‘Stop the monster, build the marvel’: movement vulnerability, youth organizing and abolitionist praxis in late liberal San Francisco

ABSTRACT

Based on a larger ethnographic project in San Francisco, this essay illustrates the housing justice work of youth participants in San Francisco’s Mission Roots youth organizing program. I introduce the concept of movement vulnerability to describe how developing ideology and political vision was central to their activism. This article draws from abolitionist political thoughtto highlight the carceral dimensions of displacement and gentrification in San Francisco. More importantly, an abolitionist lens allows us to recognize the creative and visionary dimensions of Mission Roots youth organizers’ work. Furthermore, this article offers a reminder to youth studies and education scholars that organizing is a method of transforming material conditions and pursuing social justice projects, rather than a mere ‘intervention’ to promote conventional notions of academic and youth development.

KEYWORDS:

• youth activism
• abolition
• resistance‌
• social movements
• housing justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) denotes the differing structural relationships of racialized communities to the ongoing settler colonial arrangements of San Francisco and the United States as a whole (Coulthard 2014). The term also underlines the unique and interrelated diasporas of racialized peoples as a result of European and American imperialist projects on the African continent, the Middle East, the Americas, and across Asia (Lowe 2015).

2 ‘Racial capitalism’ originates from the historiographical work of Cedric Robinson ([1983] 2000), which highlights the development of racialism in Western societies prior to the development of capitalism. Robinson notes how race would ‘inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism’ (2). The concept underlines race as a concomitant mode of social, cultural, political and economic organization within the capitalist world system.