Born Sinner, Fashioned Divine: The Criminalization, Commodity and Creativity of Young Black Males

Abstract

This article explores how a community struggling to survive systemic marginalization may imagine a liberating future. Black scholars have pressed the realm of science fiction in efforts to interrogate how Black youth may construct a sense of worth from Afrodiasporic experiences to the world for a promising Black future. The Nashville Team of the Children's Defense Fund explores the relevance of Mark Dery's cultural criticism for young Black males who find themselves cradled in a school-to-prison pipeline that in twenty-first-century American society not only functions as an oppressive and death-dealing institution, but also an extremely lucrative financial enterprise. Drawing from Black religious philosopher Victor Anderson and his philosophy of race, the Children's Defense Fund Nashville Team will explain how we engage narrative and the arts in assisting young men of color to reconstruct identity from foundational positions of unrestricted space and interactions in order to imagine new possibilities.