After the 2016 Presidential election, students on a California university campus threatened and attempted to rip off a Muslim women's hijab. The persistence of anti-Muslim racism in U.S. society two decades following September 11, 2001, reveals deeper colonial roots of the racialization of religion. Muslim Americans worldwide and in the U.S. continue to experience overt violence in public places, including schools. Yet, studies on Muslim college students' experiences focus primarily on interpersonal racism from interactions with school officials and students. Few consider how the global War on Terror permeates higher education's bounds to institutionalize anti-Muslim racism. Further, studies of Muslim racialization primarily sample Arab and South Asian Muslims while focusing on the Muslims' collective religious identity, thus overlooking the racial heterogeneity of this community. This study advances an understanding of anti-Muslim racism as a fluid racial project that manifests through hyper(in)visibility - both the overt and covert racial mechanisms that institutionalize racial-religious inequality. My results rely on multivariate analyses of 2016 University of California Undergraduate Surveys (N=63,115), qualitative analysis of 85 in-depth interviews with Muslim students, and a case study of a participatory action research photovoice project. This study demonstrates how religion is racialized and experienced amid other salient targeted identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, refugee background, and imperial and colonial contexts. By examining in-depth case studies, and inter-religious, intra-racial comparisons, this study reveals the intersectional variations that lead to differential experiences with institutional racism, civic participation, and racial belonging.

Los Angeles has been heralded as the city of inmates and prison capital of the world. In this study, I used mixed qualitative methods to explore the ideas and experiences of Black and Latinx young men in what I refer to as carceral Los Angeles. Carceral Los Angeles recognizes criminalization, confinement, and punishment as central to the making of the city. These carceral logics expand beyond prisons, jails, and detention centers. Informed by the carceral history of Los Angeles, this study was guided by questions such as: (a) What does it feel like to be a young person of color criminalized in the city of inmates? and (b) How does criminalization shape gender ideologies and gendered practices? I found Black and Latinx young men are constantly experiencing and witnessing criminalization across contexts and institutions. Their experiences revealed an overlapping ensemble of institutions and social actors were implicated in their criminalization not because they are committing a crime, but because by their very existence they are assumed to be criminal. With these experiences beginning as early as 6 years old, I show how racialized emotions (e.g., fear, paranoia) in a context of criminalization are described and understood by the young men. I argue racialized emotions are a central process through which the carceral state materializes. I also revealed that criminalization and hostility across contexts produces gendered enclosures that shape the young men’s gender ideologies and practices. Gendered enclosures bring attention to how policy, punitive practices, and discourse serve as formal and informal means to impose white patriarchal heteronormative ideals that confine the expressions and behaviors of Black and Latinx boys and young men. I argue gendered enclosures foreclose vulnerability, emotional expressions, and the opportunity to process experiences with criminalization and violence. Thus, a second set of questions also guided this study: (a) Where do Black and Latinx boys and young men find spaces to heal from criminalization?; (b) How, and to what extent, do the organizational practices in community-based educational spaces shape the gender ideologies of young men?; and (c) What strategies are Black and Latinx young men adopting in their efforts to combat the carceral state? Based on participation observations with Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition (BSS)—a coalition of nine community-based organizations across Los Angeles County engaged in abolitionist activism and political education—I found community-based educational spaces function as a homeplace (hooks 1990) that mediates gendered enclosures at the interpersonal level because being part of a homeplace provides alternative understandings of manhood via relational practices, political education, and healing programming. Thus, I argue the young men’s participation in BSS programming, including healing practices, buffers gendered enclosures. To illustrate this buffer, I honed in on BSS programming and the practices of youth workers to illuminate the ways the young men extend their understandings of gender and sexuality by their participation. Lastly, I demonstrate how intersectional thinking and an abolition ethos informs the young men’s visions of social transformation, coalition building, and relational practices. Particularly, how their intersectional thinking attends to relational practices that pose a challenge to carceral logics of abandonment, criminalization, and disposability. Based on these findings, I use water seepage as an organizing metaphor to argue the carceral backdrop the young men navigate can be understood as carceral seepage. Carceral seepage attends to the intensity, scale, and consequential nature of the carceral state on the lives of Black and Latinx youth.

The following report shows the trends in enrollment, the patterns of choice by students of different races and income, enrollment patterns of the various schools, and test scores of students enrolled in different schools in Clark County's Prime 6 program. The report shows relationships that are troubling and offers recommendations for improvement.

Also available at http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu

Over the last five years, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877 - the “Justice for Janitors” union - has recognized educational improvement as a key quality of life issue for its predominantly Latino immigrant Los Angeles membership. Most Local 1877 members with children send their children to low-performing public schools. Yet many view their children’s education as the key to securing the future well-being of their families, especially since economic gains obtained through a janitors’ union contract can only go so far. Union members believe that SEIU Local 1877 should become involved in efforts to improve educational opportunities for their children. 

SEIU Local 1877 has taken several steps to respond to union members’ interests in their children’s education. The union has partnered with UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (UCLA IDEA), the UCLA Labor Center, and UCLA School of Law’s Program in Public Interest Law and Policy to understand the educational issues facing union members’ children.1 UCLA’s research findings show that the union’s Los Angeles membership is residentially concentrated in low-income Latino and African-American communities, near high schools that disproportionately suffer from a shortage of qualified teachers, overcrowding, and insufficient college preparatory courses. In these high schools, less than one half of entering students graduate.