ABSTRACT
Race, ethnicity and how we learn to live with difference are amongst the most important issues facing future generations growing up in a rapidly globalizing world. It is widely accepted that race is a fictitious category used to divide up the human population in ways that may benefit some at the expense of others. Despite appeals to a common humanity many people continue to give meaning to the fallacy of race, to the extent it remains a central organizing principle in late-modernity. This can be seen where racial inequality persists in a number of spheres including education, work, law and criminal justice, health, sport and media relations. For example, in the UK in 2014, 37 per cent of 16-24 year olds who are from a minority ethnic background are registered unemployed, a rise from 33 per cent in 2012; while for the UK as a whole unemployment in this age group has remained constant at around 21 per cent for the past three years (Department of Work and Pensions, 2014). While race may be an entirely arbitrary mode of human classification it then continues to structure social relations. This chapter begins by examining how racism is made manifest in young lives, focusing upon racist name-calling, white privilege and grievance. It argues that young people cannot be set apart from the racialized world in which they inhabit and contribute to. The chapter then explores how young people might transgress race borders by creating ethnicities that borrow on transnational and global influences in the making of a new urban heritage that exceed parochial forms of nationalism. Here, we consider the potential for young people to engage in post-race practices and the possibilities this has for undoing race. The final section considers the persistence of youth ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 1972) where contemporary ideas of race difference and ‘Otherness’ have come to mark out Muslim youth as ‘terrorists’, ‘suicide bombers’ and religious ‘fanatics’. It is argued that race-thinking has an important role to play here in assembling an idea of Muslim youth through the conjoining of events, performances and global imaginaries.
