ABSTRACT
The intersection between race and punishment contradicts contemporary youth’s positioning as subjects with rights, an arrangement predicated on modernity’s promise of proportionality. Indeed, proportionality signifies rationality and restraint in the treatment of modern individuals. A key example of the contradiction is the racialization of youth gang crime, which rationalizes extreme levels of punishment and its synonymous partner, exclusion, for racialized youth. In the context of gang crime, punishment is synonymous with wider injustices, for instance, compounding the gang adjacent positioning of youth with a narrative that recognizes them as being at risk for, instead of being vulnerable to, gang involvement. This is a key distinction, since risk narratives inform amplified policing surveillance which operates without restraint in youth’s communities and on youth’s bodies. Looking through the lens of modernity’s promise of restraint, I propose that the I/M logic offers an expanded explanatory vocabulary for unpacking why ethical reactions (have not reached a greater crescendo and) still remain(s) a long time coming. According to this approach, the racialization of the gang and the unrestrained punishment of the gang youth is a reminder that racialized peoples were not written into the expansion of rights, corresponding with modernity.
