Race,rage and emotional suspects: Ideologies of social mobility confront the racial contours of mass incarceration

Guilt, shame, pride and rage ripple through conversations about racism within the juvenile justice system where the racial contours of mass incarceration challenge the legitimacy of the American ideology of being a colourblind meritocracy. This paper argues that projects of emotional regulation, especially the regulation of young people's emotional response to the hypervisibility of race, are central to the governance of youth in carceral spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research in a southern California juvenile hall, I explore how young people engage with an evolving biopolitics of emotion and the ways carceral spaces shape young people's constructions of racial boundaries and solidarities.