Razing Kids

The kids are not, in fact, alright. Or so we learn from Jeffrey Sanders in his smart and fascinating, if episodic, account of young people in western environments during and after World War II. From the playgrounds of wartime shipbuilding boom cities to the insidious spread of radiation from postwar atomic testing, from the underresourced Watts on the brink of explosion in 1965 to the Yakima Valley, Washington farmworker camps of the same era, young people in Sanders’s telling are always both threat and threatened, at once potential architects of social chaos and themselves victims of malign human-made environments. The “exaggerated importance” of youth in the postwar decades, Sanders brightly argues, drove “new understandings—and new reasons for understanding—environmental and social risks” (p. 12). The book is at its best when explaining how the identification of environmental and social problems often ran through Americans’ postwar obsession with children and youth. Displaying his mastery of the historical literature on youth, gender, and race—on top of western urban and environmental history—Sanders is alive to the coursing of power and privilege through his case studies. The status of nuclear testing was transformed by the early 1960s because White mothers made clear the poisonous threat that iodine 131 and other radioactive byproducts posed to the development of White children. Black mothers in Watts and the Latinx-led United Farm Workers in places like the Yakima Valley (and other ag-centric West Coast spots) were less able to break through the casual indifference mainstream White culture displayed when environmental harms—poverty, police violence, pesticides—were visited on youth of color. When rebelling White youth came under assault by authorities, as in the violent clashes over People’s Park—and by association the “flower child” as a concept—in Berkeley late in the 1960s, the outcomes were deeply ambivalent, falling between disdain for Whiteness gone awry and the birth pangs of an altogether new, baby-boomer vision of Whiteness, via reworked conceptions of youth and family.

Casual · Mainstream · Political science · Power (physics) · Privilege (computing) · Sociology · White (mutation) · American Environmental and Regional History · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Gender Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law