This talk is based on a chapter of Lewis' dissertation which draws on data from open-ended interviews and surveys with 83 Black adults from diverse class backgrounds in Cincinnati, OH–a city whose dynamic history is relevant to 21st Century discussions of community safety. In this presentation, he mobilizes the concept of safety reimagination to capture how class-diverse Black men and women reconstitute their community priorities to elevate root causes of poverty and persisting inequities as fundamental safety concerns to avoid gaslighting themselves and obscuring the material realities of their social condition(s).

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is a major educational problem. Official data show that Black boys are disciplined at the highest rates of any group. Scholars suggest that the “criminal” Black male image shapes teachers’ views and treatment of their Black male students as early as preschool. Yet the interactional mechanisms of racialized discipline are unclear, particularly in early childhood. This study uses ethnography to understand first-grade teachers’ disciplinary interactions with Black and White boys. The findings uncover teachers’ racialized disciplinary approaches via differential surveillance of, differential engagement with, and differential responses to noncompliance from Black and White boys as a key mechanism that produces unequal disciplinary experiences in early childhood education. I discuss the implications of these findings for the racial socialization of Black and White boys.

Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police interventions. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police interventions. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent police interactions enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of procedural injustice, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with cellphones—what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–civilian interactions to challenge procedural injustice. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.