Conformity and Delinquency: Surveillance, Sport, and Youth in the Charm City

Abstract

Concerns about safety and property rights have led to seemingly endless expansion of technologies and practices structuring modern surveillance society. While presumably “practiced with a view to enhancing efficiency, productivity, participation, welfare, health or safety” (Lyon, 1994, p. 52), we argue the continued function of a “social problems industry” (Pitter & Andrews, 1997) in cities like Baltimore, reflect a “colorblind” paternalization of sport-based charitable aid that disguises racialized surveillance under the auspices of educating lower-income Black youth through prescriptive measures to become upwardly mobile citizens. As Simone Browne (2015) reminds us, rather than seeing surveillance as logical outcomes of innovation, we must “factor in how racism and anti-Blackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order” (p. 8). Beyond CCTV and helicopter reconnaissance, this study situates sport/physical activity programming as yet another context of anti-Black surveillance, and discusses the potential of emergent resistive spaces that empower, rather than discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Surveillance
• youth
• sport
• neoliberalism
• racialization
• colorblind racial politics

Notes

1 Author 1 and Author 2 engaged in semi-structured interviews with program staff (author 1 worked closely with Fitness for Baltimore Youth between 2009-2012, incorporating participant observation and informal qualitative interviews; Author 2 worked with CCBS and other organizations between 2019-2022 in a semi-structured, online format due to COVID-19). To draw from the analysis of these interviews, Author 1 used Richardson’s (2000) triangulation approach to place interview responses in dialogue with participant observations with youth program participants to explore how FBY was presented by organizers and perceived by youth. Author 2 utilized a Thematic Analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to identify key elements of interviews that were constructed through detailed immersion within and analysis of interview data. Author 3 constructed themes derived from a content analysis of KYRC’s publicly available materials from 2020-2022 (see Mayring, 2022).