 2007). What matters, Khean and other
youth point out, is not individual supposed “bad apples” but rather structural violence and
systemic violence inflicted on their communities. Like other abolitionists, youth questioned the
assumptions of what crime really means when elected officials and disinvestment had engineered
the conditions for crime by systematically committing harm to their communities (Intercepted
2020). Youth argued that they had been perceived and treated disposable, as mattering less
through racialized criminality (Cacho 2012) that had nevertheless been manufactured by policies
and elected officials’ decisions.
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Young people argued that elected officials’ willful decision to allocate funds to
punishment were redolent of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “strategic abandonment”: young
people of color had been thrown to the wayside by the state, which criminalized them and
deemed them unworthy of care, health, or well-being (Gilmore 2007). With the assistance of
adult allies and supporting organizations, youth uncovered an egregious discrepancy in the
amount spent on the budget for policing in comparison to health services and youth
development: in the fiscal year of 2019, the city spent “$2,500 dollars to suppress and arrest one
young person vs. $119 to develop a young person.” Alexandra points out that the budget analysis
helped her understand that the city was focusing on over-policing and punishment rather than
care:
“I learned about how sad our budget is. Where I live there's not that many resources. It
was very shocking to me….I wouldn't have thought about budget but the fact that I had
learned about it…. kind of made me realize that people don't care about us. They really
sometimes don't care about our future sometimes…Instead of incarceration, you should
be offering these other ... therapy or programs to help them not to make them turn out
into a bad person even more so. I feel like they would think that's easier than like
providing these resources. I get scared when I think about how police they say that
they're there to protect us. … They would rather like punish us than give us the
opportunities to help heal or improve ourselves, I guess, in the community.
Alexandra’s reflections echo what many youth and staff in the campaign asserted: the
moral depravity of an over-bloated investment in punishment rather than investment in growth,
healing, and nurturing. As she also points out, the budget was not an intuitive place to turn, but
SEAP’s campaign opened her eyes to the neglect written into numbers. Similarly, Noah argued:
“Sending us to prisons--instead, [we need] money for us to have programs to do
something better—what are you doing with our future, with our city. Getting rid of our
youth instead of helping them. We need to really think about what we want to do for this
money and what we want for our city. We’re spending more on incarcerating youth than
on making sure they have something to do in the city. Coming from lower income homes,
districts. They don’t have these opportunities that other districts do. When I go to college
all I see are upper class people. I have two older brothers who were high school drop
outs, on drugs. The programs they were in got cut. We’re worried about youth making
bad decisions but we don’t give them a pathway to make better decisions. If we want
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them to be better, we need to guide them to a better pathway so they can do something
for the city.”

Like Alexandra, Noah set up a clear distinction: punishment is focused on eviscerating
and invisibilizing them, their communities, youth as a “problem” as a form of strategic
abandonment and disavowable death (Cacho 2012). This is more costly than actually caring for,
investing in, and supporting the growth and potential of their communities. Noah points out how
this disinvestment has directly harmed them. As they point out, “care” is not just about imposing
high expectations, and then furnishing punishment when youth are not able to meet them—but
rather providing development pathways. Finally, Trevor pointed out this discrepancy in terms of
the war on drugs:
I knew young people caught up in system for low level violations and locked up and then
placed on parole. Communities of color have been negatively impacted by the war on
drugs. My older cousin is just one of these examples. In 2016, the US locked up 1.2
million people for drug convictions. 700000 were for marijuana. Close to 60% are Black
and Latino. With the move in our city to legalize marijuana, we have the opportunity to
correct this wrong and invest back in communities hurt the most… by investing at least
50% of marijuana sales taxes in the Children and Youth Fund, you’re giving us an
opportunity to support young people and invest back in them.
Trevor points out the direct need for re-investing the funds that are now being reaped
from the legalization of marijuana, even though Black and Latinx folks have long been harmed
by its criminalization. Young people’s comments thus argue against disappearing, and instead
shifting assumptions and mindsets of young people of color as bearing great potential to grow
and to be able to make a positive contribution to their communities and cities as a whole. Their
insights illustrate the critiques of a “metastasizing carceral state” that “govern[s] through crime”
(Gottschalk 2008)-- as state policing and surveillance become obscenely bloated, while welfare,
social services, and the social safety net and been gutted. The role of policing as solution to all
social problems (Davis and Rodriguez 2000) has failed young people and their communities.
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This disappearance also illustrates necro-politics, state-sanctioned disposability of youth’s
communities to premature death (Gilmore 2007; Mbembe 2003).
As youth leaders pointed out, this systemic lack of care translates into a deep internalized
feeling of lack of care and direct harm to their well-being. The deeply human emotional,
socioeconomic, and far reaching impacts of the carceral state instead showed how they are not
disposable, or disavowable. Troy reflected on his experience as a gender non conforming Black
youth:
I didn’t know fitting the gender binary was such a big deal until I didn’t do it. I found
myself being harassed, beaten, as though I’d done something wrong. Of course this hurt
my self-esteem at a young age because I did not feel safe at school, and I didn’t know
how to express my pain to get help. This feeling of not knowing where to go continued
through my 10
th
grade year when it was decided that I’d be evaluated for mental illnesses.
Trevor’s testimony reveals how, although pathology gets displaced on him as “mental
illness,” the violent enforcement of gender binaries and a lack of support should be indicted as
indicative of systemic, societal illness. His “mental illness” is more a mark of the illness of a
willful abandonment of gender non-conforming youth, and the neglect that made him feel
unworthy of love. Laura, during an Invest in Youth press conference, shared another side of this
disinvestment: her depression flowed from a lack of nurturing spaces aligned with her values
challenging homophobia and racism. These lack of resources and investment left her with
depression, stress, and anxiety that were compounded and sparked by the disjuncture between
her own beliefs and that of adults at school and at home:
I grew up experiencing a lot of internalized homophobia, transphobia, and internalized
racism in my home. It made me feel really sad and angry, and part of it was ….there were
cultural differences because my parents come from somewhere else. And I found that the
values that matter to me didn’t matter to the adults around me—my parents, relatives,
teachers, and adults at school. They wanted me to conform to their beliefs. But I’ve chosen to
stand up for what I believe in. And this can cause great pain, and the cultural differences
between us can lead to a lot of arguments in our family. This led me to want to rebel, and I
went from a student who was getting top grades to a student who was failing all my classes.
At my lowest point, I struggled with depression, anxiety, and stress. By the time I started
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high school, I had already been hospitalized for high levels of anxiety. I didn’t have
anywhere to go to cope with stress and to express myself outside of home.

Laura’s story illustrates how a lack of political spaces for her to explore different sociopolitical
viewpoints left her feeling isolated, alienated, and unsupported. Not having a safe space to
express and voice her opinions sparked the desire to rebel, which, as she points out, derailed her
academic career and eventually spiraled into her hospitalization. Finally, Mac’s experiences also
explained how lack of socioeconomic opportunities and isolation and exclusion from being queer
also converged to produce mental health issues:
During my junior year of high school, my family was homeless. My single mother tried
to find homes while working for four children. We couch surfed for a while with family
and friends, but not having a place to live, my mental health plummeted. I fell into a
depression and started skipping my classes and started slipping on grades. I had to
transfer schools to catch up. Then I was outed by a family member to my mother. This
made our relationship very rocky. I began to have thoughts of self harm. I tried accessing
therapy but I didn’t know where to go and who to trust.
These three youth’s stories show how systemic, policy, and budgetary foci on suppression and
punishment, rather than care, leaves them literally uncared for, and feeling uncared for in deeply
personal ways. Each of them highlight different dimensions of disinvestment and uncaring
structural environments, which were especially harmful given young people’s experiences of
intergenerational trauma, poverty, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia. Youth’s stories also
demonstrated how a lack of care translates into isolation, stress, depression, and anxiety as well
as impeded life chances: brutally, what it feels like on an everyday level to be left for dead.
Young people further made the point that care was necessary by drawing upon their
experiences of being resourced, supported, and cared for in SEAP. In doing so, they practiced
abolitionist projects of actively creating nurturing, loving, healing, creative spaces and the
founding of new relationalities (Davis 2003; Love 2019; Moten and Harney 2004) and “building
alternative formations that actually protect people from violence” (CR10 Publications Collective
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2008). In short, they care for each other given the abject failure of the state in the vein of social
movements’ such as Black Panther Party’s and Young Lords’ forms of mutual aid (Fernández
2019; Nelson 2011b). As the executive director of SEAP argued:
“Young people require nurturing so they can bloom and thrive, and this is what the
campaign is all about…At SEAP , we believe that when they’re given resources, young
people can turn their energy to solving the world’s problems.”
Youth shared how organizations nurtured and cared for them in contrast to systemic voids of
care. For example, Mac and Trevor both shared how GSA Network was one of the few spaces
that fully embraced their intersectional identities as Black, queer, and gender non-conforming. As
Mac told the Pacific City City Council:
At the start of my senior year I met [staff member] who is my mentor and an organizer
with GSAN. Meeting [him] changed my life. He affirmed me that I have a purpose and I
can help others find their purpose and voice. I joined the youth committee [that] focuses
on youth first and engaging them. This is exactly what I needed so desperately when I
was younger. By creating a child and youth fund and establishing meaningful partnership,
we can ensure young people have access to holistic programs and services and help them
reach their full potential. I am Black, queer, low income, a friend, mentor, and a lot of
other things. I deserve to be happy, safe, supported because I learn that I matter.

Similarly, Trevor shared:
Still struggling with mental illnesses, I bumped into a friend from middle school who was
also a queer youth of color. They brought me to a support group, a place to talk, hide, or
know that I was protected. I never had that before. I joined GSA which gave me another
safe space, specifically for queer youth. We provide safe spaces, support groups and sex
ed and giving youth a place to figure themselves out. I say all this to say: it’s important to
give queer youth of color and systems impacted youth a place to go, and resources to
meet their basic needs. Giving youth more funding protects programs such as GSAN and
RAP, increasing access to intervention, prevention and retention programs

Both Mac and Trevor share examples of how their youth organizations embodied care,
investment, and support for their growth. These spaces helped them translate their deep,
personally felt pain into connections with mentors and peers, while also helping them to meet
basic, material needs. Young people offered these testimonies as a sharp contrast to the
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invisibilization, disinvestment, and felt harms described above. In doing so, they reveal the
constitution of “new democratic institutions” (Davis 2005) and “production of freedom and
liberation practices” (Rodríguez 2015). Again, these harken back to the prefigurative,
interpersonal practices described more thoroughly in the previous chapter. Here, however, Mac
and Trevor explicitly juxtapose these practices with that of systemic disinvestment in order to
illustrate that neglect is not an inevitability, and that other youth deserve to access the same
spaces of love and care as a matter of policy rather than accident.
These two, alternating paths were perfectly juxtaposed during SEAP’s Yellow Lounge
event, where youth wrote a skit where they contrasted the dominant narratives explaining why
poor youth of color were “failing” with the systemic problems that warranted a Children and
Youth Fund. Set up as a “game show,” two students acted as unsympathetic teachers and elected
officials, and two as students in different scenarios. The first question posed by the “game show”
host is that “Cambodian youth report alarming rates of depression. What’s the best way to stop
depression?” Viet, a student posing as a school administrator, with a tie loosely draped around
his neck to show his role as an adult pontificated:
Teens these days are so entitled. Nobody back in my day was depressed. What’s there to
be depressed about! You don’t have to work. Teens just to be reminded is all they have to
do is stay in school and focus on going to college.
After some scattered boos from the audience and a long bell ring, the students switch into a
scenario that illustrates the consequences of Viet’s and other adult’s mindset. Jamie, playing a
student, is holding her phone and asks another student playing a teacher:
Hi Miss K, can I talk to you for a second. Lately I’ve been falling behind on work and my
homework because I’ve been reading comments online. I’ve been thinking about what
people are saying and I think I’m depressed. [She holds up her phone]

Teacher: stop thinking about what people are saying about you online. Just focus on your
homework.

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After a record scratch, Jamie turns to the audience and says emphatically:
“No, that’s just wrong! We don’t need to stop being depressed, because we can’t help it.
What we need is counselors and nurses who can recommend mental health services like
therapy.”

After this, we return to a replay of the same scenario that plays out Jamie’s recommendation.
Jamie repeats her same lines about being depressed, and this time the student playing the teacher
responds:
“I can refer to you a psychologist at the wellness center who are culturally responsive.
And if you’re over 13 you don’t have to tell a teacher.”
Students play out a similar situation again, but this time in response to a question about teens
needing jobs.
Viet: like I said, the entitlement is just unreal. It’s up to each individual teen to work hard
and find a job. Teens need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, focus on going to
college and making something of themselves.

This time, the student Sara steps up to the mic and cries out:
“Ok, I’ve had enough! I want to support my family but how am I gonna do it if there’s no
ways to teach us how to look for a job or write a resume. Youth’s future should be
nurtured: not just by the school but by the city!”

Here, she makes a big show of pushing Viet aside, to cheers from the audience.
“Adults and politicians need to listen to us young people to provide the solutions to
issues. Ultimately as young people we know what we need to be believed, loved, and
cared for. We’re fighting for the CYF that will provide culturally relevant services. [The
city] needs to invest in youth today!”

These scenarios drive home the argument above, and encapsulated the message that
SEAP was trying to get across: youth need care, not cops; care, not condescension; systemic and
collective care, not an appeal to individual personal responsibility. Viet represented the dominant
individualistic, meritocratic narratives that pathologized youth for the social problems that
enveloped them, particularly the assumptions of “entitlement” and laziness. The response to
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depression also directly echoed many of the dismissive responses that youth reported in response
to mental and emotional health issues in Chapter 3. In response, SEAP’s youth presented a
narrative shift—in the first, pointing out that depression was not simply an issue of mind over
matter, but one that needed to be fully acknowledged as reality, and responded to with care in the
form of actual support and services rather than individual will. The second youth response also
made a similar point, illustrating how youth had the desire and aspiration to uplift themselves,
but that they needed to be cared for: engaged, resourced, and invested in in order to bridge the
gap between hope and reality in a context of severe disinvestment. As such, SEAP’s Invest in
Youth campaign redefined solutions to social ills in terms of the need for systemic care.
Relationship Centered Schools: Caring Schools
Similarly, YPEJ’s Relationship Centered Schools argued against prevailing notions of
what youth needed to succeed in educational contexts. YPEJ redefined what matters in schools
based on youth’s identification of school climate and caring relationships with school staff as the
most critical factor in their success. Their Relationship-Centered Schools campaign brought to
the light and recognized teachers’ hidden caring and emotional labor: they “reclaim caring as an
activity of value and necessity” (Vogt 2002). I argue that this assessment challenged dominant,
neoliberal ways that schools appraise teaching, student, and school success according to
standardized testing and subject area competence.
One statewide dimension of the RCS campaign sought to redefine what “good schools”
are via a campaign that pushed back on a new proposed accountability system for schools. In
doing so, they argued that schools needed to recognize what scholars and educators have long
argued: that “academic success” could not take place in a vacuum hermetically sealed from
everything outside of school gates: that is, their realities of students’ home and community lives
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and systemic conditions outside of school (Darling-Hammond and Cook-Harvey Forthcoming).
Students essentially argued for a new accountability system that cared for students. And as one
student leader and alum pointed out at a press conference:
“To be clear, “care” isn’t just about feelings. It’s about seeing students past academics,
but as whole people with their own cultures, their own languages, and their own diverse
communities. It’s about truly putting effort into investing in our students, and seeing that
their potential is limitless.”
Her point, similar to that of SEAP and YC youth, redefined care as systemic. This was not to say
that feelings didn’t matter but rather that care was about actual, concrete investment.
YPEJ’s campaign arose because the initial accountability system was focused on
academics through traditional understandings of school success: access to basic supports, test
scores, access to basic courses, attendance, graduation rates and other academic measures.
Concerned that these measures of accountability continued to ignore low-income youth of
color’s holistic conditions, YPEJ successfully lobbied decision-makers to include “school
climate” and “student engagement” as two of the six key indicators in order to acknowledge the
importance of how students feel at school. Although they won this initial battle, they ran into
another roadblock when the State Board of Education initially proposed that school climate
surveys only be implemented bi-yearly, while other indicators were measured annually.
YPEJ argued that this move continued to subordinate school climate, which, in their
estimation, should actually be regarded as the heart of education and institutional success.
Young people testified that emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being were not ancillary to but
essential to their educational success. School climate and measures for emotional well-being
should not be treated as binaristically opposed to, or separate from, academics. As youth leader
Nicole asserted: “making school climate and culture just as important as academics” was critical
to ending systemic racism and “closing the achievement gap.” This assertion emerged from
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young people’s structurally induced mental health needs as highlighted in chapter 3, which
crippled their capacity to attend, engage in, let alone succeed and thrive at school.
Such experiences demonstrated how academic success was moot when, as RJ put it:
students “are constantly struggling with things like depression, anxiety, stress, and trauma, and
experiencing things at home and in our communities that make it difficult to do homework or
focus in class.” As another student, Rita, pointed out when testifying in front of the school board:
“I have a friend who has PTSD because when he was younger, his father was shot and killed
in front of him. In the middle of class he was triggered by the sound of a gunshot and had a
panic attack. No one knew he had PTSD or how to help him, so after his panic attack they
called his parents, sent him home and there nothing done to help him find solutions. I wish
someone was there to talk to him so that he feels like he isn’t alone in what he is going
through. And the reality is, there are more students like my friend who go through issues like
these on a daily basis.”
As Justin pointed out, this reality fostered a poignant question: “How are students supposed to go
to school and just focus on academics? The answer is they can’t, and adults can’t ensure student
success on academics alone.” Students thus threw in stark relief the contrast between
expectations and current measurements of individual and school-level success with reality. Here,
we see how PTSD makes it impossible for a student to function, let alone to do well in class.
This story illuminates the violence of broader public educational narratives and policies that treat
young people of color as cutouts from their worlds and that demand educational success free of
their broader conditions, without providing the resources for fully coping with these realities.
As such, students’ advocacy around the prioritization of school climate also argued that
institutions needed to actually value the elements of school that nurture their well-being.
During one action, a student asserted that “school climate is the heart of our education system: it
is essential to improve our schools and support students.” Six students held together a string of
ribbon that indicated “School climate,” student engagement, student achievement, parental
involvement, foster youth, and basic services. After each phrase, they punctuated each phrase
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(e.g. students don’t have a caring adult) by cutting the according ribbon, showing how school
climate held together all the pieces. In an accompanying speech, Xiomara pointed out:
“Climate surveys are our school’s annual check-up, and when we don’t have these check
ups, we are neglecting our heart. When we neglect our heart… students don’t have a
caring adult in their classroom, foster youth and homeless youth remained uncared for, a
parent doesn’t feel welcomed on their child’s campus, students aren’t prepared to go to
college, students drop out of school. So as you can clearly see, when we neglect school
climate, we neglect everything else in our education system. It IS the lifeline of our
schools.”
By unapologetically embracing school climate as the heart of educational and racial equity,
YPEJ challenged longstanding dichotomies between hearts and minds that also devalued feeling
(as outlined in chapter 3). Furthermore, they cleverly showed that the heart is also vitally
necessary: other organs, just like other aspects of school, fail without the beating, vibrant heart of
school climate. As such, their metaphor illustrated how school climate is not just an “extra,” but
the factor that could tie together educational success and all other priority areas in education
more broadly.
Local Campaigns: Caring Teachers
YPEJ’s local Relationship-Centered Schools campaigns made a parallel argument about
the importance of students feeling cared for at schools. Students’ action research found that
caring relationships with teachers and other school staff are the most critical factor to their
educational success: for example, teachers’ warmth, concern about students, compassion,
willingness to talk after and during class, encouragement, and connections as hallmarks of an
effective teacher. This theme pushes back both against dominant ways that teacher and school
success are assessed. Consider, for example, PJ’s presentation of a teacher award to a lanky
teacher with an impressive beard:
“The reason we are giving the award to him is because he is really for all for the students. I
mean c’mon, what teacher takes the time out of their day to get to know the students on a
really deep personal level? He gets to know us on an emotional level as well so we can be
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ourselves. Most importantly he helps us become the best as we can be. I had him for two
years and he knows how we deal, how we feel, how we think, and that’s what I looked
forward to every day. Although the rest of the curriculum was pretty ehhh.. not just as
exciting. I’m glad he was my teacher. So this year I was having a really, really rough time
with a lot of stuff going on but he was always there for me. He was there to ask me if I was
okay. He is the best teacher one could ever have and I’m happy to be giving this to you
today.”

Like other students presenting awards that night, PJ pointed out that this teacher stood out to
them in ways that had little to do with the technical or expected aspects of teaching, such as the
curriculum. Instead, PJ describes her teacher as the “best teacher” because he was perhaps the
only one who took the time to consistently, authentically express care—a true rarity, as she
implies. Of course, subject competence should not be dismissed, especially when considering
educational equity. But PJ’s comment points to a base level, or foundation of caring that matters
for students—echoing Valenzuela’s (1999) research in which “students view caring, or reciprocal
relations, as the basis for all learning. Their precondition to caring about school is that they be
engaged in a caring relationship with an adult at school.” (Valenzuela 1999:79) Again, it’s not as
if teachers’ competence doesn’t matter, but that there is a precondition of caring that is only
rarely met.
As other students such as Camila showed, teachers’ care about students’ personal life is
not just the icing on the cake, but critical to their academic and holistic success. Camila reflected
on her father’s passing in school at a Pacific City Board of Education meeting:
“I've seen the power of having a caring adult in my school. And from personal experience, it
can make all the difference. I recently lost my father because of cirrhosis to the liver and it
was one of the most difficult times in my life. But I was very lucky enough to have an
English teacher who helped me get through it. She passed back a rough draft with the usual
notes on what we should improve and at the bottom of my paper she acknowledged my
situation; she offered me extra time to finish the assignment and encouraged me to talk to her
about anything. She explained that all the teachers were here for me and that they believed in
me and that I would get through the dark time. She understood my situation and empathized
with how difficult things were for me at the time. And I was shocked and surprised by her
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note. Never before had a teacher reached out to me in that way and it was such a small act of
kindness, but it made a great difference. The experience motivated me to pick myself up,
come to school, try a little harder on my assignments and overall improved my attitude.
Someone believed in me when I couldn't. And I wish all students could share this type of
relationship with their teachers. When I experienced this I shouldn't have felt surprised and
it's important for this kind of action to be a given.”
Similar to PJ, Camila points out her surprise that her teacher expresses care for her
personal situation. As she suggests, this experience should not be an anomaly. Camila explains
that small gestures from her teachers made an outsize difference and motivated her even when
she was in a very challenging emotional and personal space-- her personal circumstances left her
despairing and perhaps on the verge of complete disengagement from school. It was her teacher’s
understanding and support that helped draw her back in from the edge: caring has been crucial.
Again, like PJ, what stands out to Camila is not necessarily subject area learning, or the technical
aspects of learning, but the care that helped propel her through a grief-ridden part of her life
where she felt like giving up on school and life altogether.
These stories show that what stood out to students was teachers who care. Yet the fact
that caring teachers were relatively rare must be situated within how neoliberal education policy
assesses teachers in very different ways than students. No Child Left Behind and other neoliberal
education policy reforms have focused especially on testing (Biddle and Berliner n.d.; Costigan
2013): in particular, standardized tests focus on “acquisition of facts and information” (Costigan
118). Accordingly, teachers are socialized and assessed by how “successful” they are in
distilling information through “textbooks, curricular materials, scripted lessons, and standardized
tests largely created by for-profit multinational corporations and with the support of well-funded
neoconservative foundations” (Costigan 2013). Teaching, and teacher socialization is very much
dominated by “strategic planning, cognitive leadership, problem-solving, teacher reflection,
higher-order thinking, and standards-based reform” (Hargreaves 2005), which de-prioritize their
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emotions and care. Teacher education programs also tend to neglect social emotional learning
and school climate. After all, standardized test-based measures still dominate teacher
education—what some call the “managerialization” of education that is intertwined with a
narrow view of accountability further subordinates “ethical and emotional qualities” (Forrester
2005). Valenzuela (1999) argues that “When teaching effectiveness gets reduced to
methodological considerations and when no explicit culture of caring is in place, teachers lose
the capacity to respond to their students as whole human beings and schools become uncaring
places” (94). As such, students’ priorities and educational policy priorities are at odds.
Not only did students’ focus on care challenge prevailing norms around what matters for
student success: they also challenged YPEJ’s previous focus that had not always centered
emotional well-being and care. As the YPEJ executive director pointed out, she was initially
skeptical about youth’s direction for this campaign:
“Students they told me the #1 resource was relationships, I was like ooooh, what??” [she
grimaces dramatically, to laughs from the audience of teachers, students, and
administrators] I thought we were gonna go after school funding, some kind of cool
school policy. It was on me to have the courage as a leader to say; ‘You know what,
you’re right, I think you’re right, I have to trust you on this.’
Her observation demonstrates that the emphasis on teachers’ caring is not intuitively a solution to
thorny, material, intricate problems of racial and educational justice. And indeed, it marked a
different type of campaign than YPEJ’s previous campaigns around school funding, Ethnic
Studies, more counselors and teachers in school, college preparatory classes, and more. Rather,
the dimensions of interpersonal and self-focused elements of emotional counterpublics also
shaped, and were shaped by, demands that students’ schools also practice elements of emotional
counterpublics.
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Tensions Around Care
Several tensions also arose from students’ focus on care—dilemmas between colorblind
and race-conscious caring, and caring as individualistic versus care as systemic and structural. I
argue that these tensions, and how YPEJ attempted to adjust, point the way to the need for
budgetary justice that I will discuss in the next section of this chapter.
On the one hand, YPEJ and students in the beginning seemed to openly embrace the more
“benign” seeming aspects of focusing on teachers’ caring, while avoiding overt discussions of
race. This seemed to be an important inroads to repairing relationships with teachers and staff,
who had previously been suspicious of YPEJ. Early on, students’ discussions of care aligned
with what some scholars have critiqued as colorblind theories of caring in education, such as
teachers’ receptivity, responsiveness, sensitivity to needs and talents, engaging students, fostering
dialogue, and supporting students’ growth (Gilligan 1993; Nel Noddings 1984; Noddings 2012).
For example, at a YPEJ event honoring teachers, one student explained that she nominated her
teacher to receive an award because:
“He encourages us to push forward. If he sees you slacking, he’ll pull you aside and tell
you to get it together. He sees potential in you that we don’t always see. Like I’ve always
been so quiet and shy, and I wouldn’t participate in class. But then I would actually try in
[his] class.”
Another student highlighted how their teachers’ encouragement helped motivate them in
positive ways because “she genuinely believed that I would succeed. She was intentional about
building a genuine bond. In turn, I felt as if I wanted to succeed so I could make her proud. I
ended up receiving a five on the [AP] exam, and I owe it to her believing in me.”
These themes could be interpreted as “colorblind” understandings of care, which tend to
be focused on individual nurturing, and as some Black feminist scholars have cautioned, can
perpetuate racist systems by using individual kindness to elide the structural and political
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dimensions of educational and racial justice and to absolve individual teachers of complicity in
racism (Bartolomé 2008; Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2002; Garad 2013). Rarely did students speak
about teachers who made an impact on them through more explicitly anti-racist forms of caring.
Yet Black and Latinx feminist have argued that care must embody a political ethic rooted in
critical understandings of race, culture, and power dynamics, as well as willingness to upend
oppressive practices and structures: for example, Black feminist pedagogy “subverts historically
oppressive educational policies and practices,” such as in activism focused on community uplift
(McArthur and Lane 2018)--whether in the form of resisting Eurocentric school curriculum
(Mogadime 2000), helping students confront racism via “colortalk” (Thompson 2004) and
developing curriculum specifically around racism, white supremacy, and oppression (Beauboeuf-
Lafontant 2002; Love 2019; Thompson 2004).
After all, Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) points out that models of care in Black
communities are not just based on individual relationships but rather extended family and shared
responsibility for care as necessary due to white supremacist destruction of so-called nuclear
family units (Collins 1990; Thompson 1998). She asserts the importance of teaching that
embraces the maternal as a collective “commitment to the well-being and survival of black
children and black people,” much like other-mothering (Collins 1990; Delpit 1995). For
example, Black teachers in the segregated South taught and cared for their students in ways that
were necessitated, but also created balms from, structural violence of apartheid (Brown 2016;
Dingus 2006). Meanwhile, Latinx educators discuss the importance of drawing on their own
backgrounds and creating familial-like atmospheres for teachers and students to share and learn
from each others’ cultural referents (Antrop‐González and De Jesús 2006; De Jesús and Antrop‐
González 2006; Monzó and Rueda 2003).
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However, some aspects of care described within Black and Latinx educator traditions
could also be seen in students’ accounts of teacher caring. Students showed that teachers cared
about them in that they developed substantive relationships (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2002;
McArthur and Lane 2018; Roseboro and Ross 2009)—pushing back against the relational
breakdowns that stem from oppression and systemic, pervasive lack of care (Madrid 2013). Even
if students rarely discussed care in racialized terms, teachers who encouraged and believed in
them made an outsize impact. Students often spoke about teachers who encouraged and believed
in them: high expectations did not materialize in terms of punitive measures or shame as
motivation, but served as a positive incentive that sparked students’ desire to make themselves
and their teacher proud. Such themes resonate with hooks (2003)’s argument for love and
emotional connection in teaching, which helps educators tailor a classroom and build
community. Scholars have argued for the importance of Latinx teachers practicing cariño by
providing support, mutual respect, personal connection, and commitment to collective well-being
as a counterbalance to power imbalances. (Bartolomé 2008; Prieto and Villenas 2012; Reyes
2020; Valenzuela 1999).
Indeed, these teachers practiced some principles of Black and Latinx feminist teaching in
that they Black and Brown students’ academic skills as a counterpoint to low expectations
(Patterson, Gordon, and Price 2008). Caring in these contexts was a form of “critical caring”
(Antrop‐González and De Jesús 2006) rather than being lenient or “nice,” which coincide with
deficit approaches, lower expectations, and ultimately fueling racialized academic attainment
gaps. Furthermore, reflections show how teachers “authentic care” did indeed align with some
elements of Black and Latinx feminist pedagogy, which involves teachers recognizing students’
whole selves (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2002), spirit, spirituality, and basic needs in ways that
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embrace links between intellectual and emotional (Prieto and Villenas 2012). Students
appreciated when teachers acknowledged their full humanity and expressed genuine care about
their lives outside of school. For example, during a chapter meeting at one high school, a student
member Jordan contrasted her experience with two teachers:
“[One time I was late and] Mr. E he was like, what up J dubs [when I came in]. I was
already stressed about being late but he wasn’t mean about it, and I came here and got done
what I needed to do, which is to learn. But another teacher, Ms. M, if you’re late you need to
have a pass and if you don’t, she’ll call the office, and she’ll ask you why you’re late. Like in
this other class, my friend came in late and he had his lab report and the teacher was like,
why are you late, and she wasn’t going to accept his report. But he was like, I’m late because
I was taking care of my little sister and waiting for my mom to get home, and the teacher like
emailed the mom to confirm.
Jordan explains that she was already stressed out about her lateness and that it was
helpful to have an understanding teacher who did not exacerbate the stress and enabled her to
meet the objective of the day. In contrast, Ms. M’s punitive approach to her friend entailed
suspicion and assumptions of the students’ mendacity despite his circumstances of caregiving
responsibilities for his little sister. Furthermore, contextualizing their stories within the broader
hostile atmospheres described in chapter 3 illustrates how such care was an antidote to punitive
discipline, the school to prison pipeline, and general hostile environments of which Black and
Brown students bore the brunt. Seemingly individual relationships of caring, as highlighted by
Noddings and critiqued as colorblind, were deeply important for students of color—perhaps
because they have not been the afforded of being treated as individuals.
As such, youth’s initial focus groups, surveys, and understandings revolved around
teacher care that seemed colorblind, but could also be situated in anti-racist practice. However,
some staff worried early on that YPEJ had lost their “racial justice teeth” and was losing sight of
the racial justice aspect. After the first year or so, they decided to actively reinvigorate an explicit
racial justice frame. I helped with some of this piece behind the scenes by drafting a report on
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Race and Relationships, which worked to link some of the previously discussed themes of
relationships with an explicit racial justice framing. Organizers also closely linked race and
relationships in public framing—for example, how caring school staff recognized their specific
needs for support, given their structural positioning as aspiring first-generation college students.
For example, at another YPEJ event with school staff and administrators across the district, staff
member Norma recalled:
“As a first generation daughter of immigrants whose parent had a 4th and 6th grade
education, I had no idea how to navigate the college process, but Mr. N [my high school
counselor] made himself available and even sought me out to give me grant and
scholarship applications. I trusted him and got to know him so I felt safe to ask many
questions that other people might deem stupid: what is a personal statement, how do I pay
for college, what is a good college? Because of his support and having him in my corner I
was able to successfully apply and get into college, now here I am-- paying it forward
and working with you all to build the next generation of college students!”
Norma’s story explicitly pointed to what YPEJ described as the “belief gap,” or pre-formed
expectations about students’ achievement levels and capabilities according to race (Bergh et. al
2010). YPEJ’s previous social media campaign, “Flip the Frame,” argued that belief gaps
become self-fulfilling prophecies, informing school staffs’ assumptions that shrink opportunity
for students of color. School staff, then could perform implicitly anti-racist caring teaching
through bridging the belief gap.
Ultimately, students’ reflections showed that caring is definitional and central, not
auxiliary, to teaching. But they also showed an invisible tension: on the one hand, students were
grateful and appreciative enough for the rare teachers who showed authentic care.
Organizationally, though, YPEJ also wanted to encourage more explicitly political, anti-racist
elements of care. Yet it also became painfully evident that teachers were already worn thin.
Students value most teachers’ care that seems to fall outside the official, technical purview of
their teaching. But teachers are not being compensated or cared for, to provide this care. That is,
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theories of teacher care have less frequently acknowledged emotional labor as uncompensated,
devalued, underappreciated labor, and teachers’ plight within the relentless disinvestment in
public education.
Budgets as Schisms of Care
The previous sections have shown how YPEJ and SEAP redefined success and what they
need by highlighting care. In some ways, their campaigns already show how and why care needs
to be systemic—in particular, SEAP’s campaign that argues for the need for investment in their
development. The following section illustrates some of the challenges embedded in pressing
institutions to care, and why and how care must be more than just individual and interpersonal
practice, but truly backed up with investment. I argue that YPEJ’s and SEAP’s campaigns
showed how budgets are the location of schisms in care. I show how YPEJ’s campaign
illustrated the disjunctures between expecting teachers to care, and the conditions that made it
challenging for them to care. Meanwhile, SEAP’s campaign pointed to the schism between the
care that they practice in their communities and the adamant refusal of care by elected officials in
their budget allocations—and how they attempted to scale up the prefigurative types of practices
for each other to bridge that gap.
Caring for Teachers
YPEJ’s campaign emphasized that if we want teachers to care for students, then we need
to care for them—not just symbolically but via actual resources. While teachers still needed to be
held accountable for punitive behavior that had real damaging consequences on students,
organizers also tried to contextualize teachers’ behavior in the broader problems that teachers,
students, and administrators alike needed to transform. For example, in one core leader activity
where young people were asked to draw and write out their ideal teacher qualities, Karly
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suggested that teachers “shouldn’t bring their personal problems and take it out on students.”
Rocío gently probed Karly: “So is your teacher not human then?” Karly responded after a
moment, “No, she is.” The organizer continues: “So-- she still has feelings, though.” The student
says, “Well yeah but it’s that she shouldn’t take them out on us.” The organizer acknowledges
this, “Yeah, definitely. But it’s also true that teachers will still have human needs and feelings
that they bring into class.” This exchange shows how Rocío was suggesting that the problem
wasn’t the teacher’s personal problems, but rather that they needed support like students so that
their frustration and stress weren’t translated into punitive actions. During one chapter club
meeting at the high school, Camila echoed similar sentiments:
“Teachers don’t have time and resources, like us. Like how we’re really stressed with
homework, teachers are stressed too because they have a lot to do and they don’t have a
lot of time either. So when they’re stressed they might say something negative that really
hurts us in class but it’s not because they mean to.”

At the end of a meeting in which students have shared elements of caring teachers, Rocío
contextualizes teacher stress within lack of structural care:
“But we all know teachers are not all super set up to do all the things we need them to. So
we’re asking people in power to invest in staff, not just these superheroes. We wanna see
them as people who are doing this everyday thing. So that’s going to be a big part of our
messaging, that all teachers have the support and investment to be really great.”

YPEJ’s frames respond to these tensions previously identified: the burden should not be on
individual teachers to practice all forms of anti-racist, authentic care as antidotes to structural
failure. Instead, supporting teachers to care requires monetary and other forms of care and
investment for teachers.
Of course, teachers’ attitudes towards emotional labor is complex (Isenbarger and
Zembylas 2006): some genuinely enjoy emotional work (Goldstein 1997). But caring and
teaching are also often exhausting. Teachers may experience emotional dissonance (Shuler and
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Sypher 2000) when they must hide anger, disappointment, anxiety, frustration, and guilt, while
only showing positive emotions such as enthusiasm and love (Zembylas 2002b, 2002a, 2003,
2004). Teachers also experience considerable stress, anxiety, and burnout from a number of
reasons broadly stemming from a lack of support and investment (Chang 2009; Davidson 2009;
Keller et al. 2014). As Roseboro and Ross (2009) point out, caring can also take a toll—they
profile three Black women teachers, whose lives led them to “question the physical and
psychological implications of their persistent commitment to social justice through teaching
despite the overwhelming obstacles.” Ultimately, they ask:
“Is it possible that Black women educators, committed to social justice, may care too
much? What are the psychological and physical consequences for Black women
educators who faithfully practice engaged pedagogy in a world which consistently
questions one’s actions, motives, and competence? …. ? If so, when (if ever) do we get a
time-out—a chance to disengage from this critical social work? If respite is granted, how
do we rest and not experience the guilt of not being in “the struggle?”
(Roseboro and Ross 2009)

Tensions between the multiple dimensions of care demanded by racial, class, gender, and
intersectional injustice and the lack of support or value around teachers’ labor in doing so, points
to the need to scrutinize “the institutional contexts in which caring teaching takes place”
(Zembylas and Isenbarger 2002). Similarly, Hargreaves (2001) argues that teachers’ caring is not
just “a matter of personal disposition, moral commitment, or private virtue,” but require
addressing how teaching is organized in ways that shape their emotional experiences. This
dilemma illustrates the need to further develop a strong understanding of institutional and
systemic care, rather than further demanding care work from those who are also suffering from
disinvestment.
YPEJ worked with teachers to show how care is structurally inhibited for them. Uplifting
teacher’s caring labor would not be possible without actually increasing compensation. The
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Oakland chapter, for example, had already been focusing on issues of high teacher turnover even
before teacher strikes bloomed across the U.S. Students in the region also conducted action
research with teachers and administrators to highlight support that they needed. Much like other
districts in the U.S. (Berge 2019; Turner 2018), teachers spoke about meager salaries and
benefits in light of the astronomical cost of living in the Bay Area, which made it impossible for
them to sustain life in the area. Those who stayed coped by commuting or crowded living
situations. One teacher shared: “I got priced out of Oakland and now I commute. That’s an hour
longer to my day just to work for OUSD.” This finding was corroborated by Oakland Unified’s
own exit survey, which found that sixty-seven percent teachers who left their positions in OUSD
did so because of low salaries (Harrington 2019). And this disinvestment also fostered working
conditions that only layered on the indignities. As one teacher noted, “I have ants for months in
my classroom, where temperatures reach 90 degrees 40-60 days each year.” Teachers also spoke
to excessive work pressures and stresses, including the many accountability measures mentioned
above. As such, YPEJ’s approach sought to transform institutions by actually winning concrete
support for teachers. On the one hand, this took place through supporting teacher strikes as well
as waging a current large statewide campaign to reform Prop 13 and win back funds that would
be reinvested in education.
These challenges were in dire need of being addressed because they also fueled high
levels of teacher turnover, which negatively impacts students. As Jiawen, YPEJ student leader
wrote:
When teachers come and go, we lose the strong connections students need to feel safe
and comfortable at school. We can struggle and fall behind in our classes. We can
become overwhelmed and not know who to turn to for assistance. We can check out and
go through an entire day without talking in class or connecting with an adult.
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Furthermore, teacher turnover and attrition are approximately 50% higher in schools that serve
more low-income students, and 70% higher for teachers in schools serving the largest
concentration of students of color (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond 2017). Pressures to
teach to the test, and teachers being overworked and being pulled in multiple directions, mean
that teachers might generally be open to the idea of carving out time for well-being and
restorative justice, but practically there is little time to do so. As one student, Nicole reflected,
when I asked her how teachers responded to YPEJ’s campaign, she explained:
A lot of them like the idea. Some of them feel like it might be a little optimistic with AP
classes because we barely have enough time to go over the curriculum, especially with
the mindfulness activities that go along with relationship centered schools, they're like,
oh, I don't know when we're going to have enough time to do your breathing exercises in
class.
Nicole’s comment highlights some of the challenges between practicing Relationship
Centered Schools. Although there are plenty of staff who still need to be won over to the idea,
there are also many who are broadly sympathetic.
As YPEJ youth reflected, this meant that teachers’ emotional and holistic well-being,
along with that of students, also needed investment and support. For example, in 2017, I spoke
with Dakota, a Black and Latinx student leader with short curly hair, during a YPEJ action in
Sacramento. We’ve been asked by a facilitator to talk about the theme of Relationship Centered
Schools and what staff and students alike need. We discuss the general milieu of anxiety and
depression at school, which she has already started telling me about on our walk over to another
building. She shares her own experiences of trying to protect her mental health in a deeply
overwhelming school environment: “especially in [my school], like I just walk in and it’s toxic.
Like there are two fights a day at that school. And it’s even worse because I’m an empath and I
have depression and PTSD, so it’s especially hard for me. Because those things weaken me.” I
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express sympathy and point out how this also impacts teachers, explaining that as a college
instructor myself, I have my own anxiety—and the general atmosphere of anxiety and precarity
that I feel from students also affects me, especially as I try to provide support for students and to
hold space for their emotions. Dakota cocks her head and her eyes widen a little bit in reflection
as she says,
“That’s a really important point: We keep talking about students, students, students-- but
it’s teachers too. if they’re not being supported with their own mental health--we all have
that in common… if they’re not in a good place, they can’t support us when they’ll need
to de-escalate.”
Later on, when the facilitator of an organization asks us to report back, Dakota repeats a version
of this reflection and explains that she’s thinking about a situation in which teachers might need
to address a conflict or behaviors that would otherwise be responded to with suspensions or
expulsions. The facilitator of the exercise, who comes from an allied policy/ research- oriented
organization, nods and affirms this with her own research: that “When we interviewed teachers,
one of them said that the single most helpful thing from her district would be getting affordable,
quality mental health services.” This exchange shows how YPEJ began to shift towards a
narrative that recognized that care for students also required investments in teachers’ mental
health to provide them with the “affective capital,” and emotional strength to practice empathy
and generosity with students.
Furthermore, YPEJ spoke to the need for professional development around building
restorative relationships. Their teacher survey found that although teachers believe meaningful
relationships are a priority, less believed that their school provides them with professional
development, mentoring, and additional staff support needed. Teachers in other regions told me
that their investment in building relationships with students, and to varying degrees, forms of
class and race consciousness, tended to be a matter of accident rather than the motivating
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principles by which they entered education. Nor was it a part of their teacher education and
training. One teacher told me that she was originally very strict with students and unforgiving. It
wasn’t until she once visited a student—her first time ever seeing the projects—that she realized
that she needed to treat them with compassion for systemic racism, poverty, and trauma. Another
teacher told me that he only by chance happened upon books that made him more aware of race
and class differences and the need to develop good relationships with his students during his
struggles as a new teacher. As he pointed out, his approach of caring relationships and racial/
class consciousness was not something that was encouraged by the district, nor the school. In
fact, master teachers encouraged him to be even more strict. That such teachers happened upon
their critical consciousness and empathy for students by accident demonstrates a systemic failure
in teacher training, which YPEJ also pointed to.
Expecting teachers to build relationships and to willingly engage in emotional labor—
given their plethora of responsibilities--warrants investment, support, and care. YPEJ youth
pointed out that like other technical aspects of teaching, requiring professional development
around topics such as racism, implicit bias, and supporting social-emotional well-being, creates a
standard of expected practices. This challenges implicit ideas that emotional labor is inherent to
certain folks (particularly women, and women of color), and challenges caring teaching as
located only in individual heroic actions that remain uncompensated. During a chapter meeting at
one of YPEJ’s schools, for example, Nicole explains that the issue is that “some [teachers] are
sympathetic but others are not... So the goal is to make it more standardized across teachers and
schools so that teachers can get the training to deal with the issues that Black or Brown youth
have [like] when they’re taking care of their family members or to give them more time…”
Again, Nicole’s comment highlights that care is a skill that needs to be developed; and
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furthermore that care and emotional-wellbeing must be invested in so that students are not
subject to individual circumstances as to whether they had a teacher who cared or not. YPEJ is
also currently pushing for master schedule changes, common prep time, advisories, and paid time
for teachers outside of school hours. As a teacher participant in YPEJ’s focus group explained: “I
think a whole lot more of relationship building would happen if teachers had more time. We
should have a prep every single day.” Some of YPJ’s recommendations included support for
professional development and collaborative learning communities so that “teachers have the
resources and support they need to make schools an inclusive place that embraces, encourages,
and empowers students of color to pursue their dreams.”
YPEJ’s campaign thus showed how care must be more than an individual characteristic.
Although emotional labor and carework are broadly feminized and devalued (England 2005;
Wharton 2009), YPEJ’s campaign showed that teachers’ caring is a skill, and form of work, that
requires monetary investment, training, and standards. These may seem like technocratic
elements of education, and thus it may be a bit surprising to merge care and emotions with policy
and budgets: but that is the intervention of emotional counterpublics.
Conflicts over Budgets
Despite successes, YPEJ, SEAP, and Youth Coalition continue to face challenges around
translating stated commitments to care into budgetary commitments to care. Pacific City youth
groups are still grappling with institutions failing to live up to their word. Here, I show some of
these challenges, and the ways that SEAP and YC in particular are working to scale up and
translate community care into political muscle.
Although youth groups had won a city resolution stating commitment to restorative
justice, these programs were consistently underfunded. One report found that the district had
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spent 200 times more on salaries, equipment, and contracts for law enforcement compared to
policies like restorative justice or other ways to support a safe and welcoming school climate
(Salazar and Omojola 2016). Imani reflected on going to a LCAP meeting and poring over a
sheet on school funding allocations:
So the meeting was like a bunch of older people sitting at tables. They went through all
those, what do you call it, oh yeah, the dashboard, with the information on where the
money is going. And there was a, what do you call it, not a book but oh yeah, a plan. But
we just got one little sheet with the basics. And me and [the organizer] were talking about
one part where it had like one column of different things like police, safety, and three
columns with the years. I saw the restorative justice one and it was like 100K, 100K,
100K consistently for the next three years. And I looked at police safety and school
campus and it was something like 300,000 and even going up even more, like oh my god
when you see the numbers.” [The budget showed that $2.4 million was dedicated to
policing and school security officers]

Rocío responds:
“Yeah exactly like that’s how they measure or address safety. But you all are the ones
who have brain capacity to figure out if that’s right, like to say actually at my school,
that’s not how it works. It’s your job as advocates, like we just take you there to the
meeting but it’s up to you all to bring it up.”

This continual battle over the disjuncture between stated commitments and actual
budgetary investments sparked ongoing conflict between youth leaders and decision-makers.
Youth continually pressed decision-makers on where the funds were and felt that they were
responded to with deflection and run-arounds. They argued that there was a disjuncture between
the empty rhetoric around caring and the actual transparency and investment involved in what is
needed to care. The back and forth about the location of the resources, and the school board
member’s insistence that the fault lay with schools and others for not going through the proper
channels—but as they pointed out, they had already been exhausting these existing institutions,
to no avail.
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A similar challenge took place with the Invest in Youth campaign. A number of
circumstances scuttled efforts to permanently fund the children and youth fund by rendering it
politically “impossible” within austerity measures and potential conflict with the city’s police. In
one meeting where some city councilmembers sought to reduce this initial allocation,
councilmembers argued that diagnoses of disinvestment were incorrect, that “incremental”
progress should be celebrated rather than regarded with anger and disappointment by young
people, and that there was a need to be “realistic,” “prudent,” and “pragmatic” with the budget
given limited resources. This pushback was suffused with power dynamics around race, class,
age, gender, and youth. In particular, councilmembers argued that there were other interest
groups and constituencies they represented, who were not present at city council members when
youth made their case for full funding. Oftentimes, these populations were coded as white,
seniors, and affluent. And any discussion of policing’s overrepresentation in the budget was
quickly squelched. One councilmember argued that “unequivocally, what most [of my
constituents] are first and foremost interested is that core services are funded. When we say why
more to police, to buildings and infrastructure, it’s because for most of community who live here,
those core services are a budget priority.” Their refusal to even entertain any debate around the
police budget was indicative of how taking even a miniscule amount from the police budget was
repeatedly shot down as a non-starter.
This contrast between how young people perceive the lack of care for youth of color in
the budget and those of city councilmembers on the budget committee illuminate how power
imbalances translate into different definitions, and lack thereof, of care. For young people,
transforming the city budget was quite literally a matter of life or death for them, their loved
ones, and communities, and refusal to do so only deepened their assessments that their city did
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not care about them. And their emotions and passions were deemed a liability: city
councilmembers instead proposed an alternative narrative of who actually has political power
and sway compared to what the overwhelming research states (all the political participation lit
here)—in their views, seniors and white folks were being underrepresented, and they had to
valiantly protect their interests. Furthermore, their framing continued to assert that investing in
police was an indication of care and so-called safety for their communities.
Scaling Up Care
How, then, did SEAP and YC grapple with this contradiction? I argue that emotional
counterpublics translate into strategies that warrant a scaling up of care—that is, extending the
types of dynamics practiced from the previous two chapters into broader prefigurative dynamics.
For SEAP and YC, this meant translating care for each other into political care for their
community by real power building. After all, organizing—what SEAP, YPEJ, and YC do, is
about depth, nuance, but one of the eternal dilemmas for movements is how to balance that with
numbers and scaling up (Han 2014; Pastor, Ito, and Rosner 2011). It is these practices that serve
as a bridge between the types of emotional counterpublics discussed in previous chapters, with
institutional and policy change discussed in this chapter.
For SEAP, this scaling up of care looked like Integrated Voter Engagement, or a power
building strategy that merges electoral and grassroots organizing (Lin et al. 2019; Pastor 2018).
This was a way to scale up consciousness building and transforming political commitments of
their communities. After all, traditional electoral organizing strategies have often sacrificed
outreach to these communities because they don’t fit neatly into the model of turning out voters
who already tend to be inclined. SEAP staff galvanized youth and alum to get excited as we
would meet on Saturday mornings, youth still wiping sleep from their eyes, by framing our
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efforts as a practice of care for their communities. As Soph put it during one sunny Saturday
morning, during a door-knocking session to youth:
“This is really about investing in the community and building relationships with
community members. Usually we’re out there just knocking on people’s doors asking
them to vote or to get their information. But now we really wanna engage them in the
long run and not just show up one time but really be able to call on them when we need.”

Amy nods and affirms:
“Exactly! So building power is exactly about making sure we’re engaging and building
relationships with our community in the long term. We’re gonna be door knocking in our
communities and usually folks aren’t door knocking—unless it’s ICE and they’re coming
through our communities for deportation, right? So it’s kinda like giving our community
the keys—like who here saw Get Out?” A bunch of folks raise their hands. “So it’s like—
remember that one scene where the brotha was trying to get the woman to give him the
keys? It’s like that ‘cause usually our community doesn’t have the keys.”

As Amy and Soph framed it, immigrant communities, and communities of color, are only
contacted for punitive, carceral, and surveillance purposes. This fear was very real, and
canvassers sometimes reflected that concern about deportations seemed to block folks from
opening the door and talking to strangers. And yet these communities are not contacted when it
comes to weighing in on decisions that impact their lives. And so IVE was a strategy for care on
a larger scale: engaging in ongoing conversations to understand community members’ hopes,
fears, and commitments so that SEAP and YC could eventually wield a collective hammer on the
city budget.
I went doorknocking with youth leaders several times, and our conversations showed the
importance of this ongoing, consistent engagement to shift community members’ consciousness
and align their values with political commitments. On a Saturday in October of 2017, I was
doorknocking with two students, a sophomore and a junior, and Jesse, partner to a SEAP
organizer in order to collect surveys for the Invest in Youth campaign. During one interaction
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with an elderly genial woman, she expressed complex views about the police. On the one hand,
she points out that police never help with what they’re supposed to help with or show up when
they’re supposed to. She also tells us that she thinks there need to be more youth programs,
because “you hear kids screeching in the middle of the night.” Right on cue, a young person goes
skateboarding past us, making a huge ruckus. Then there are survey questions about increases in
budget, and the woman says that she believes we should increase the police budget. One of the
youth asks, surprised, “really?” and the woman affirms her viewpoint. However, as she goes
through the survey, she also indicates her support for increase in mental health services. At
another point in the survey, she says this time that she disagrees that law enforcement should get
more money—“As far as I can tell, they get a lot of money and they don’t do a good job.”
This particular instance illustrates what engaging community members in conversation,
using the action survey as a launching point, looked like, indicating a few themes: one, a broader
sympathy with the mission of the campaign when articulated as positive values, and second,
potentially contradictory thoughts about police. That is, this particular person agreed with the
need for more youth services and resources, which was a non-controversial point for many. The
sticking point around police, and whether they needed more budgetary investment, showed how
attitudes around police can be complex. While this woman indicated on the survey that she
supported increasing the police budget, she also says later on that she disagrees that police
enforcement should get more money and that she believes mental health services should receive
more funds. Perhaps the conversation changed her mind so that she decided to answer in a
seemingly contradictory way later on in the survey, or perhaps it was a matter of unclear
wording. Either way, these conversations made evident that the councilmember’s assertion
mentioned above: that is, that communities are unequivocal in their support for “core services”
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of police, is much more nuanced, and perhaps even amenable to folks changing their minds with
more extended conversations and relationship building. This particular moment shows why
transforming consciousness on a broader scale is both necessary and possible, but requires
investment and support for organizations to engage in both frequency and scale of conversations
with moveable populations.
Abundance and Investment, not Austerity
Scaling up care also meant putting forward positive, asset-based frames of abundance,
possibility, and need for investment through arts, culture, and public narrative practices. After
all, long-term disinvestment in low-income communities of color has also been wrapped up in
assignations of blight, and assumptions that these communities are better razed (or abandoned
altogether) than supported with investment. SEAP circulated frames around young people as
deserving and worthy of love: investing in youth was quite literally an investment in the health
of the whole city. Prior to the depression expedited by the pandemic, youth knew that even
though they were in a context of supposedly “better” economic times (at least in contrast to the
Great Recession), that the specter of recession was constantly looming. Rather than simply
accepting the narrative that cuts are inevitable—and that youth and other vulnerable populations
are the ones whom will necessarily absorb the cuts—coalition members argued that this brief
respite from recession was an opportunity to “secure their future now and not have cuts balanced
on the backs of our children.” As Mac explained: “My hope is all young people and especially
young ppl of color and those in poverty are treated with respect, love, and dignity. I envision [my
city] as a place where young people are equitably invested in and have access to the programs
that help them reach their full potential.” Similarly, as the executive director put it during a press
conference:
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“All young people in Pacific City deserve to be loved and believed in…So we know that
the city is facing an upcoming deficit. And oftentimes when this happens, libraries, parks
and recreation, etc. are on the chopping block. But these are essential programs. So this
time we’re pushing back, that they shouldn’t be on the chopping block and that now is
not the time to make cuts.”

Youth Committee’s frames thus implicitly challenged the Councilmember’s claim that “core
services,” namely police and fire, are the spine of what is truly needed for a city to be safe and to
thrive. And rather than treat austerity hitting their communities hard as inevitable, they sought to
normalize investment. It is not prudent, they pointed out, to starve their communities of
investment.
This rejection of the inevitability of budget cuts and austerity was grounded in SEAP’s
broader efforts to assert a proactive and asset-based frame, that refused to accept what has
become pre-ordained destiny in times hard for everyday people, and flush for billionaires. As
Soph, an organizer pointed out, during one session when young people were brainstorming a
zine:
“A lot of time in action space we’re organizing, we’re reacting. Someone says something
and then we’re limited in what’s possible. Like someone says something like immigrants
should go to jail and we’re like oh, immigrants shouldn’t go to jail! But then in an ideas
space it’s like, we’re envisioning more about what’s possible, we can lean into that ‘yes.’
It’s not just like an anti- deportation space but the world looks beautiful, we have more
space to envision it.”
This shift to a cultural narrative strategy attempted to re-center the values of the
campaign, rather than being boxed in by the frames ossified by decision-makers to reinforce their
legitimacy.
Some of the strategies by which SEAP did so was by focusing on the beauty of their city
and Khmer and youth culture. For example, youth reclaimed and reframed narratives around
their city, pushing back against assumptions of Pacific City as crime-ridden, consumed by
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gentrified whitewashing, or of poverty as devoid of beauty. One youth Linda shared a poem
during Yellow Lounge that embraced simultaneous beauty and imperfection.
Seeping out the window,
Seeping into the neighborhood, I
hear:
the chirping birds from my barred
windows, the echoes of the dogs,
enigmatic boom—I can almost smell
its fume
Where are you from?
I say Pacific City,
You say: I don’t know what danger it
consumes
But you know nothing but only to
assume
Listen—
You’ll hear
The voices of the people
You’ll see
My beautiful community…
I love the blooming gardens and
endless chatter
To see the bikes and children run
I will believe in us
For the broken cracks you call ugly
I say homey
Because I truly care
…
Its very existence who makes me
what I am
Pacific City is where I’ll stay, no
matter what they say.
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Linda’s poem highlighted a nuanced balance that SEAP and other youth organizations
maintained. On the one hand, they encouraged youth to dream big and to think about how their
community could be improved via structural investment—the cracks in the sidewalk, the fumes
that indicated environmental racism, the barred windows that protected from fears of crime as a
response to disinvestment. In doing so, they pointed again to structural rather than individual or
community pathology. On the other hand, they also sought to frame Pacific City as beautiful and
complicated. Rather than subscribing to the narrative that individual success entails leaving her
community behind as she ascends a socioeconomic ladder, Wendy asserts that Pacific City has
always been a part of who she is. She also refers to “blooming gardens,” which resonate for
many Southeast Asian American youth. Those who have access to yard space often cultivate
gardens. SEAP’s youth leaders thus balanced a nuance between loving their community but also
demanding resources and investment to provide their community with the resources needed. That
is, this community care for each other illuminated the need for the city’s care as well.
SEAP also framed Khmer culture as beautiful but under siege from the converging
violences of different forces of erasure, including assimilation and gentrification. Recuperation
of and practicing Khmer culture was always linked to the need for political power. For example,
when Lotus Leaders is working on a zine, Gabrielle decides to write about her experience
growing up and doing classical Khmer dance. Soph tells me that we need to make sure that
youth’s sections of the zine are explicitly linked to the Invest in Youth campaign. So after I read
Gabrielle’s initial draft, which focuses on the cultural histories of the dances, the clothing, and
the narratives behind the dance, I ask her to tell me more about her own personal experience with
Khmer dance. Gabrielle tells me that she took classes for five years on Saturday mornings, but
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she quit after her teacher told her she wasn’t making any progress—but her older siblings did it
for eight years. I encourage her to include some more details about her experience of the dance
and the costumes. Gabrielle sits up straight and begins telling me about the costumes she would
wear—including a gold crown “that’s really heavy and it would make like a dent in your
forehead.” She also explains that all the clothing was handmade and intricate. There was one
shirt that she explains, “I had to get sewn into it because there were no buttons or anything and it
would take like 40 minutes.” She scrolls through her phone to show me some pictures of her and
other young women proudly wearing traditional clothing. I tell her that this seems like it was a
huge commitment, and it was something that she must have really loved and valued for her to
devote her Saturday mornings, and to engage in such physical trials—and that she should
emphasize why having this opportunity is so important for Khmer youth.
Later on, this point becomes especially clear when Soph emphasizes to the group again
that they have to connect the different aspects of the zine with the Invest in Youth campaign, and
why it’s especially important for youth to have access to spaces that connect with their culture.
Gabrielle chimes in that she found out her old Khmer dance studio is really struggling and was
going to get closed down so now they have to charge $10 a month for participants. Soph shakes
her head. “There shouldn’t be a price on our culture, so how can the city support our culturally
relevant programs?” Gabrielle points out: “It’s unfair because it’s Cambodia town and they’re
taking away Cambodian things!” Soph nods: “Like why did the city even designate it as a
historical landmark, to protect it for us or… what? And it’s like, the younger generation can’t
fully communicate in Khmer, but how we engage with the culture is wearing the clothing. We
can’t talk fluently but wearing it makes us feel more Khmer.” These narratives pushed back
against the invisibilization of Khmer culture, or framings that treated culture as devoid of
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politics. Instead, Soph sought to link cultural programs with the need for re-investment,
especially culturally specific forms. She also pushes back against authenticity arguments that
presume one type of cultural practice is more important than another.
SEAP thus practiced cultural framings of love and care for their community, to show how
communities treated as disposable are worthy of love and care. These practices resonated with
their broader framings to “show youth the love” by ensuring investment as a form of care for
youth. In doing so, they brought together two seemingly disparate areas of justice:
policymaking/budgets as a technocratic process, and the idea of affection, love, and care.
Responding to the problem that budget prioritizations demonstrated a lack of love, SEAP instead
pressed adults to care for and show love for youth through the ways that they voted, while also
presenting their own frames and creative ideas for how they showed each other the love.
Conclusion
The YPEJ executive director reflected on her initial skepticism of the youth-led RCS
campaign with the following statement: “Now five years later you all have proved me right, [in
education], different words like SEL [Social emotional learning], whole child, growth mindset,
restorative practices. It took the bold leadership of our students to push us as a state, as schools to
value this and make it meaningful.” She points out that YPEJ youth leaders were already at the
forefront of a broader shift in educational policy that is slowly and, in many cases, reluctantly
beginning to recognize the importance of students’ emotions, emotional well-being, and health.
Her initial skepticism is not just the ED’s, but the skepticism of educational institutions as a
whole. Although budgetary battles continue, YPEJ did successfully secure their first statewide
bill of $15 million in the state budget and $13.3 million for community engagement to “foster a
positive school climate,” including “positive behavior interventions and support, restorative
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justice, bullying prevention, social and emotional learning, trauma-informed practice, and
cultural competency.” This victory illustrates how they have been able to translate emotional
counterpublics into systemic change.
In RCS and Invest in Youth, both organizations asserted that care for youth of color
warrants material investments, development, and systems change. What young people need is
not just hollow, pretty words of kindness or individually benevolent heroes, but institutions that
invest in care. We must provide structural care to make collective and individual care a
possibility, and we must practice care in ways that explicitly aim at the systemic roots of
inequality (Patterson et al. 2008). They also brought discourses of love, care, and relationships to
matters that have not always acknowledged the importance of emotional well-being (for
example, educational equity and disinvestment). However in SEAP’s case, the imbalances of
political power also materialize to render even seemingly innocuous campaigns out of reach. For
both, battles remain in terms of translating stated intentions into actual funding. Nevertheless,
they demonstrated that love and care are not just about discourse or individual acts, but must be
reflected in budgetary commitments.
This chapter thus contributes to the scholarship on care work, especially in education.
Youth foreground care to redefine what success and thriving in education and in their life
trajectories look like—challenging prevailing foci on punishment, testing, and academic
outcomes that ignore emotional well-being. In their uplift of care, however, they bring to light
tensions in how we conceive of care for low-income youth of color. Whereas Black and Latinx
feminist scholarship has pointed to the importance of explicitly political, abolitionist, anti-racist
care on the part of educators, this may inadvertently demand too much of already overwhelmed,
underpaid, and exploited educators. This tension points to the need for structural elements of care
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that bridge the distinctions between interpersonal kindness and racial justice. Yet decision-
makers’ reluctance requires SEAP and other organizations to translate their practices of care into
building political power and asserting new frames of possibility.

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Chapter 7. Emotional Counterpublics amidst “Converging Pandemics”

I write this conclusion a few months into “converging pandemics” (Bennett et al. 2020),
the brunt of which has been borne by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and some slices of Asian
American communities. At a moment of such immense and barely fathomable crisis, when life is
quite literally at stake and when a once-in-a-century depression looms, it would seem as if
emotions and emotional well-being should be discarded. What is the point of emotional
counterpublics when we don’t even have enough protective masks for healthcare workers, when
Black and Brown folks continue to be murdered with impunity, when the simplest of solidarities
and empathies are being refused, when people are starving and being forced out onto the streets,
when incarcerated and houseless folks are being completely abandoned, when those who survive
are faced with monumental bills and a potential lifetime of disability? Aren’t emotions and
healing frivolous in the grand scheme of it?
My aim with this framework of emotional counterpublics has been to show how emotions
have been central to a more expansively imaginative, more just world by following the lead of
how youth’s emotional acumen and insistence on doing, acting, and feeling differently that will
pave the way. I have sought to show how emotional counterpublics weave together forms of
resistance that seem at odds with each other: the granular, deeply individually felt and the
structural; the material and the intangible; the vaguely felt and the rigorously documented.
Centering healing, emotional well-being, and unruly forms of resistance show how us how
emotional counterpublics are not just the frosting on the cake but a way for us to leverage and
harness the possibility of these horrific crises into a more just world. Here, I apply the framework
of emotional counterpublics to this current moment of converging pandemics.
226
First, emotional counterpublics help us understand the needs for structural change
moving forward. Demands for institutional change, such as the rallying cries of “care not cops”
(and similar slogans) that have gained mainstream traction, are nothing new, as I highlighted in
the previous chapter. Youth’s demands for schools and cities to prioritize care, nurturing, and
growth over punishment, incarceration, and surveillance have signaled structural dimensions of
emotional counterpublics that follow the lead of Black abolitionists, often women, who have
long been arguing in this vein even when they were labeled as “crazy” for daring to fight and
dream for something other than policing and incarceration as a solution to all social problems
(Davis 2003; Intercepted 2020; Kaba 2017). As SEAP and Youth Coalition’s Invest in Youth
campaign shows, Black and Brown youth have similarly been derided and dismissed for daring
to propose even a fraction of re-allocation from youth suppression towards their development—a
call previously described as politically impossible. Yet it was their insistence on translating the
emotional counterpublics that they already practice within organizations into systemic, structural,
and institutional change that creates the fissures that are quickly opening up into new
possibilities now. And groups like YPEJ would not have moved towards campaigns that centered
the importance of care and emotional-wellbeing if they hadn’t listened to the leadership of young
people, even when adults were skeptical. And although Pacific City’s Council remains wary of
calls to defund the police, there have been some small victories already, including the resignation
of a councilmember representing a white, affluent district from the Budget Oversight Committee
to open up a spot on the committee for a councilmember representing a district that is
predominantly low-income communities of color.
Emotional counterpublics have also been part of an alternative pathway to respond to the
interrelated crisis of the recession or great depression that we are already in the midst of. As is
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well documented, economic downturns are often met with austerity, scripted as inevitable budget
cuts to public services like education. The moment is no exception, as Governor Newsom’s
proposed revised budget initially made massive, drastic cuts to education. YPEJ and other youth
organizations were successfully able to mitigate the damage, including protecting LCFF and
demanding that we do not default to the same old templates of austerity. Furthermore, YPEJ,
SEAP, and other organizations are going full steam ahead with Schools and Communities First
ballot initiative, which seeks to close the corporate property tax loophole created by Prop 13 and
to assert that there is, indeed, plenty of wealth out there that has not “trickled down.” Again,
these efforts are a continuation of youth leaders’ efforts to budgetary justice depicted in the
previous chapter. Youth are continuing to push institutions and decision-makers to match their
statements of care with actual investments for doing so.
Second, this moment is also a clarion call for remaking education in the vein that YPEJ
and SEAP youth have long envisioned. It is painfully evident now that students are engaging in
distance learning from home, that their home and community conditions are not divorced from,
but deeply intertwined with educational outcomes. What YPEJ and SEAP students have long
been arguing—that schools need to account for their full humanity, and center rather than
disregard care and emotional well-being as ancillary—is especially true now. The importance of
this approach, of abolitionist teaching as a practice of care (Love 2019), inspired my approach to
teaching an undergraduate class that ended up being entirely online. Students shared their fear,
anxiety, and grief. They had been violently uprooted, forced to give up independence, some were
essential workers, others had family members and friends who had contracted and even died of
COVID-19. The tone deaf-ness of enacting the same “rigors” of academic expectations and
grading schema was blaring. I did my best to prioritize care, kindness, and generosity. The
228
students’ responses showed that our assumptions about what makes for a rigorous education
have never been sustainable, nor necessary. And it was YPEJ and SEAP youth leaders’
insistence on care as a foundation for their educational success that primarily informed how I
took this approach.
Relatedly: third, this moment reminds us of the importance of ethos of collective care for
each other and prefigurative practices as a guidepost for the future regardless of the
responsiveness of institutions in the long term. Mutual aid networks popped up at the very
beginning of the pandemic, echoing long legacies of marginalized communities’ care for each
other in the face of governmental apathy and abject neglect.YPEJ and SEAP, too, have been
engaged in care and meeting basic needs for their youth members, some of whom have become
the sole providers for their family based on their organizational stipends. Again, these practices
are not out of the blue but rather an extension of what I outline in Chapter 3. By embedding care
for each other in everyday practices of the organization, even in the micro-dimensions of how
youth communicate and share thoughts, organizations have always been practicing this
alternative possibility of care. This reminds us that caring for each other is far from trivial in
light of everything—in fact, it is a crucial dimension of transformation.
Fourth, by centering emotions and emotional well-being, youth have always been
pushing back against the respectability politics that threaten to rein in the possibilities of this
moment. Even as we see increasing call to “defund the police,” we have also seen immediate
backlash and dismissal of the slogan as too extreme or off-putting. In casual conversations, I
have heard others argue that this slogan is “poor marketing,” or should be renamed into
something more palatable--even though abolitionists argue that this does, indeed, exactly capture
what they are fighting for. And of course, much of the focus on protests has been on “rioting”
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and “looters,” sparking anew a debate over what is supposedly “acceptable” and “peaceful”
protest. By unapologetically embracing emotions and their need for emotional well-being as well
as bold solutions to the social ills that devastate them, young people have refused respectability
politics and the policing and gaslighting of their feelings. It is this refusal of respectability
politics and the paradigms of “acceptable change” that have gotten us to where we are now, and,
as youth leaders point out, to the place that we need to be that truly values human life.
Relatedly, this shows the importance of de-centering whiteness and whiteness-shaped
paradigms of respectability and “proper” routs of change. I have tried to show that emotional
counterpublics can encompass forms of resistance that are not just about emotions in the role of
inequality but rather in terms of justice. While whiteness and systems of injustice cannot
completely be extricated from analysis, youth and staff also try to practice with each other new
forms of resistance that are not defined by the limited parameters of whiteness. Today as
conversations about de-centering whiteness have justifiably been renewed, this reminds us that
the conversation and forms of action need not be mired in unimaginative nor unnecessarily
circumscribed realms.
Fourth, emotional counterpublics reminds us of the importance of doing, of action, and
not just symbolic and empty words and gestures. Rightfully so, organizers and others have been
lambasting elected officials who insist on performative gestures and statements even as their
commitment to white supremacy and oppression remain unperturbed and steadfast. Think, for
example, of the Democrats kneeling and wearing kente-cloth stoles even as they refuse to fight
for support for basic needs that everyday people need and divert funds to corporations.
Disjuncture between words and actions have become painfully clear. Throughout these chapters,
I have sought to show how emotional counterpublics also involve doing, and acting, in
230
relationship to each other and in relationship to oneself. Emotional counterpublics remind us that
we need to move beyond just performance and statement but to actual investment in care.
And finally, emotional counterpublics reminds us of the importance of centering healing
and supposedly individual, psychological well-being even throughout this process of fighting for
structural transformation. This moment throws into stark relief that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts
it, life is precious: we are fighting to make life precious and recognized as such in every way, via
policies, via budgets, via institutional priorities, via our interactions with each other, and how we
regard ourselves and our place in social change. Although the outcomes we hope for are clear in
terms of defunding police and more resources for supports that help youth and our communities
flourish, not just fight for crumbs, emotional counterpublics reminds us that this collective fight
cannot come at the expense of our own well-being. Emotional counterpublics forged, imagined,
and practiced by youth leaders in this study urge us wholeheartedly to value the messy, full,
unfiltered, humanity of youth and communities who have long only been afforded only a sliver
of acceptable human presentation. As we stand on the precipice of hopefully creating a world
anew, let their immensely generous ways of feeling and doing justice, unbound by restrictive
parameters, lead the way.

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Appendix: Positionality and Power in Research
In this appendix, I describe more of my relationship with YPEJ and SEAP, including my
role as a research associate for YPEJ, the process of building relationships, and how my
positionality informed my modes of participation.
My Role as a YPEJ Research Associate
I first encountered YPEJ during my first semester of this PhD program, in the fall of
2013. Upon my return to Los Angeles, I was interested in supporting a youth organizing group
that built coalitions across race, especially since much of my previous focus had been supporting
Asian American youth. I asked Dr. Terriquez to connect me to an organization, and to my luck,
the new executive director of YPEJ was meeting with her later on that week. I met the ED, who
later followed up with me to ask about my interests in supporting YPEJ. Shortly afterwards, I
connected with the ED’s sibling, a longtime organizer in YPEJ who now consulted part-time as a
strategy director. Therein began my role as a research associate for YPEJ, which continues until
this day.
Topics have spanned evaluations of voter engagement; student and parent engagement in
Local Control Accountability Plans; mental health needs of Asian Americans and other students
of color in San Francisco Unified School District; and experiences of students of color, English
Learner, and queer and gender non-conforming students in California schools. I collaborate with
Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American high school students and staff to design and
conduct multi-methods research strategically advancing their campaigns. I recently drafted a
policy brief that centers English Learner students’ voices, drawing on my interviews with youth
leaders and disaggregated analysis of school climate data. YPEJ will leverage the brief in
upcoming statewide policy opportunities to garner resources for social emotional learning and re-
cast narratives of English Learners from deficiency-ridden to agents of abundant possibility. I am
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also evaluating YPEJ’s Relationship Centered Schools campaign in partnership with Learning
Policy Institute by examining best practices for youth and adult collaboration to close
educational equity gaps.
Building Relationships and Trust: YPEJ
Starting in the spring of 2014, I also tried to connect and show up at YPEJ’s Pacific City
office as much as possible. It was a challenging time to build a relationship with the Pacific City
chapter because my point of initial contact was also a moment of massive turnover. Apparently
several of the staff in the local chapter had just departed before I got connected with YPEJ, and
an organizing director from one of the NorCal regions had come down to help them rebuild.
Especially during my first few years of connecting with YPEJ, there was some turnover with the
lead organizers and organizers, many of whom did not stay for more than 1-2 years. At the same
time, there were also staff who had moved up in the ranks, from previously being youth alum, to
organizers, to lead organizers, to organizing directors, who provided institutional memory and
expertise. From the spring of 2014, I made it a point to show up consistently to the YPEJ office
and do some of my research work there, and occasionally start sitting in on some of the
workshops and events. Sometimes I would accompany organizers and help them with outreach to
different schools. For the first few years, however, my on-the-ground presence at YPEJ was
inconsistent especially as I was completing coursework and finishing quals. However, I also
continued my relationship with YPEJ through research projects for their purposes. In the fall of
2016, I formally asked YPEJ if I could conduct participant observation and interviews with them
for my dissertation research. Given my long-relationship with them and the trust I had
established at least with staff and some of the youth leaders, they agreed.
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Building Relationships: SEAP
One thing that surprised me at the time, was the relative difficulty of gaining access to
SEAP. However, this made sense in hindsight. I had spent most of my first several years building
relationships with YPEJ, and during that time I did come into contact with SEAP—which was
actually the most present, and largest presence in most youth organizing spaces. When I tried to
formally ask for the possibility of conducting research, however, I was not able to get a response
for a while. I knew that suspicion was understandable and justifiable, so instead I reached out
about volunteering with one staff member whom I knew otherwise.
Positionality and Participation
I was well aware of my awkward positionality as an older, East Asian person who
embodies many class, racialized, and citizenship privileges. At the beginning, this made me a
most likely very awkward participant, especially as I wasn’t quite sure how to balance
contributing and supporting young people during workshops, while remaining as unobtrusive as
possible. I noticed that young people seemed wary of me at first, which was understandable
given our multiple forms of social distance. This became especially evident when I would
conduct interviews without any prior relationship. It was this realization that made it clear that
participant observation was important methodologically, both to understand the kinds of
processes that couldn’t easily be answered through interviews, but also to build relationships
through engagement and presence.
Throughout time, I learned to take up space in proactive and affirming ways that felt
more comfortable to me. In the beginning of workshops, I would sit in the circle and take notes
on my phone. At one point, one of the youth leaders, Skyler, pointed out that there was a
community agreement and then pointed at me, “Except May who’s using her phone!”
234
Recognizing the awkwardness then of me using my phone to take notes while students were not
supposed to be using them during community agreements, I then made it a point to ask students
if it was all right for me to use my phone to take notes. However, as much as possible, I would
use my notebook to jot down notes. Although it was not as good as capturing the poignant quotes
that students used, I did feel it was less obtrusive. I especially did this during sensitive and
vulnerable moments during healing circles. During healing circles, I would take notes very
sparsely so that students would not feel as if they were being surveilled, and would feel
comfortable revealing their unfiltered thoughts and experiences.
I used discretion in how, and to what extent, I participated in discussion. My primary
contribution was often in supporting youth during small group breakouts and pair shares. I would
always participate in the silly icebreakers and check-ins introducing myself. Oftentimes during
breakouts, young people might rotate through different sessions, or break out in small groups to
read a scenario, fabricate a skit, sculpture, create something, or watch a video and discuss. I
would stick with a small group and help facilitate discussions in these instances. Sometimes,
time permitting, I would also participate in large group discussions when we were doing go-
arounds. Generally, however, I would follow the cue of other adults and see whether, and how
much they participated, especially given limited time. The priority was always to center and
make sure that young people’s voices and opinions were given precedence. So, it was a delicate
balance to both prioritize that philosophy and yet to also voice my opinion.
One particular organizer was interested in giving me opportunities to facilitate
workshops, so during her tenure, I designed and facilitated a few workshops. One of them was a
leadership development workshops for the interns. Another took place over the summer, where I
facilitated two workshops and economic justice and queer of color justice. The latter was
235
apparently a hit with the youth, who told the ED that this was their favorite workshop of the
summer program. Later on, when I had a campus visit at SF State, I also did a practice teaching
demo with some of the students and alum, who gave me honest and encouraging feedback.
Throughout my time, I was supportive of, and affirming of young people, as much as possible.
For example, I would listen to, and give students feedback when they developed or practiced
speeches. After going out and supporting students with canvassing, I would make it a point to
report back to the group on the ways that students had persuaded others. Although I generally
waited for and encouraged students to be the ones to report back from large groups, sometimes I
would step in and reflect back some of the points that students made.
My general approach was to be myself, including recognizing my fundamental
uncoolness and distance from students. I made it a point to come to workshops early so that I
could chat with students beforehand and during breaks and ask them about their day, how they
were doing, and just listen to them. That was also part of my rationale for working in the YPEJ
office more generally; it provided me with more informal opportunities to chat with and get to
know students. Occasionally Asian American identity, or questions about Asian Americans,
would come up in YPEJ. Usually I was one of only 2 or three other Asian Americans in the
space, and for the most part, I would try to use it to express solidarity and a recognition of my
relative privilege as an East Asian. One time, for example, I was facilitating a small group with
Leah, who is Filipinx, and three Latinx students (Chicanx, and Salvadareña/ Guatamelan). The
Latinx students were speaking about low expectations that teachers impose on them, and Leah
interjects with the issue that Asian Americans are deemed the “model minority” and expected to
be smart. Leah’s friend listens on with interest and fascination, in part because Asian Americans
are not often discussed in YPEJ spaces. I suggest gently that this is a major problem but it’s not
236
necessarily the same as being deemed the opposite. Leah and I also later have conversations
because she has heard that affirmative action discriminates against Asian Americans, a viewpoint
that surprises me given her background in YPEJ. This is one example of how I tried to reflect on
relative racialization of Asian Americans, at least East Asians, in critical ways. I also openly
shared my queer identity with students, which I felt was especially important because many
students identified as pansexual, bisexual, queer, and/or questioning. For some students, this was
a point of pain especially in relationship to their family. So as much as possible, I would share
with them my own queer identity, talk openly about having a partner, and discuss with them my
own journey and vulnerabilities around being queer.

237
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Emotions are an engine of racial and intersectional inequality -- whether the emotions of Black and Brown youth are derided, or emotions of white decision-makers upheld as authoritative fact. And yet, social science theories of social movements have shied away from investigating how emotions matter in racialized resistance. This study puts forth a framework of "emotional counterpublics." Emotional counterpublics are spaces where youth harness emotions to redefine and expansively enact social change: such as expansively re-imagining strategies for racial and educational equity and healing wounds from structurally induced trauma. I argue that youth show how emotions are not just instrumental, but central to social, paradigmatic transformation. This study expands sociological understandings of dilemmas and possibilities for rectifying racialized intersectional inequalities and to move beyond the social movements' literature inclination to focus on structural change aimed solely at the state.

Emotional Counterpublics is based on three years of critical feminist, community-engaged ethnography in two Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian American youth-led, racial justice organizations in a diverse city in California. Groups engage in leadership development; political education; policy change campaigns around racial, economic, gender, and education justice; and holistic youth development. I show how groups harness youth's emotional and affective knowledge as "epistemic resources" indicting the abject failure of educational and other institutions in their lives. Doing so is especially critical because youth are often met with emotional suppression in other spaces.

Groups practice three main dimensions of emotional counterpublics that knit together the micro and the macro by transforming the self, interpersonal dynamics, and engaging in structural change. First, emotional counterpublics encourage youth to recuperate a damaged self by addressing what I call "paradoxes of the personal and political." Youth activists can become politically empowered and recuperate erased selves, but fighting for systemic change can also exacerbate stresses of everyday survival amidst structural violence. Group strategies to manage these dilemmas, such as self-care and reclaiming time for rest, form new movement cultures oriented towards holistic well-being instead of working to exhaustion in the name of justice. Second, youth and staff forge emotional prefigurative norms of interpersonal dynamics that embody care and support. I highlight how these norms can be categorized as collective emotionalities or democratically created agreements on how to be together, spaces for sharing unfiltered thoughts, and affirmative practices that encourage affective capital. Third, I show how these practices translate into systemic and institutional transformation that redefine robust schools and cities. Groups validate youth's emotions (elsewhere dismissed or even punished) as critical knowledge about trauma engendered by carceral landscapes and anemic city and school budgets. They mobilize this emotional knowledge to assess the "success" of institutions in alternative ways (e.g. beyond test scores) and to propose policies and material investments that instead center youth's well-being.

I show how groups seek to heal racialized, gendered, classed trauma -- often neglected both in previous scholarship and by movements themselves. Youth show that emotions are central to forging social relations not wholly defined by injustice. Embracing youth's emotional knowledge, groups value their complex humanity and create new epistemic paradigms. That is, they refuse the respectability politics that shun emotions as an irrational product of their race, class, age, and gender. I argue that these emotional counterpublics constitute a paradigm shift unsettling our most deeply held assumptions about what is needed for social change, particularly racial justice.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Lin, May Hong-Ying (author)

Core Title Emotional counterpublics: the feeling of racial justice

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Degree Conferral Date 2020-12

Publication Date 09/26/2024

Defense Date 07/30/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag critical race,educational justice,emotions,gender justice,health,intersectionality,OAI-PMH Harvest,racial justice,resistance,social movements,youth organizing

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Pastor, Manuel (committee chair), Terriquez, Veronica (committee chair), Junn, Jane (committee member), Saito, Leland (committee member)

Creator Email may.h.lin@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) http://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-342839

Unique identifier UC11666482

Legacy Identifier etd-LinMayHong-9007

Dmrecord 380120

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lin, May Hong-Ying

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu