“Who might hurt me, who might not? These are constant questions in my mind.”: Identity politics and being injurable in the lives of minority youth

Author: Dr. Bahar Tanyaş, Bahçeşehir University, İstanbul

In this brief paper, I will discuss issues of power, identity, and being injurable in the lives of minority youth. To do this, I will try to summarize what I have learned from young people in my studies on immigration, discrimination, and collective action (Tanyas, 2016, 2019a, 2019b) 1.  This reflective piece is written for a blog that is run as part of an important research project on the radicalization of youth in Europe. Therefore, I will also attempt to look for some clues in these studies, and within their limitations, that might help reflect on the issue of radicalization, though I did not directly study the phenomenon.

Young people are exposed to various forms of discrimination, exclusion, or marginalization because of their identities, especially their ethnic, religious, or class identities. They are also active actors in the processes reproducing marginalization and exclusion towards others. As social scientists, we clearly recognize and identify these experiences in the everyday lives of youth, but there are still some gaps in our understanding of social and developmental tracks through which young people internalize or identify with explicit and implicit workings of discrimination and exclusion.  One key issue here is the political that is embedded in the socialization of young people.

Young people socialize within and throughout various power hierarchies. These hierarchies signify whose life is a liveable life (so who should not be injured), whose death is to be mourned (so who did not deserve to be killed), and damage to whom is legitimate (so who is to be attacked) in a particular society (Butler, 1996, 2009). They have a complex political, historical, and economic background, and most of the time they are not visible or spoken out.  However, they are strong enough to provide the justification of, and permission for damage to certain identity groups (but not to others). All young people had already been hailed by these hierarchies of injurability in a way that they ‘intuitively’ know whether they are ‘allowed’ to give injury to the other or the other is allowed to injure them. Moreover, minority or disadvantaged youth are well aware of the ‘exact place’ they occupy in these power hierarchies, i.e., whether they are positioned at lower/more marginalized layers of otherness or do they belong to a more ‘tolerable’ minority group.

Minority young people are very vigilant about these differential power relations. Any encounter with the majority quickly tells a lot about how they are positioned in that particular moment. There are some cases in which power differentials are reproduced implicitly, but there are also cases in which the majority other is irresponsibly vocal about the ‘privilege’ to give injury. On the other hand, minority youth had, from a very young age onwards, been warned to remain silent in these encounters or had such models in their lives. This is a state of silence that is mainly accompanied by fear. These moments of silence and fear are very intense but mostly confusing in childhood. It is generally the period of youth, partly because of their cognitive and intellectual development and partly because of their increased relationship with the social and political, when young individuals start to make sense of and reflect on their experiences of otherness.  In this sense, being a minority youth is a process through which they get ‘re-registered’ at the society via complex negotiations of meanings given to what is already known to them. They try to undo already established power relations (i.e., they do not want to hide their religious identities or “make trouble” by calling their mothers in their native language in public); they also start to question their own silence or, on the contrary, they directly or indirectly justify these hierarchies.

Young minorities’ vigilance about injurability is maintained in instances of solidarity among different power groups. Participation in collective actions, e.g. in Gezi protests with Turkish middle-class youth, is a significant challenge for working-class or ethnic minority youth. They are ambivalent about acting together with those who refuse to treat them equally in everyday life and cautious about idealizing and freely enjoying the liminality (Turner, 1969) of contemporary solidarities. From the perspective of minority youth, those collective actions that appear to be lacking social status and rank might reflect the majority’s blindness that their perspective might not be the single and correct one for all.

As regards radicalization, I  would suggest that radicalization among minority youth, especially their preference for violence against majority others, is an attempt aiming at undoing these power relationships and changing one’s position from being injurable to giving injury. There is a serious misperception that denial of one’s vulnerability might suffice for one’s “superiority”. There is also a belief that the other’s erroneous and unethical relationality deserves radical acts, i.e., violence. However, though such acts might appear to be a resistance against social damage to less powerful groups or contestation of its legitimacy, it is often a counter-productive strategy, and consequently gives rise to more marginalization of one’s group – they become further marginalized as the “radical” others. More importantly, radicalization makes the same claim that is supposed to be challenged – some lives are not liveable and grievable. It is about changing one’s position in the hierarchy rather than challenging the hierarchy itself.

Here are two critical issues: The first is that we should avoid making the minority groups responsible for changing the situation (i.e., not getting radicalized), though we keep on looking for alternative means through which young people are able to critically engage with, resist, and contest already established power relations. We should be cautious about constructing the main problem as being ‘radicalization of youth’ rather than the hegemony of this type of identity politics. Unless the majority or dominant groups are ready to confront their privileged position and its implications for less powerful groups, our solutions to radicalization cannot go beyond some youth work in poor neighborhoods.  The second one is that we should also avoid excusing radicalization and radical violence. Being victimized does not assign anyone with the power or right to wound, and avoiding condoning radicalization is another means of justifying injury to the others. The basis for resistance to hierarchies of injurability should be challenging those conditions that maximize certain groups’ vulnerability rather than creating more vulnerabilities.

1. Studies in 2019a and 2019b were conducted with young participants in Turkey, the 2016 study was conducted with Turkish immigrants in the UK.

References

Butler, J. (1996) "Burning Acts: Injurious Speech," The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable, (3)1.Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/roundtable/vol3/iss1/9.

Butler, J. (2009) Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 4(3). Available at: http://www.aibr.org/antropologia/04v03/criticos/040301b.pdf

Tanyas, B. (2016) Experiences of Otherness and Practices of Othering: Young Turkish Migrants in the UK. YOUNG, 24(2), 157-173.

Tanyas, B. (2019a). Protest Participation and Identity-Related Dilemmas: A Qualitative Inquiry into the 2013 Gezi Park Protests. Qualitative Psychology, 6(1), 47-60. 

Tanyas, B. (2019b) Rethinking the Coping Perspective in the Context of Discrimination: Young Religious Minorities in Turkey. In S. Frosh (Ed.) New Voices in Psychosocial Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillian.  

Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Cornell University Press.