The war on teenage terrorists

Abstract

This paper interprets a recent, aggressive state crackdown on public gatherings of African American youth in the streets of Philadelphia's commercial districts against the backdrop of historical geographies of race and disinvestment. Drawing on news accounts and government publications, and deploying theories of securitization and space, it joins those who argue that the performance of security in everyday spaces works to conceal the social relations undergirding the post-9/11 security state. We consider how city officials and others have constructed the collective figure of the ‘flash mob’ as a perpetrator of urban terrorism and the subject of state intervention. We trace the application of this subjectivity to individual bodies marked by age, race and class, thereby revealing how the latest strategic move in a historic reinforcement of the US ghetto sustains and feeds off of newly heightened and intertwined anxieties about the sources of criminality, violence and terror. If the venal urban geopolitics of Philadelphia reproduces long-standing spatial segregation and social inequality, it does so by exploiting newly emerged nationalist identities and under the auspices of antiterrorist legislation. More broadly, then, this paper argues for closer attention to the social warrant of racialized space and of banal terrorism in the constitution of state power.

Keywords:

• urban geopolitics
• post-9/11
• youth geographies
• banality
• securitization
• race

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful for the generous editorial support of Bob Catterall and Kurt Iveson. Melissa Wright, Lorraine Dowler, Deb Cowen, and two anonymous reviewers offered valuable comments on earlier drafts. Very special thanks goes to Nicole Laliberte, Megan Mullaney and our talented writing workshop team, Maureen Biermann, Jenna Christian, Dana Cuomo, Arielle Hesse, and Jenn Titanski-Hooper, whose feedback made all the difference. The authors are solely responsible for any errors. We dedicate this article to Destiney and Madison, and to the fearless adults they are becoming.

Notes

To name just two examples: (1) an average of 1.7 incidents of aggravated assault occur in Philadelphia schools every school day (CrimeBase, 2006; Academic Calendar, 2006) and (2) in 2010, 306 people were murdered, and of that total, 79.1% were African American. African Americans represent 42.7% of the city's total population (PPD, 2010).

Antiterrorism legislation designed to foster extensive surveillance and preemptive monitoring without probable cause begins with the Patriot Act, established promptly after September 11, 2001 (Scheffey, 2011) and re-emerged with recent federal requests to gather intelligence on private Facebook, Twitter and Skype user accounts (Martel, 2010).