“Doing the Dirty Work”: Examining Youth Organizing and Black Transformative Agency with Black Male Youth Activists in Los Angeles

Community-based educational spaces have engaged in youth organizing as a tool to reshape education, juvenile justice, and city landscapes across the United States for racial and social justice. Such organizing not only has transformed policy and practice but also has impacted how young people involved in youth organizing engage their civic worlds around them. Through 5 years of fieldwork and 43 interviews conducted with 22 Black male youth in Los Angeles, California, the author advances a theoretical framework called Black transformative agency , a multiaxis process for the ways in which Black boys and young men learn to combat institutional hegemony and social isolation through individual means of navigation, relationship building, and collective means of organizing for social change.

The author offers discussion and insight into how scholars and practitioners can engage politically activated youth by centering young people’s actions.