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Paper short abstract

Considered both a risk and at risk, young urbanites of colour are subject to both violence and care. This paper theorises violence-care nexuses by exploring the tensions that emerge when Moroccan-background men try to protect each other’s sons from racist police violence in Antwerp’s public spaces.

Paper long abstract

In postcolonial urban spaces, young men of colour are construed as ‘a risk’ and ‘at risk’ simultaneously (DeBacker2022), thus being subject to dynamics of both racialised violence and care. This paper explores how such dynamics of violence and care relate to one another in Borgerhout, a stigmatised neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium. Drawing on fieldwork with Moroccan-background young men and their fathers dwelling in Borgerhout for generations, it considers how intergenerational practices of care can manifest both a response to structural, racialised, exclusionary violence and a rearticulation of this violence (Hobart&Kneese2020).

Excluded from mainstream leisure activities, many Moroccan-background young men hang out daily in Borgerhout’s squares and street corners, serving as their ‘backyard’. Yet, as youths – and particularly young men of colour – in public space are regarded as ‘nuisance’ or ‘security’ problems, they are regularly confronted with angry/anxious neighbours and racist police violence. In response, ‘neighbourhood fathers’ walk through the streets to ‘keep an eye’/‘check up on them’, coordinated by a state-funded neighbourhood centre. Being of Moroccan descent themselves, these ‘fathers’ have experienced similar violence in Antwerp and hope to protect the youths from (police) confrontations. Now, while youths appreciate their effort, they sometimes also experience them as yet another set of controlling-cum-constraining gazes. Moreover, as the neighbourhood father project is funded by the municipality’s Department of Social Security, the state increasingly instrumentalises such (kinship) care for the ‘securitisation’ – or racial sterilisation – of public space. How, I ask, do violence and care ambiguously (re)articulate each other, here?