National belonging and expulsion in North Carolina's juvenile reform institutions for girls, 1918-1944.

National belonging and expulsion in North Carolina’s juvenile reform institutions for girls, 1918-1944.

My paper uses two historical examples of juvenile reformatories in North Carolina to explore how mercy is related to Southern modernity, and how both are related to liberal humanism as understood by scholars such as Foucault and Agamben. In the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, New South advocates helped to secure their regional affiliation with the American empire through the showcasing of mercies, variously racialized, gendered, and linked to sexuality. Spectacles of mercy were keyed to the South’s own subordinate status within national U.S. politics, and were crucial to the reinscription of white Americanism in the post-emancipation twentieth-century liberal-humanist context. As citizen-building institutions with a protective and benevolent mandate, juvenile reform served as a bio- political tool of state racism, indoctrinating young women and girls of the working and workless poor into white Americanism as compliant labourers. Governing through the microphysics of daily life, with a focus on family patterns as the primary source of poverty and social disorder, Jim Crow training schools extended mercy that was often commensurate with increasing, noncompassionate racialization, with implications for our present-day state of supposed “post-raciality.” My paper is organized around analyses of archival records of restricted juvenile reformatory racial policies, a show trial involving white girls who faced the electric chair for the capital crime of arson, and negotiations for state funding for the sexual reformation of “wayward” black girls.