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Book Review: Victor M. Rios, Human Targets: Schools, Police and the Criminalization of Latino Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0226090856 (Cloth). 224 Pages. $60.00.
Reviewed by Marcus Anthony Hunter1
[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: [email protected] Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2018 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Although the United States Constitution has over its working duration designated race, sex, class and to some degree sexual orientation as protected classes, communities and peoples of these backgrounds are not the target of opportunity or access. Rather, they are and into the foreseeable future best understood as targets of surveillance, subjected to the multiply and varied apparatuses of anti-Blackness and White Supremacy violence and policies. Being of color and an immigrant is a fraught experience, one where you have been lured and recruited by the enticing promise of American exceptionalism, mobility, education, and entrepreneurship.
That people of color are targeted by policies borne of the War on Drugs and War on Poverty has been made clear by a growing and potent body scholarship on the school to prison pipeline, stop-and-frisk policies, and the hyper-police state is clear evidence of the enduring legacies through which second class citizenship is forged and reinforced. Often preconfigured as criminals rather than citizens, Black and Latinx youth are especially vulnerable to surveillance that emanates from these antiBlack, anti-immigrant, and anti-youth policies that seek to control and constrain them instead of empowering and encouraging them.
In Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth Victor M. Rios brings this reality into sharp relief, rendering a powerful sociological analysis where the personal is not only sociological but political as well. At the outset, Rios argues, "that institutional process and power overdetermine young people's ability to adopt and refine specific cultural practices and actions that impact their well being" (7). Demonstrated and conveyed over seven highly-accessible chapters, Rios details the sites and approaches that agents of the State deploy...