Collective Imagination: Black and Latinx Young Men's Intersectional Thinking in Carceral Los Angeles

In U.S. immigrant rights movements, intersectional consciousness has been used by undocumented immigrant youth activists to challenge power dynamics through collective identity mobilization and collective action framing (Terriquez 2015; Terriquez et al. 2018; Escudero 2020). Similarly, in the reproductive justice movement, women of color performed cross-racial work to encourage solidarity, social transformation, and intersectional practices (García 2020; Luna 2017; Zavella 2020). In the Movement for Black Lives, Black activists—often inspired by Black feminist teachings and practices, including intersectionality—have built a movement centering new modes of leadership and practices (Ransby 2018; Milkman 2017). However, sociologists have yet to fully understand the potential of intersectionality as a racial politic and tool for social change (Hill Collins 2019).

In this paper, I examine how Black and Latinx young men described intersectionality, how it informed their analysis of the carceral state, and how their intersectional thinking informed their activism and coalition building. To do so, I draw on interviews and focus groups I conducted between September 2018 and January 2021. I conducted these interviews and focus groups while completing three years of participant observations with the Brothers Sons Selves Coalition (BSS). BSS is a community-based educational space (Baldridge 2019) that engages young men and masculine-identified youth in abolitionist organizing, political education, healing programming, and youth participatory action research. I find that these young social actors and their intersectional thinking contribute to our current understanding of intersectionality as a racial politic (Hill Collins 2017; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Nash 2019). Particularly, I argue how their intersectional thinking centers age as a social location and attends to relational practices. In other words, the young men’s experiences with the carceral state gave rise to intersectional thinking that posed a challenge to carceral logics of abandonment and disposability extending beyond prison walls.