ABSTRACT
What does it mean for a race to be treated as a problem while racism is taken for granted as normal? What is the process of normalization that informed the institutionalization of Black, racialized youth as intractably deviant outsiders? Imagine being marginalized from the benefits of (participation in) expanding rights and privileges characteristic of early modern nation building. According to the main claim, just as the effects of racial discrimination are totalizing, it similarly requires a total effort from societal institutions for racial discrimination to become normalized and Institutionalized. Chapter 4 explores the historical normalization and institutionalization of Black, racialized youth as intractably deviant outsiders, in the Canadian context. Within this history, the important example of how racialized youth were treated within the early education system stands as an exemplar of racial exclusion. Within the I/M logic, the Canadian example represents a competition for resources and opportunities, which reinforces the overarching proposal, that racialized peoples were excluded from modern rights; in this case, exclusion manifested as denial of access to education, a resource deemed important on many bases, including the crucial role it played in both citizenship and inclusion. This historic denial of access to resources as rights has implications for how we talk about racialized youth’s contemporary positioning of disproportionate punishment. In the contemporary case, exclusion manifests in the denial of lenience. As with the ethos underpinning early modern institution building (informing early youth penal reform), the education system represented an opportunity structure supporting the actualization of the individual’s development.
