ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces the I/M thesis. I/M is an analytical framework adopted and adapted from critical race theory (CRT) and recognition theory (RT). Ideas about recognition are one way to investigate the rules which have structured social arrangements, through the race-specific lens contributed by CRT. According to the central premise of the I/M thesis, historically Black, racialized youth were outside the imaginings of the early twentieth century, youth penal reform efforts, and this outsider status remains pertinent to the recognition these youth receive in contemporary YJ and wider society. Indeed, this status underwrites Black youth’s disproportionate incarceration, and overall (mis)recognition, within contemporary society. The I/M framework emphasizes that this positioning is not about criminal justice alone. According to this understanding, a historic stigmatization of race as deviant and threatening reproduces a continuity in the exclusion of racialized peoples from considerations of universal equality. This exclusion is discussed here as a status consistent with being denied one’s transformative potential, by virtue of being deemed intractable. In the contemporary arrangement, the youth whose transformative potential has been denied are also the youth for whom disproportionate punishment is rationalized. The I/M framework situates disproportionality as a historical continuity of racialized youth’s exclusion, supporting the idea that disproportionality is not just a matter of criminal justice but as a broader exclusion of racialized peoples from the rights prioritized under modernity.
