If eternal youth is a contemporary obsession, this fantasy has very little to do with the challenges and issues specific to this transitory period of life, filled with ambiguities and fluctuating contours. In fact, we must admit, we care little about real youth. […] The one, in short, who is groping for her place in the confusing world that we pass on to her.
This indifference mixed with concern for young people often gives way to a more or less diffuse fear when it comes to the one who struggles to conform to the norm, of the one who refuses and contests it or one that is simply not included. This fear feeds on negative representations – from the young gang member to the young runaway to the young wokes, trans or non-binary – and too often serves as an alibi for a whole array of means of control, sometimes subtle and placed under the sign of benevolence, sometimes restrictive, even downright repressive. However, this reflex collectively exempts us from a deep questioning of the narrowness of the path that leads to inclusion.
Ideas in reviews
[…] [N]shady are [pourtant] recent examples that reveal our bankruptcy at [cet] respect.
The Commission […] Laurent is one of them. The multiple problems she has brought to light within the system supposed to protect young people have long been known – the main solutions too – but the political will to really tackle them still seems to be lacking. The timid response of the Caquista government to the Laurent report illustrates this well, as the researchers Jade Bourdages, Emmanuelle Bernheim and Mélanie Bourque underline in [notre] case. But the critical observations they make with regard to the report itself are also disturbing. Too little heard in the public arena, they lift the veil on a form of blindness to the structural causes of the problems: poverty, classism and racism – systemic or ordinary -, among others. […]
The role of the police with regard to racialized or indigenous young people is another very topical problem, which contributes to their criminalization and their exclusion. The municipal election campaign which has just ended has clearly shown this. Listening to the main candidates, but also the Minister of Public Security, the Quebec metropolis would be besieged by armed bands of young Blacks, Arabs or Hispanics who have lost all moral benchmarks. Given the mistrust of these insidious representations of all racialized young people – and in particular within the police force – one would have expected a little restraint. Importantly, there is little or no critical hindsight regarding the sources of violence and crime, and even less regarding the fact that the promised police solutions risk aggravating widely documented police profiling. Black and racialized young people in certain neighborhoods thus risk being even more targeted for offenses that have nothing to do with firearms crimes, which fuels a dynamic that stigmatizes them, places them on trial and makes them more likely to ultimately, even more vulnerable to dropping out of school and the risk of falling into crime.
Finally, while it should be the place where we aim to equalize opportunities for all young people, whatever their social, ethnic or even geographical origin, school still too often reproduces inequalities. The pandemic has cruelly exposed it, the demands of distance education having immediately excluded young people with fewer opportunities […]. There are also many who denounce the school segregation which results from the fact that the private network and the public schools with special projects reserve the most privileged students, leaving the ordinary public network, already chronically lacking in resources, to absorb the number. exponential of students who face various difficulties.
These few examples show to what extent young people who are already experiencing difficulties and situations of exclusion navigate a system made up of institutions which do not manage (or very badly) to give them a chance and produce exclusion from systemic way.
The neoliberal management that has prevailed in our public services for several decades has certainly had a lot to do with it. […]
But it also shows the tense and ambiguous relationship that our society has with social transformation, which the emergence of new generations necessarily embodies, if only in the imagination. Anti-hysteriawoke which has seized Quebec (and other Western countries) is a testament to the fear inspired by part of today’s youth and the values associated with it – although these last, from ecology to anti-racism through the fluidity of the genre, are in no way exclusive to it. […]
[I]We will have to have the courage to look in the magnifying mirror held out by today’s youth, and in particular those who confront us with the flaws in our model of society. It is our collective ability to face challenges […] of tomorrow. Above all, it is about the dignity and freedom of these young people.
Comments or suggestions for Des Idées en reviews? Write to [email protected].