UC Berkeley

Youth Organizing as a tool for social change has helped to not only change material conditions in some respects, but it has also equipped youth with the critical tools needed to engage in long term social movement building. As a result, youth activists and organizers have been able to increase investments in the highest needs communities, gain access to college, and even defund and abolish school police. This dissertation focuses on youth activism and the political engagement of Black young men and boys. More specifically, this study focuses on the experience of Black young men and boys in community-based programs that engage in racial justice-based activism and community organizing.

Drawing upon interviews from 22 Black male youth activists, 19 interviews with youth workers who engage Black male youth, and five years of field notes as a community organizer working with four community-based organizations in Los Angeles, this study elevates the political imaginaries that Black young men and boys adopt based on their political activism and how they were educated in community based organizations. In the political moment of COVID-19 and the global fight to address anti-Black racism, how have Black boys and young men engaged in the fight for their own lives? To them, what is agency and how do they use their agency to transform their conditions?

Building upon frameworks such as Transformational Resistance, Critical Civic Praxis, and Black Critical Theory, I chronicle how Black boys and young men engage in Black Transformative Agency, which I define as an axis of processes that Black boys and young men adopt to both politicize their peers and fight against anti-Black racism in their communities. How Black young men and boys imagine their agency, however, varies depending on how they were politicized and what forms of activism they engage in, which is deeply influenced by their understandings of gender, geography, class, and comparative race relations. This study provides insights and implications for social movement scholars, education scholars, and across the social sciences more broadly who are interested in the ways that youth produce meaning of social change