Conformity and Delinquency: Surveillance, Sport, and Youth in the Charm City

Abstract

Concerns about safety and property rights have led to seemingly endless expansion of technologies and practices structuring modern surveillance society. While presumably “practiced with a view to enhancing efficiency, productivity, participation, welfare, health or safety” (Lyon, 1994, p. 52), we argue the continued function of a “social problems industry” (Pitter & Andrews, 1997) in cities like Baltimore, reflect a “colorblind” paternalization of sport-based charitable aid that disguises racialized surveillance under the auspices of educating lower-income Black youth through prescriptive measures to become upwardly mobile citizens. As Simone Browne (2015) reminds us, rather than seeing surveillance as logical outcomes of innovation, we must “factor in how racism and anti-Blackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order” (p. 8). Beyond CCTV and helicopter reconnaissance, this study situates sport/physical activity programming as yet another context of anti-Black surveillance, and discusses the potential of emergent resistive spaces that empower, rather than discipline.