Resumen de Fit to Protect: Race, Vulnerability, and the Risk Politics of California Firefighting
Anthropologists have long understood that a society’s ideas about who or what is risky depend on how meaning and worth are attributed to objects, people, and processes in a given place and time. However, until recently, little consideration has been given to the ways race and other hierarchical relations of power and difference shape how risk is constructed and deployed in social life. This article explores how race and criminal status intersect to shape the perception and management of risk and vulnerability in the United States by chronicling the lived experience of one young African American man who was prevented from obtaining an emergency medical technician (EMT) license because of his felony convictions. His pursuit of the EMT license and a career in firefighting exposes how risk, as a purportedly value-neutral concept, builds on racialized ideas about threat and vulnerability and further entrenches racialized social exclusion. Whereas many have decried racism as an unfortunate by-product of actuarial practices, I argue that racism and antiblackness are among risk’s core animating logics. Challenges to risk evaluations must therefore go beyond politics of deservedness, rehabilitation, and inclusion to confront the foundational premises of risk head-on.
