Uncivil Youth by Soo Ah Kwon
Uncivil Youth by Soo Ah Kwon
YOUTH
Race, Activism, and
Affirmative Governmentality
Soo Ah Kwon
Soo Ah Kwon
UNCIVIL
YOUTH
Race, Activism, and
Affirmative Governmentality
≤≠∞≥
© ≤≠∞≥ D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
CHAPTER ∞
Civilizing Youth against Delinquency 27
CHAPTER ≤
Youth Organizing and
the Nonprofitization of Activism 45
CHAPTER ≥
Organizing against Youth Criminalization 73
CHAPTER ∂
Confronting the State 95
Conclusion 121
Notes 131
References 149
Index 165
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
read of my work have critically shaped its outcome. Special thanks to Fiona
for suggesting the title for this book. I extend appreciation to Yen Le
Espiritu and Sunaina Maira for the sage feedback they provided on an early
draft of this manuscript. I am also grateful to my anonymous manuscript
readers at Duke University Press and their rigorous and thoughtful engage-
ment with my work, from which I benefited immensely. Thanks also to Fay
Hodza, Vincent Pham, Melissa Pognon, and Teresa Ramos for their re-
search assistance.
Heartfelt thanks for the support and the good cheer extended by Lisa
Marie Cacho, David Coyoca, Aaron Ebata, Augusto Espiritu, Stephen
Hocker, Moon-Kie Jung, Susan Koshy, Esther Lee, Christy Lleras, Adrienne
Lo, Mireya Loza, Martin Manalansan IV, Brent McBride, Ray McDermott,
Isabel Molina, Ramona Oswald, Naomi Paik, Yoon Pak, Marcela Ra√aelli,
Junaid Rana, Maria Rund, Constance Shapiro, Siobhan Somerville, Ian
Sprandel, Elizabeth Sweet, Yutian Wong, and Caroline Yang during the
completion of this book. Much gratitude also to all the faculty and sta√
members in the Department of Asian American studies and the Depart-
ment of Human and Community Development at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, who have individually and collectively provided
me with so much support. I am grateful to have the benefits of the rich
intellectual and social community they sustain.
I am delighted to have found a home for this book at Duke University
Press and appreciate the people there who made the publication process
a smooth one: Courtney Berger, Christine Choi, Katherine Courtland,
Jeanne Ferris, Liz Smith, Cherie Westmoreland, and Ken Wissoker. Thanks
to Ken for taking the time to patiently hear my project out. Many thanks to
Courtney, an amazing editor, for shepherding my book from the beginning
to the very end with unwavering enthusiasm. Grants from the Center for
Democracy in a Multiracial Society Fellowship and the Campus Research
Board’s Humanities Time Release at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign gave me time o√ from teaching to concentrate on writing. I
discuss the case of young people’s activism against juvenile hall expansion
in chapter 3 in an essay, ‘‘Youth of Color Organizing for Juvenile Justice,’’
in Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change, edited by
Shawn Ginwright, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2006), 215–28. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as
‘‘Deporting Cambodian Refugees: Youth Activism, State Reform, and Im-
perial Statecraft,’’ in positions 20, no. 3 (2012): 737–62.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was against local anti-
immigration and racist voter initiatives of this time, but activists also op-
posed larger economic conditions resulting from neoliberal policies.Ω Fur-
thermore, young people’s activism challenged increased state militariza-
tion following the launch of the war on terror and the US invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The US
government response to the attacks incited a strong antiwar movement in
the Bay Area and across the country, and aypal youth marched against the
invasions along with a hundred thousand other protestors.
The initiative most directly a√ecting young people, and what many of the
youth and adult organizers I worked with identified as the mobilizing im-
petus among youth of color in California, was Proposition 21, the Gang Vio-
lence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act. This proposition sought more
severe penalties for gang-related crimes, proposed that children as young as
fourteen be subject to trial as adults, and sought to streamline such trials.
Proposition 21 was passed by voters in 2000, but the constitutionality of the
measure was contested in the courts. Despite its passage, the legislation was
met with much resistance by youth of color, especially in Northern Califor-
nia. For instance, the measure did not pass in Alameda (where Oakland is
located) and San Francisco Counties. Although proponents of Proposition
21 justified their arguments for the legislation with mainstream media rep-
resentations of superviolent youth of color, sometimes referred to as ‘‘super-
predators,’’ who were in need of punishment and control, these very young
people pushed back against the portrayal of themselves as delinquents and
troublemakers.∞≠ A positive and deliberately political youth and youth of
color identity linked to resistance and activism emerged to counter this
trend in criminalization, emphasizing racial identity and opposition to
youth criminalization as central concepts in the youth organizing move-
ment. The phrase ‘‘youth of color’’ stems from organizing among ‘‘people of
color’’ of the Third World movements that rallied around familiar experi-
ences of racism and oppression. The Bay Area—and Oakland in particular,
as the birthplace of the black power movement—has a long history of orga-
nized action against state power. Youth of color organizing thus has intimate
ties to these social movements among traditionally marginalized groups,
and it shares in a legacy of student activism. However, a distinguishing
feature of this youth organizing movement is the participation in it by a
large number of high school–aged youth.∞∞
4 INTRODUCTION
and the nonprofit organizations and foundations that support it. Drawing
on Michel Foucault’s observations about modern democratic governance
and its imperative of self-government and self-care, I argue that our politi-
cal projects must seriously contend with those relations of power that rule
through subjectivity and subjection, a≈rmation and criminalization.∞≥ Fo-
cusing on the youth of color organizing movement and the role of non-
profit organizations that enable, but also direct, this upsurge in young
people’s activism, I take a closer look at what I call an a≈rmative govern-
mentality, through which youth organizing operates as a strategy for em-
powering youth through their voluntary participation in nonprofit organi-
zations.
I take the position that although social justice–oriented nonprofit organi-
zations and the foundations that support them may be not for profit, they
are nevertheless subject to capitalism’s logics and the neoliberal state’s art of
governance, just as they may be engaged in practices of opposition. The
ostensible independence of civil society and the subsequent idealized view
of political organizing as occurring apart from the state rely on particular
histories of the development and depoliticization of oppositional move-
ments. The expansion of nonprofits in the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury is tied to the steady incorporation and professionalization of activism,
evidenced in the legal restrictions of political activities allowed under non-
profit status along with the state’s post–civil rights a≈rmation and trans-
formation of race and racial identities into categories of resource admin-
istration. Meanwhile trends of social disinvestment and corporatization
overburden public nonprofits that o√er social services, while increasingly
situating these organizations as important sites of care for marginalized
groups. I examine the nonprofitization of activism and the constitution of
nonprofits as a technology of neoliberal governance, processes that have
severely limited the potential of oppositional political activism in the con-
temporary moment. It is these collusions and complicities between state
and civil society, specifically youth activist nonprofit organizations, that
together mediate and manage youth as political actors and democratic sub-
jects that inform the central inquiry of this book.
The phrase ‘‘uncivil youth’’ underscores my concerns with youth of color
organizing, which I assert is embedded in neoliberalism’s structures of
governance. I interrogate the relations of power that both enable and limit
young people, particularly racial minority youth, as political actors and
6 INTRODUCTION
the state’s care and control. Imagined as crucial to a nation’s future, young
people are viewed as investments in need of guidance. But their care is also
figured in conceptions of them as transitional subjects positioned some-
where between child and adult, requiring particularized governance (an-
chored in discourses of their physical and social immaturity) and punish-
ment (as perpetrators of crime and loose sexual behavior). Disturbingly,
youth of color are not often imagined as future agents of democracy, but as
objects already under suspicion and state surveillance and regulation.
‘‘Youth’’ itself frequently suggests negative connotations. Jean and John
Comaro√ write: ‘‘In much of the late-twentieth-century English-speaking
world, young white persons are teenagers, their black counterparts are
youth, adolescents with attitude. And most often, if not always, male.’’∞∑
Despite a steady overall decrease in youth crime since 1980, youth of color
are all too often targets of state crime prevention measures, as exemplified
by the institution of antigang task forces in California’s Street Terrorism
Enforcement and Prevention Act of 1988 and Proposition 21 in 2000. Add
to this the imposition of curfews, assignment of police o≈cers to patrol
schools, mass arrests for petty crimes such as loitering, heightened penal-
ties for drug tra≈cking, and the trying of juvenile o√enders as adults.
Nationally, minority youth are more likely than white youth to be arrested,
detained, referred, and tried in juvenile courts—and they are more likely to
receive harsher punishments, including detention in adult state prisons.∞∏
African Americans, American Indians, Latino/as, and a growing number
of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up the majority of young
people locked up in juvenile hall. Since 1980 female incarceration rates have
steadily doubled every seven to eight years, and one-third of the juveniles
arrested in 2003 were young women.∞π Female youth, however, are more
likely than their male counterparts to be arrested for status o√enses—
o√enses committed only by juveniles—and suspected immoral sexual con-
duct (including running away, prostitution, and what is known as incorri-
gibility).∞∫ Despite this spike in female incarceration, youth crime and
delinquency is coded as masculine—more precisely, the young delinquent
is seen as a male who is also a racial minority. This not only reflects the
traditional management of young men for so-called delinquent, antisocial
acts but also of young women for suspected acts of sexual immorality.
These youth (often poor, minority, and urban) are constructed and
understood as an ‘‘at-risk’’ population in need of intervention, whether
8 INTRODUCTION
that takes the form of care or punishment. Yet in the current moment,
certain populations, such as the homeless and ‘‘dangerous’’ youth, are no
longer deemed ‘‘at-risk.’’ Rather, they are considered inevitable risks in
themselves, and their physical banishment or punishment is thus legiti-
mated by the state before they even engage in delinquent behavior or
commit a crime.∞Ω These surplus subjects lie ‘‘outside of risk’’ and therefore
beyond the normalizing technologies of reform and programs of a neo-
liberal state.≤≠ Most often, as Lisa Marie Cacho explains, African American
and Latino/a youth serve as markers of social deviancy and are already
marked as devalued and unworthy subjects of care.≤∞ The youth of color I
worked with, and countless other participants in groups sponsored by
youth organizing nonprofits, were situated at this slippery intersection.
They were members of an ‘‘at-risk’’ population who might yet be enabled
to become entrepreneurial self-empowered subjects, but they also teetered
close to those ‘‘outside of risk.’’ Thus, the neoliberal state and its tech-
nologies of a≈rmation and punishment are closely involved in the lives of
youth of color. The state is both caring and ruthless in its approach to ‘‘at-
risk’’ youth of color. In other words, powers that promote youth empower-
ment are not separate from those of youth criminalization.
Since the nineteenth century, civil society and its institutions have tar-
geted marginalized youth as a special category of intervention through after-
school, community-based programs, which have been posed as a preventive
solution to young people’s probable delinquency and sexual immorality. In
a historical study of after-school youth programs since the Progressive Era,
Robert Halpern notes: ‘‘From the outset, after-school proponents linked
their work to prevention of problems, especially crime and delinquency.’’≤≤
Chapter 1 situates contemporary youth of color organizing as the latest
youth intervention strategy arising from this tradition, aimed at transform-
ing poor, immigrant, and minority youth to become better democratic sub-
jects. I examine two cornerstones of youth services—after-school programs
and the juvenile justice system—to make my argument about those com-
mensurate forms of power that produce young people through subjectivity
and subjection. Participation in wholesome community-based programs
continues to be o√ered today with this implicit, if not explicit, purpose: as
this story goes, involvement in such programs will steer poor youth of color
onto an alternative path of responsible citizenship, away from those dangers
(drugs, gangs, prison, sexual disease, and pregnancy) assumed to otherwise
INTRODUCTION 9
loom close at hand for these youth. Too often such prevention measures are
o√ered as ways to control male criminality and female sexuality, through
which youth of color are already marked as deviant. For young people of
color construed as a vulnerable but also threatening ‘‘at-risk’’ population,
becoming a good citizen-subject necessitates voluntarily and willingly
(and, I might add, enthusiastically) participating in supervised programs
designed to empower them. Failure to participate may be used to justify
state interventions and legitimate young people’s criminalization and
punishment.
Nonprofit youth organizations charged with improving the life chances
of ‘‘at-risk’’ youth of color are directly linked to the modern state and the
reconfiguration of civil society as a technology of neoliberal citizenship.
Foucault argues that civil society, while assumed to be a domain separate
from the state, is very much a ‘‘concept of governmental technology’’ that
mediates the development of self-governing entrepreneurial subjects in a
capitalist state.≤≥ I contend that nonprofit organizations are called upon to
regulate as well as to empower ‘‘at-risk’’ young people to exercise respon-
sibility and self-government in what I call an a≈rmative governmentality.
My concept of a≈rmative governmentality is not so much a departure from
Foucault as it is an elaboration on his ideas. Governmentality for Foucault
describes a system of liberal governance. Governmentality names the rela-
tionships and practices of power through which citizens and populations
are subject to control and exercise that control on themselves.≤∂ Foucault
notes that the key to liberalism is the state’s restrained exercise of police
power and the practice of the art of government of ‘‘self-limitation.’’≤∑ Gov-
ernance in a liberal democracy is not an exercise of absolute state power
(although it is not bereft of that power), and therefore neither are the prac-
tices that make up acts of citizenship. In other words, the relations of power
within democratic liberal governance are as much about enabling its sub-
jects to govern themselves—and enlisting their willing participation in the
process.≤∏
Neoliberalism increases this shift in the art of government to render the
individual as governmentalizable in a new fashion, one that is steeped in
economic rationales. Contrary to liberal political thought that categorizes
market forces as separate from the state, the neoliberal state, in Foucault’s
view, is mutually constitutive of the economy. It is ‘‘a state under the super-
vision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state.’’≤π Impor-
10 INTRODUCTION
ects. This chapter presents the ever more urgent need for communities of
color to critique and rethink strategies and points of a≈liations to build
multiracial coalitions for political action. Both the establishment of race as
a technology for the management of minoritized populations and the
limitations of identity politics for creating coalitional possibilities require
our close attention.
Furthermore, the devolution of the mid-twentieth century’s moderate
expansion of the welfare state increased the presence of nonprofit organi-
zations to fill the void left by social services and programs of care once
under the state’s direction. But the state has not ceded all control of its
services. Rather, it has embarked on a new relationship with the private
sector by contracting social services out to nonprofit organizations. By the
1990s, government funds made up half, if not more, of the funding sources
of nonprofit organizations that were traditionally financed by the private
sector.∑∞ This contracting regime stresses the mutual dependence, not the
autonomy, of state and civil society. Paralleling this transformation is the
increasingly expansive role of private charity and philanthropic founda-
tions in supporting nonprofit organizations.
Just as civil society is linked to the political state, it is also entrenched in
its economic principles. In other words, nonprofits and their funders also
follow capitalist logics. This means that, despite their not-for-profit status,
the nonprofit sector and the philanthropic foundations in it are implicated
in the expansion and development of capitalism and in mediating neo-
liberal governance both domestically and internationally. Uncivil Youth is
in dialogue with a growing body of scholarship that carefully examines the
role of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations and their funders in
mediating neoliberal governance and relationships of power.∑≤ I pay close
attention to the challenges faced by youth organizers running nonprofits,
who must write grants, possess business management skills, and be ac-
countable to funders that emphasize market rationalities and measurable
outcomes that often clash with social justice activists’ sensibilities. One
issue that aypal, like other youth organizing groups, struggled with was
the need to address both individual youth development skills of self-esteem
and self-confidence—along with the young people’s educational improve-
ment and leadership skills—and social justice outcomes, often referred to
as the ‘‘youth development–youth organizing divide.’’∑≥ Also straining an
overwhelming number of youth organizing nonprofits that depend on
16 INTRODUCTION
ing public resources and services have translated good citizenship and
politics into practices of personal choice, consumption, charity, and volun-
teer service. Emphasis on citizenship and politics has shifted from the
realm of social action (protest gatherings and meetings, contested public
debates) to personal acts (voting, signing a petition, volunteering). By
stressing collective action, youth organizing pushes against this individu-
alizing focus, but it is not free from the logics of neoliberal governance of
self-empowerment and community governance.
Youth organizing as social movement is indeed restrained by these rela-
tionships of power, but that does not mean that young people are not
involved in political practices of opposition. Nor should civil society be
overlooked as an important terrain of political struggle. Hall insightfully
notes that Gramsci’s expansive understanding of the state and its ties to civil
society opens up new arenas and institutions in which to wage political
struggle.∑∂ As I show in this book, the e√ects of neoliberal power are visible
and palpable, and so are young people’s challenges to these state e√orts.
However, at times this power is not easily identifiable or felt as oppressive.
Instead, it can govern through a≈rmation and enlisting one’s willing par-
ticipation. It is in these occurrences and ruptures of power and resistance
that I situate young people’s activism and youth of color organizing as a
vehicle for social change.
Politics, like power, is not static and uniform, but dynamic, multiple, and
situated. Politics, I believe, includes a wide constellation of mediated social
practices and social relationships that may reinforce and/or subvert rela-
tions of power. These practices of politics are individual and collective, as
well as multifarious. The political practices of the young people I worked
with included formal and informal practices of citizenship. The informal
practices included the di√erent forms of flexible citizenship that Sunaina
Maira identified in her work on Muslim youth; these were not necessarily
dissenting practices, but they were based on everyday practices of leisure,
work, and popular culture.∑∑ Yet the political practices of the young people
I examine in this book are weighted toward the collective and explicit
expressions of oppositional politics. As participants in a youth activist
organization with a clearly stated mission to promote social justice, aypal
members, like their peers in similar youth organizing nonprofits, engaged
in an analysis of social inequalities and oppositional collective action that
challenged power (that of targeted individuals or of institutions). These
18 INTRODUCTION
e√orts did result in concrete social change outcomes, such as when they
stopped expansion of juvenile hall. But they were not always successful, as
evidenced by the young people’s failed attempts to repeal a federal immi-
gration policy.
These political practices did not materialize solely as deeds; they were also
expressed as sharp political critiques and analyses of state power and its
policies. In chapters 3 and 4, I turn to the details and nuances made possible
by ethnographic participant observations to illuminate how young people
negotiated and responded to neoliberalism’s powers, and how their activism
points to creative and alternative possibilities for political work. Chapter 3
tells the story of how young people successfully fought against youth incar-
ceration and directly challenged the state, which they identified as the source
of their criminalization. Mobilizing under a collective political youth of
color identity, they transformed youth crime from a problem of super-
predatory ‘‘at-risk’’ youth of color (assumed to be male) into a social prob-
lem of state incarceration and criminalization. Youth of color redefined
their involvement in nonprofit organizations as going beyond the mere
practice of participating in programs to reduce their potential to commit
crimes and delinquent acts by confronting the very powers that constructed
and punished them as such ‘‘risky’’ subjects. I describe aypal youth learn-
ing about and questioning the deportation of Cambodian refugees under
increased immigration controls in the US war on terror after September 11
in chapter 4. As part of their antideportation campaign, young people en-
gaged in a number of practices that constitute the core of democratic par-
ticipation, such as engaging with their congressional representative and
holding public meetings and protests. But this process also made evident to
aypal youth, especially because they were too young to vote, the limits of
what constituted conventional political engagement in a representative de-
mocracy. Nonetheless, in their e√orts to stop these deportations, young
people challenged the discourses and practices of democratic citizenship
and state reform to discipline the state’s immigrant population and privatize
‘‘good citizenship’’ as an exercise of personal responsibility. They developed
a sophisticated critique not only of neoliberal state structures for political
participation, but also of the reach of US imperialism at home and abroad.
In this regard, young people’s activism challenges and expands studies of
youth political practices. First, the spirited and visible activism of the
aypal members and others in the youth of color organizing movement
INTRODUCTION 19
volunteer and ethnographer of aypal over the course of three and a half
years in the early 2000s. My introduction to the group came in fall 2000,
when I worked on a community project with two of its sta√ members. In
subsequent months I advocated for equitable educational policies and ad-
dressing the programming needs for Asian and Pacific Islander students
and parents in Oakland. I learned more about aypal and its youth orga-
nizing activities, and I volunteered my services. My o√er led to an intro-
duction to and a series of conversations with the rest of the aypal sta√,
after which I quickly became integrated into the everyday practices and
functioning of the group. Both the young people and adults came to accept
and depend on me as a sta√ member and participant. I was introduced to
others outside of aypal by my o≈cial title, ‘‘super volunteer.’’
I approached the field by attending to youth cultural production and the
implications of young people’s individual agency and collective forms of
resistance.∏∑ In the course of this investigation, I also sought to grasp those
articulations of power that contained young people’s activism, which led
me to interrogate the a≈rmative modes of governance and practices that
may shape them as subjects, often without their awareness or consent.
Although I rely first and foremost on my ethnography of and active in-
volvement in aypal to tell this story, this book is not a traditional eth-
nography, nor does it rely solely on ethnographic methods.∏∏ Rather I draw
on interdisciplinary methodologies to make my theoretical and political
critique. In addition to my fieldwork, I utilize reports by youth practi-
tioners (often produced in conjunction with private philanthropic founda-
tions, policymakers, and scholars), organizational websites, and historical
sources. I employ close readings of these sources and integrate the institu-
tional histories of youth programs and policies to analyze the intersections
of empowerment and criminalization of youth of color, the project of
youth organizing, its nonprofit structures, and its attachments to neo-
liberal governmentality. In making use of these multiple forms of evidence,
my work involves interdisciplinary methods found in cultural studies and
social sciences. This methodological approach describes a humanistic so-
cial science or, to borrow from Cli√ord Geertz, a thick description that is
an interpretive theory of culture.∏π
With this in mind, I nonetheless wish to elaborate on aypal and the
time I spent with the group in order to situate this study in the larger
context of Oakland and its Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Unlike
22 INTRODUCTION
nizing structure was to keep aypal rooted in specific ethnic groups to have
a community base from which to build youth leadership and activism.∏Ω
This arrangement is what made sense for the group during the time I
worked with it. (The organizing structure of aypal is di√erent today than
it was in the early 2000s.) In this book, I situate aypal within the larger
context of the nonprofit institutionalization of activism and depoliticiza-
tion of race. Similar to other nonprofit organizations that serve Asian and
Pacific Islander populations, aypal and its a≈liate organizations fulfill
multiple purposes, including (but not limited to) providing direct services,
mobilizing its members for political action in response to state-sponsored
disparities, and facilitating the cultural incorporation and assimilation of
its participants into the US body politic.π≠
The six ethnic nonprofit organizations that made up aypal also re-
flected the larger community profile of Asian and Pacific Islanders, which
was remarkably di√erent in the early 2000s than in the late 1960s. The 1965
Immigration and Nationality Act, passed in a period of civil rights legisla-
tion, lifted a century’s worth of restrictive exclusion laws and quotas for
immigration from Asian countries, allowing new immigrants to enter the
United States who diversified the race, class, and gender composition of the
existing Asian American population. Paul Ong and John Liu note: ‘‘After
1965, Asia became a major source of immigration . . . constituting less than
4 percent of total U.S. immigration between 1921 and 1960 and 42 percent
from 1981 to 1989.’’π∞ The influx of these new immigrants transformed the
Asian American community from a largely native-born population to a
chiefly foreign-born one. Moreover, the family reunification preferences of
the 1965 law changed what had been primarily ‘‘bachelor societies,’’ evening
out their gender imbalances. The law’s employment preferences selectively
recruited highly educated experts such as engineers, scientists, doctors, and
nurses, so that the population shifted to heavily represent middle-class
professionals. The US involvement in the wars in Southeast Asia resulted in
the arrival of political refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, groups
that were not represented in significant numbers until the late 1970s.
Oakland absorbed all these changes. The city in the 1970s was home to
waves of new Asian immigrants and refugees from Cambodia, China,
Hong Kong, Korea, Laos, Taiwan, and Vietnam, as well as ethnic Chinese
displaced from Southeast Asia.π≤ According to the 2000 US Census, the
24 INTRODUCTION
Introduction
1. In this book I use ‘‘Asian and Pacific Islander’’ when referring to ethnographic
accounts of aypal, as this is how the members of the collaborative referred to the
diverse racial groups represented. I use ‘‘Asian American’’ when I refer to the
scholarship and field of Asian American studies. This usage recognizes the social
constructions of racial categories and identifications as well as the competing and
shifting meanings of race (see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation). For a discus-
sion of shifting racial categories of Pacific Islanders, see also Diaz, ‘‘To ‘P’ or Not to
‘P’ ’’; Kauanui, ‘‘Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific Question’ ’’; Toribo, ‘‘The
Problematics of History.’’
2. Weiss, Youth Rising, 10.
3. A national survey of youth organizing groups found that 80 percent of these
organizations had young people who came from low-income households, and
white youth represented only 11 percent of young people in the groups surveyed
(ibid., 72–73).
4. Californians for Justice, Still Separate, Still Unequal.
5. Pintado-Vertner, The West Coast Story.
6. Kwon, ‘‘Moving from Complaints to Action.’’
7. D. Edwards, Johnson, and McGillicuddy, An Emerging Model for Working with
Youth.
8. HoSang, Traditions and Innovations Youth Organizing in the Southwest.
9. For an account of this organizing in California and beyond, see Brodkin,
Making Democracy Matter ; H. Gordon, We Fight to Win; HoSang, Traditions and
Innovations and Youth and Community Organizing in the Southwest ; Ishihara, Ur-
ban Transformations; Pintado-Vertner, The West Coast Story; Tait, Poor Workers’
Unions.
10. The term ‘‘super-predator’’ comes from John DiIulio’s article ‘‘The Coming
of the Super-Predators,’’ Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995, 23.
11. Most of the literature on student activism focuses on college students, whose
activism holds certain privileges and is often romanticized as a passing period of
rebellion. See Altbach, ‘‘Perspectives on Student Political Activism’’ and ‘‘Students
and Politics’’; Levitt, Children of Privilege.
12. Elizabeth Martinez, ‘‘The New Youth Movement in California,’’ ZMagazine,
March 2000, http://www.zcommunications.org/the-new-youth-movement-in-cal
ifornia-by-elizabeth-martinez, accessed August 30, 2002.
132 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
O’Neill, The Third America; Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American. In this
manner, my project deviates from studies of social movements and their particular
attention to the role of organizations, resources, and interests as mechanisms for
mobilizing political actions (Ganz, ‘‘Resources and Resourcefulness’’; McAdam,
Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency; Morris, Origins of the
Civil Rights Movement ).
53. Tang and Goldberg, The Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing’s Roots
Initiative Toolkit, 13.
54. S. Hall, ‘‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.’’
55. Maira, Missing.
56. Gordon, We Fight to Win, 8.
57. On formal modes of youth politics, see S. Bennett, ‘‘Why Young Americans
Hate Politics’’; Jennings and Niemi, The Political Character of Adolescence; Mann,
‘‘What the Survey of American College Freshmen Tells Us about Their Interest in
Politics and Political Science.’’
58. Flanagan, ‘‘Volunteerism, Leadership, Political Socialization, and Civic En-
gagement’’; Flanagan and Faison, ‘‘Youth Civic Development’’; Kirshner, ‘‘Power in
Numbers’’; Levine and Youniss, Youth Civic Engagement ; Watts and Flanagan,
‘‘Pushing the Envelope on Youth Civic Engagement’’; Watts and Guessous, ‘‘Socio-
political Development’’; Youniss et al., ‘‘Youth Civic Engagement in the Twenty-
First Century.’’
59. Cammarota and Fine, Revolutionizing Education; Delgado and Staples,
Youth-Led Community Organizing; D. Edwards, Johnson, and McGillicuddy, An
Emerging Model for Working with Youth; Ginwright, Youth Organizing; Ginwright
and James, ‘‘From Assets to Agents of Change’’; Ginwright, Noguera, and Cam-
marota, Beyond Resistance!; HoSang, Youth and Community Organizing; Pintado-
Vertner, The West Coast Story; Shah, Building Transformative Youth Leadership.
60. D. Edwards, Johnson, and McGillicuddy, An Emerging Model for Working
with Youth; Eccles and Appleton-Gootman, Community Programs to Promote Youth
Development ; Ginwright, Youth Organizing; Irby, Ferber, and Pittman, Youth Ac-
tion; Jarrett, Sullivan, and Wilkens, ‘‘Developing Social Capital through Participa-
tion in Organized Youth Programs’’; Kwon, ‘‘Moving from Complaints to Action’’;
R. Larson and Hansen, ‘‘The Development of Strategic Thinking’’; Larson et al.,
‘‘Organized Youth Activities as Contexts for Positive Development’’; McLaughlin,
Irby, and Langman, Urban Sanctuaries; Pittman and Wright, Bridging the Gap.
61. Volunteerism first appeared in the colonial era and expanded during the
Progressive Era, the two world wars, and the 1960s civil rights and peace move-
ments. Thereafter it declined, especially among college students in the 1980s. Pro-
grams to promote youth service included Youth Service America, Campus Out-
reach Opportunity League, and the AmeriCorps programs (Ellis and Noyes, By the
People; Hodgkinson, ‘‘Individual Giving and Volunteering’’).
62. Abelmann, The Intimate University; Espiritu, Home Bound; Kibria, Becoming
Asian American; Kwon, ‘‘Autoexoticizing’’; J. Lee and Zhou, Asian American Youth;
S. Lee, Unraveling the ‘‘Model Minority’’ Stereotype and Up against Whiteness;
Maira, Desis in the House and Missing; Min, The Second Generation; Min and Park,
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 135
‘‘Second Generation Asian Americans’ Ethnic Identity’’; Pyke and Dang, ‘‘ ‘Fob’ and
‘Whitewashed’ ’’; Shankar, Desi Land; N. Sharma, Hip Hop Desis.
63. Works by Lee (Unraveling the ‘‘Model Minority’’ Stereotype and Up against
Whiteness), Maira (Missing), and Shankar (Desi Land) also focus on high school
students of diverse economic backgrounds.
64. This is not to dismiss the debates within Asian American studies about the
relationship of Pacific Islanders and Asian American studies, nor to conflate these
groups (see Diaz, ‘‘To ‘P’ or Not to ‘P’?’’; Kauanui, ‘‘Asian American Studies and the
‘Pacific Question’ ’’). Rather, it is to simply note the dominant focus of East Asian
groups within Asian American studies. A recent special issue of positions critically
intervenes against this emphasis (Ngô, Nguyen, and Lam, ‘‘Southeast Asian Ameri-
can Studies’’).
65. Youth subcultural studies o√ered me a starting point to examine youth
resistance by attending to the vivid and various cultural and oppositional practices
of young people along the axes of class, race, gender, and nation. See Clarke et al.,
‘‘Subcultures, Cultures, and Class’’; Hebdige, Subculture; Ross and Rose, Micro-
phone Fiends.
66. As such, this is not a detailed ethnographic account of young people’s politi-
cal development or of the microprocesses of young people’s negotiations with their
peers, adults, and surrounding institutions. I have chronicled elsewhere how
aypal o√ered young people structured opportunities for collective action in sup-
portive political community spaces (Kwon, ‘‘Moving from Complaints to Action’’).
67. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
68. The Pacific Islander group parted from the Oakland Asian Cultural Center to
form its own organization, the Pacific Islander Kie Association, in 2003. Each of
these organizations organized the di√erent ethnic backgrounds of the young peo-
ple: Asian Community Mental Health Services for Cambodian, Filipinos for A≈r-
mative Action for Filipino/a, the Korean Community Center of the East Bay for
Korean, the Lao Iu Mien Cultural Association for Laotian and Mien, the Oakland
Asian Student Educational Services for Chinese and Vietnamese, and the Pacific
Islander Kie Association for Samoan and Tongan.
69. All the names of aypal participants in this book are pseudonyms.
70. Chung, Legacies of Struggle; Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants; Habal, San
Francisco’s International Hotel; Rudrappa, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American; Võ,
Mobilizing an Asian American Community.
71. Ong and Liu, ‘‘U.S. Immigration Policies and Asia Migration,’’ 45.
72. Ma, Hometown Chinatown, 109.
73. The statistics are from US Bureau of the Census, ‘‘Summary File 2 (sf2) 100-
Percent Data.’’ Although ethnic subgroups among Laotians are not reported in the
census, the largest portion of Laotians in Oakland are Mien. It was estimated that of
the approximately 30,000 Mien refugees living in the United States, 5,000 resided in
Oakland (Neela Banerjee, ‘‘Lao Iu Mien Culture Center Breaks Ground,’’ Asian
Week, November 2, 2000, http://www.asianweek.com/2000e10e26/home.html, ac-
cessed December 17, 2001).
74. During my time with aypal, it paid a small stipend to its youth interns, as
136 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
did many other youth organizing groups. In doing so, the group recognized the
importance of young people’s employment needs—whether to supplement their
family income or to have spending money. Many of the aypal youth admitted that
the stipend was not nearly equal to what they would get from working at McDon-
ald’s or Starbucks. Some of them did supplement their stipend by working on
weekends at movie theaters or businesses such as Walgreens.
75. Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Hale, Engaging Contradictions, Theory, Politics, and
Methods of Activist Scholarship; Juris, ‘‘Social Forums and Their Margins’’; Sanford
and Ajani, Engaged Observer.