Precarity and structural racism in Black youth encounters with police
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Precarity and structural racism in Black youth encounters with police Anne Nordberg1 · Mary K. Twis2 · Mark A. Stevens1 · Schnavia Smith Hatcher3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Youth experience increased surveillance by and involuntary contact with police officers compared with other age groups. Studies that explore the experiences of youth during these encounters are scant and focus on youth with criminal histories. This research aims to explore the experiences of college-attending youth between 18 and 24 years old in two southern states. The study was designed and conducted according to the tenets of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Twelve Black youth were recruited and interviewed between April 2015 and April 2016. Three superordinate themes (and subthemes) were identified: (1) negative feelings towards the police; (2) precarity of police encounters (subthemes: police as a threat to welfare; it could be me; steps to follow during police encounters; behavior is irrelevant) and; (3) police response is part of structural racism (subthemes: racism is everywhere; media contributes to racism). The importance of these findings for social work practice and research will be discussed. Keywords Black youth · Interpretative phenomenological analysis · Precarity · Structural racism · Police encounters Bound by our professional code of ethics to serve the disadvantaged among us (National Association of Social Workers, 2008), social workers are proud advocates, community organizers, researchers, practitioners, and educators who are professionally attuned to racisms (and other forms of oppression) and the inequities they produce and maintain. We are, ideally, imbuing our practice (clinical, research, and/ or andragogy) with anti-oppressive discourses, actions, and interventions. But race in the United States (U.S.) is a challenging topic. Michael Brown was an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri who was fatally shot by a police officer during the summer of 2014. There were several months of protests in Ferguson, across the United States, and internationally and much discussion among social workers. The NASW statement on the events in Ferguson resulted in an unprecedented * Anne Nordberg [email protected] 1
School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Arlington, 211 South Cooper Street, Arlington, TX 76019, USA
2
Social Work, Texas Christian University, 2800 West Bowie Street, Bass 2101, Fort Worth, TX 76019, USA
3
School of Social Work, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223‑0001, USA
(in the NASW archive) 156 responses, some of which were not anti-oppressive in tone or content (National Association of Social Workers, n.d.). The responses among these social workers demonstrates the importance and contentious nature of the topic of policeminority encounters among social workers and the range of practice areas that are relevant to the topic. Much of the qualitative studies about thes
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