Suspended in Time: De-Arresting Black Youth from the ‘Ethnographic Present’

Abstract

Within urban sociology, the unpredictability of poor, urbanized space explains why black youth are “present oriented” and why they treat orientations to the future as futile. But where urban sociology suspends black youth in time and space, this research aims to de-arrest them from the “ethnographic present.” Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with thirty youth, I make the case that within “present orientations” there is prescience. This paper is based on over one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way – a center for youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With limited life chances and limited chances at life, youth at Run-a-Way saw the future as fugitive. Instead of being a paralyzing force keeping youth suspended in time, present orientations were marked by the production of nowness, in light of a prescient vision of what is to come. Because black youth chose not to entertain liberal futurities directed towards “rights” and “freedoms” associated with a post-raciality did not make them present oriented. It made them prepared. As prescience comes to serve as a more accurate signifier of black youth’s relation to the future, we come to see why the “ethnographic present” and the interpellation of blackness through abjection are both unsustainable and obsolete.