ABSTRACT
From 2001 to 2003, a multiracial coalition of Asian and Pacific Islander youth in Alameda County in the Northern California Bay Area, along with hundreds of other youth of color, engaged in a successful youth organizing campaign to stop the expansion of the juvenile hall in their community known as the Super Jail. This chapter examines the factors that attributed to the success of the anti-Super Jail campaign, as well as its limitation in illuminating how young people are actively shaping social policies that have real material effects on their lives. Here I will show how young people organized collectively under a politicized “youth of color” identity, a collective panethnic identity that was developed in resistance to youth criminalization—the social, political, and economic marginalization of racial minority youth. Young people's involvement and investment in the campaign were closely tied to their personal experiences with youth criminalization and incarceration. I will argue that the success of the campaign was in part due to a collective effort by a multiracial coalition to organize under a panethnic youth of color identity, although it was not without its limitations. My purpose is to explicate what policy makers, practitioners, activists, and scholars can learn about youth political activism from this youth organizing case study.
