The Youth Scare

By TOLU OLORUNDA

Zero tolerance for guns! drugs! and crime! Hear the proponents’ cry. But behind this façade, Robbins writes, is zero tolerance for children—and the mistakes they make. School officials storm into students’ lockers any time of day—Fourth Amendment be goddamned—reinforcing how “little autonomy” students have “to resist and question” authorized abuse. And students wallow at the crack of school hierarchy, limiting attention to their concerns. For poor Black or Brown kids, the die is already cast: they walk into school Day 1, hate what they see, respond intelligently, and leave school grounds in handcuffs. And when any uppity activist or parent dares question why more money goes the way of suburban schools, officials gamely open up their special notebooks, and point out the number of tardy, absent, suspended, expelled, and arrested students as perfect justification.

Of course, as Robbins notes, racism wins again, for the “crimes allegedly committed by Black youth are presented as the consequences of biological pathologies or cultural deficits, whereas those allegedly perpetrated by White youth are typically framed as responses to middle-class alienation or the consequences of proverbial teen angst gone mad.” We hold this truth to be self-evident: that a “densely corporatized media environment has no interest in presenting youth as needy, well-intentioned, curious, meaning-seeking beings.”  Read more...