“Our Pain Makes Us Family”: March For Our Lives and the constitutive role of gun violence trauma in youth publics

Abstract

This essay examines the dynamics of diverse youth public formation through analysis of the 20 student speeches delivered at the 2018 March For Our Lives rally. I argue that the collective identification as youth survivors of gun violence trauma functions to constitute this diverse youth public. I trace how the speakers’ shared gun violence trauma enabled them to form a racially integrated coalition while not discrediting their differently positioned identities and disparate gun violence experiences. In doing so, I forward a conceptualization of how youth publics negotiate gun violence trauma, asserting that youth publics are characterized by both present constraints and a future-oriented agency, members of youth publics must account for tensions across racial differences in their gun violence prevention advocacy, and gun violence trauma functions as a shared basis for political participation. My analysis of the students’ gun violence prevention discourse complicates this framework to reveal how gun violence trauma as a shared basis for youth public membership threatens their source of empowerment: ownership over their futures. Contributing to scholarship on the formation of publics, this essay demonstrates the significance of youth publics at the intersections of race, trauma, and gun violence.

On 24 March 2018, hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded Washington D.C. in a youth-organized rally demanding gun control legislation. Called March For Our Lives, the protest formed in response to the tragic mass school shooting the month before at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Colin Kasky, a white Parkland student who helped organize the rally, told the crowd: “My generation having spent our entire lives seeing mass shooting after mass shooting has learned that our voices are powerful and our votes matter. We must educate ourselves and start conversations to move our country forward.” ¹ Kasky and fellow classmates acknowledged that although the Parkland shooting may have been the exigence for the march, the protest marked a broader movement. Indeed, the rally featured a slate of student speakers from cities across the United States. Trevon Bosley, a Black Chicago teenager, spoke to the youth gathered:

We are here demanding that we get what we . . . deserve. We deserve a right to have a life without fear of being gunned down . . . It’s time for America to notice that everyday shootings are everyday problems.

The March For Our Lives rally prompted a renewed wave of youth advocacy in US gun policy debates.

The racially diverse coalition of students that formed around the 2018 March For Our Lives rally is a significant feature of this particular youth public. The speakers approached their gun violence prevention platform from two distinct positions: one presented gun violence as exceptional occurrences in the form of mass school shootings and the other presented gun violence as everyday occurrences that plague urban communities. The students who spoke from the first position were majority white and white-passing students, although not all, from Parkland. The students that represented the second position were primarily Black and Latinx students from US cities outside of Parkland. Advocating for gun violence prevention through this dual focus is remarkable, especially considering the tendency for these discourses to typically spotlight the former issue while ignoring the latter. As Craig Rood (2019) observes, white supremacist ideology operates in US gun policy debates to perpetuate inequity by casting high-profile mass shootings as worthy of our attention and diverting focus from the ongoing gun violence that unfairly affects communities of color. However, Jason Johnson (2018), Professor of Political Science and Politics Editor for The Root, observed that March For Our Lives brought the concerns of Black lives and policy goals to attention, describing the rally as, “one of the most organized, intersectional, disciplined and integrated protest marches I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to a lot of marches.” ² Although the March For Our Lives speakers represented an integrated coalition of youth activists, they were not absolved from the challenges of negotiating the racialized tensions of white supremacy and gun violence. Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore (2021) indicate how well-intentioned white allies must contend with the extractive and violent ways whiteness is “rhetorically naturalized” to benefit itself at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (p. 86). Such uneven dynamics among the March For Our Lives speakers prompt questions as to how they negotiated the racialized tensions around the issue of gun violence prevention to form an integrated youth public united in its advocacy.

I argue that the collective identification as youth survivors of gun violence trauma functions to constitute this diverse youth public. Through analysis of the 20 student speeches delivered at the 2018 March For Our Lives D.C. rally, I trace how the speakers’ shared gun violence trauma enabled them to form a racially integrated coalition while not discrediting their differently positioned identities and disparate gun violence experiences. Through attending to the relationship between youth public formation and the rhetorical circulation of gun violence trauma in the discourse of March For Our Lives, I suggest that the status of youth is a social category that merits greater attention from public sphere scholars interested in the relationship between publics and social identities.

This essay provides a sustained focus on youth publics by exploring their attributes and dynamics at the intersections of race, trauma, and gun violence. Scholarly examinations of youth publics shed valuable insight into future generations of democratic actors within the public sphere (Childers, 2012; Flanagan, 2013; Kang, 2016; Liou & Literat, 2020). I extend this scholarship by forwarding a conceptualization of youth publics based on their key characteristics, membership, and basis for participation. I maintain that youth publics are characterized as both constrained by their present liminal status and empowered by their future-oriented agency. Scholars have considered questions of racial difference in public and counterpublic formation (Davis, 2018; Jackson et al., 2020; Kuo, 2018); in this essay, I suggest youth publics must negotiate tensions across members’ racial differences to account for the racialized dynamics of gun violence. Scholarship on publics has considered the ways that gun violence prevention discourses mobilize collective action around gun control legislation (Eckstein, 2020; Frank, 2014; Hayden, 2003; Rood, 2019). I contribute to this by asserting that gun violence trauma functions as a shared basis for participation to constitute diverse youth publics. Yet, my analysis of the students’ speeches complicates gun violence trauma as the basis for political participation, revealing the riskiness in youth publics asserting a forward projected agency. The lack of effective gun control policy in the present continues to position their futures as uncertain and thus threaten this youth public’s source of empowerment: the promise of ownership over their future.

In what follows, I first theorize youth publics in terms of their key characteristics, racialized dynamics of membership, and bases for participation. Then, I provide a brief historical context around youth racial justice activism in response to gun violence as well as the epidemic of US school shootings before analyzing the students’ gun violence prevention discourse at the 2018 rally. Finally, I reflect on the implications of this argument for public formation scholarship.

Theorizing youth publics

A key characteristic of youth publics is their liminal status, meaning youth encounter temporary age constraints in their attempts to politically engage. Yet, despite present constraints, members of youth publics are fully capable of processing various experiences on the path to adulthood, which shape their personal constitutions to inform their future political engagements. Henry Jenkins (2016) defines “youth” as “people in their teens or twenties . . . in the process of acquiring the skills necessary for political participation at an age where there is less than complete access to the rights of citizenship” (p. 7). Accordingly, youth can encompass high school students that are not old enough to legally vote as well as college students and young adults that are not of legal age to run for office (Jenkins, 2016, p. 7). As such, youth are often painted as not fully fledged constituencies due to the legal constraints they encounter in their inability to effect political change through the institutional channels of voting or running for office. Notwithstanding these constraints, youth are often actively engaged in developing political theories from an early age that will inform future behaviors. Jay Childers (2012) explains how youth is a time when young people discover and acquire their core values and beliefs that will guide them into adulthood. Constance Flanagan (2013) likewise argues that the processes of political development begin in the adolescent years, well before the legal voting age. She maintains that the period of self-reflection often marked by late adolescence is also a time when one develops “beliefs about what constitutes a just world,” where reflecting on one’s own life also prompts young people to “make assessments about their society and where it is headed” (Flanagan, 2013, p. 33). Indeed, youth are actively engaged in the process of formulating their political identities despite their temporary age limitations.

As youth publics negotiate the constraints of their liminal age status, they often struggle to make their voices heard among dominant publics. Youth’s perspectives frequently tend to be dismissed or not taken seriously. In their research on youth activism, Al Liou and Ioana Literat (2020) find that young activists feel “fundamentally misunderstood along multiple dimensions,” reporting how “age related power inequities” shape youth activism in significant ways (p. 4664). Youth activists recounted how adults often trivialize or patronize their advocacy, and they expressed a desire for adults to instead listen to them (Liou & Literat, 2020). This inequitable relationship with adults results in youth finding themselves feeling marginalized and discounted. Temporarily prohibited from participating in institutional forms of political engagement in dominant public spheres, youth publics share some features of counterpublics in feeling challenged to make their voices heard. As Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer (2001) indicate, “counterpublics derive their ‘counter’ status . . . from varying degrees of exclusion from prominent channels of political discourse and a corresponding lack of political power” (pp. 2–3). The “counter” status of youth derives from the fact they are in many respects not legal adults and the commonly held perception this precludes them from institutional channels of political participation. It is important to highlight in the case of youth that their subordinated status may not necessarily remain permanent. We might consider this an instance of what Asen (2000) calls “fluidity” in the ways the counter status emphasizes movement and circulation rather than “fixing” the counter status in certain groups (p. 430). Theorizing youth publics in relation to counterpublics requires recognition of their liminal status as youth and the “fluid” temporality of counterpublics. To be sure, youth publics are certainly comprised of individuals differently positioned in relation to their various and multiple social identities, such as race, class, ability, and so forth; yet, their youth social marker is not fixed and they may not remain in a counter position due to age.

A sense of future-oriented agency is the second key characteristic of youth publics. The temporal nature of the status of youth enables youth publics to secure empowerment in a future-oriented agency through claims of ownership over the future. While I employ rhetorical agency simply defined as “the capacity of the rhetor to act” (Geisler, 2004, p. 12), we must also consider agency in respect to shifting social contexts. As Stacey Sowards (2010) suggests, rhetorical agency is a product of social forces or a “function of individual dispositions, social contexts, and a rhetor’s ability to respond to those situations as they change over time and negotiate social standing” (pp. 226–227). The ages of youth may create a present constraint that precludes them from behaving as fully agentic adults; yet, Sowards (2010) highlights how a rhetor can circumvent such constraints through speaking with an “optimism for future change” that “reflects the future orientation of rhetorical agency, to imagine new possibilities and alternatives” (pp. 238–239). A future-oriented agency offers a sense of hopefulness to rhetors whose social positions presently exclude them from dominant modes of participation. Given the fluidity of the identity marker of youth, youth publics secure a source of empowerment through their claims to the future. Simply through the natural right guaranteed to them of becoming legal adults, youth publics can highlight their control over the future through asserting a forward projected agency.

Although their age provides a shared social category, youth publics are by no means monolithic. Like other publics and counterpublics, youth publics must mediate unequal social positioning among member’s distinct identities. Rita Felski (1989) warns how the guise of a unified identity can exert pressure on individuals in more precarious positions to collapse forms of difference, such as structural and material inequalities, for the sake of identifying as a collective. Yet, Karma Chávez (2011) maintains the possibility that coalitional politics can be built on a recognition of “parallel” issues, or the understanding that members’ distinct struggles are not equivalent, but in close relation with one another (p. 10). Shifting from a single-issue focus to a coalitional focus that accounts for disparate yet related issues suggests how structural differences need not be discounted within youth public formation and instead hold the potential to be generative among members representing diverse backgrounds.

In terms of their advocacy for gun violence prevention, diverse youth coalitions need to consider how the racialized dynamics of gun violence affect members differently. Addressing these tensions across racial differences requires accounting for the pervasive influences of white supremacy and structural racism on this particular issue. As Craig Rood (2019) asserts, the ideology of white supremacy bears significance in gun violence prevention discourses even when race and racism are not made explicit. For instance, the ideology of whiteness manifests in such a way that spectacularizes a singular mass shooting event as extraordinary while failing to properly interrogate the repeated pattern of young, white male shooters acting as white supremacist terrorists (Branscomb, 2021). Meanwhile, there remains a woeful lack of equivalent collective attention to the ongoing gun violence experienced within communities of color, dismissing these events merely as taken-for-granted norms. Ersula J. Ore (2019) argues that US belonging and civic identity depend on systems that enable state-authorized racialized violence against Black and Brown bodies, characterizing this endless violence as legally sanctioned lynchings. White ideology influences gun violence prevention discourse to sustain these racialized imbalances and produces stark differences in how differently positioned youth personally witness gun violence in their communities.

As diverse youth coalitions negotiate these racialized tensions, I suggest their collective identification as youth survivors of gun violence trauma functions to provide a shared basis for political participation. As we know, there are a range of motivators that ignite publics to politically engage. In this case, trauma coheres a collective through creating an interconnectedness among its members, fomenting a sense of solidarity that leads to political engagement. Sensations of trauma can be collectively felt between bodies. Sara Ahmed (2004) theorizes the ways emotions circulate to create attachments between bodies, suggesting how sensations possess the ability to mobilize individuals into collectives. Trauma, an embodied sensation, can cohere individual bodies together in a community. Collective identification of trauma creates heightened social bonds and increased intimacy (Grey, 2007). Sharing trauma instills a sense of solidarity among group members that can lead to political engagement. Debanuj DasGupta (2018) describes the “political potential of trauma” or how trauma can be positioned as a “creative force” (p. 326). Collective identification of trauma produces a unified “we” that can be harnessed to mobilize publics toward political action. Karen Foss and Kathy Domenici (2001) consider the protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the ways this public formed to mobilize their personal trauma toward political action. In this way, trauma serves as the source for various publics’ political engagement. Gun violence trauma, more specifically, motivates the political engagement of publics. In her analysis of the Million Mom March, Sarah Hayden (2003) considers how mothers that lost children to gun violence experience “interconnectedness” with one another and “transcend” from individuals to a collective when they leverage public platforms to tell their individual stories, elevating personal issues to demands for societal level change (pp. 203-204). As such, I suggest gun violence trauma functions as a shared basis for political participation that constitutes diverse youth publics.

Youth gun violence prevention activism and the March For Our Lives rally

Contemporary instances of youth activism such as the racial justice movements that transpired in the summer of 2020 certainly stand out as recent examples of youth political engagement around the issues of race, gun violence, and trauma. This section aims to provide historical context on youth gun violence prevention activism and the epidemic of school shootings in the United States leading up to the March For Our Lives rally. The 2018 rally was by no means the first coordinated youth public response to gun violence. The affordances of social media have made possible the broader circulation of evidence of US police violence against people of color. In response to the increased public awareness of this violence, youth-led movements protesting gun violence that disproportionately affect minoritized communities have been on the rise. These protests call attention to structural racism and how centuries of racist-policy making inflict harm on Black and Brown bodies. For instance, organizations like Dream Defenders and Million Hoodies were formed in response to the 2012 fatal shooting of 17-year-old African American Florida high school student Trayvon Martin. Both organizations employ a racial justice lens in their advocacy work that calls for an end to gun violence (“About Us,” 2019; McGrogory, 2013). In addition, the Movement for Black Lives and its #BlackLivesMatter campaign received widespread attention in raising awareness of the US history of gun violence that disproportionately impacts communities of color. These gun violence prevention movements that raise awareness of the structural harm perpetrated against minoritized communities had been engaged in advocacy work well before March For Our Lives captured the national spotlight surrounding school shootings in 2018.

It is unfortunate that March For Our Lives also needs to be situated within the historical pattern of school shootings in the United States. Although the 1999 Columbine High School shooting is thought to be the first of these mass school shootings to capture national attention, the list of these tragic events has grown to an appalling length. ³ Seared into the memory of older school-aged youth is the recency of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, 6 years prior to the Parkland shooting. This generation of school-aged youth has grown up in an educational climate accustomed to active shooter lock-down drills. These tragic school massacres have shaped students’ social worlds. In addition, they have occurred amid the backdrop of an ongoing mass shooting epidemic in the United States, with gun violence taking place in movie theaters, places of worship, night clubs, music festivals, and more.

Out of this historical context, the 2018 March For Our Lives demonstration formed in response to the mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL on February 14, 2018, during which a gunman killed 17 people. The movement emerged in the hours following the attack after Parkland students posted to social media using the hashtag #NeverAgain (Grinberg & Muaddi, 2018). Leading up to the rally, students across the United States participated in a student-organized national school walkout that occurred on March 14, one month after the Parkland shooting, and lasted 17 minutes, one minute for each student killed in the shooting (Grinberg & Yan, 2018). The March For Our Lives nationwide rally took place only 6 weeks after the tragic attack. Beyond the initial rally in March 2018, momentum around the March For Our Lives movement continued through grassroots organizing, including over 800 sister protests globally, related protests like the National School Walkout Day on the 20th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, March For Our Lives’s national “Road to Change” tour, and the formation of local March For Our Lives chapters.

The students that organized the 2018 March For Our Lives Rally endured a fair bit of criticism. Opposition from the political right discredited the student organizers, dismissing the students based on their age and their lack of knowledge of gun control policy. For instance, Rich Lowry, editor in chief of American conservative editorial magazine the National Review, described the student activists as “juvenile,” “underinformed,” and “sophomoric” (Lowry, 2018). Other partisan-directed criticisms framed the youth as puppets of liberals, such as conservative radio host Kevin McCullough referring to the students as “media-hyped know nothings” simply used by the “political left” to advance “socialist utopia ideals” (McCullough, 2018). These partisan attacks critiqued the March For Our Lives movement because it received financing from liberal politicians and wealthy celebrities and donors. Less-partisan driven criticisms broadly called out the Parkland students white’ privilege. These critiques identified how the Parkland victims were largely white students and attributed the financial success of the movement to the fact that Parkland benefits from race and class-based privileges as a majority white and upper-middle-class community.

Yet, attention to the actual speeches delivered at the event reveals how the majority white Parkland students shared the stage with Black and Latinx students and used the platform to call attention to structural racism. In the analysis that follows, I analyze the 20 student speeches delivered at the 2018 D.C. rally. I observe how the student speakers approached their gun violence prevention platform from two distinct positions: one presented gun violence as everyday occurrences that plague urban communities and the other presented gun violence as exceptional occurrences in the form of mass school shootings. This distinction reveals the youth’s unequal social positioning. The students speaking from the first position were primarily Black and Latinx students from US cities outside of Parkland like Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. The students speaking from the second position were majority white and white-passing (although not all) students from Parkland, FL, and Newtown, CT. Among the 20 speeches, half represent each position. All of the speakers were youth and all of the speakers had been impacted by some form of gun violence. I organize my analysis of the students’ gun violence prevention discourse in relation to the following themes: expressing embodied trauma, negotiating different backgrounds and identities, collectively identifying as youth gun violence survivors, and claiming ownership over the future.

Expressing embodied trauma

Articulations of their collectively felt trauma are a key feature of the students’ gun violence prevention discourse. Their speeches are marked by moments where their internal bodily sensations of trauma hijack the speaker’s ability to verbally express their experiences. For instance, students experienced emotional breakdowns midway through delivery, taking long pauses as they struggled to regain their composure to continue. Zion Kelly, a student from Washington D.C. who lost his twin brother to gun violence, attempted to describe his traumatic experience to the crowd: “He shot my brother in the head.” Kelly then stumbled into silence, tears welling in his eyes. It is only after cheers and encouragement from the crowd that Kelly continued on through sniffles, “Once we arrived to the hospital, he was pronounced dead.” Kelly continued his speech, stopping only to wipe tears from his face and mutter “excuse me,” after each pause. Such emotional displays like Kelly’s indicate how the trauma was raw and palpable among the speakers. Faltering voices, tear-stained faces, and choked sobs characterized several of the speeches. Perhaps one of the more pronounced instances of the embodied sensation of trauma overtaking the speaker’s attempt to verbalize their experience was during Parkland student Samantha Fuentes’s speech. Fuentes read a personal narrative that described the events of that tragic day. When she arrived at the part which detailed her friends dying, her bodily reflexes overtook her, and she vomited behind the podium. After a noted lapse in her speech, she stood up and confirmed, “I just threw up on international television and it feels great.” Another student joined Fuentes on stage to rub her back, providing the comfort Fuentes needed to eventually regain her composure and finish her speech. These examples illustrate how embodied trauma functioned to build community among the speakers. As the student speakers struggled to articulate their traumatic experiences, they received verbal encouragement from the youth gathered. In the case of Fuentes, she received the presence of another student joining her on stage to provide the solidarity and physical comfort she needed to complete her remarks.

Some speakers employed tactics that invited the audience to bear witness to their trauma through drawing attention to silences and their bodies. Parkland student Emma Gonzalez employed silence to force her audience to witness her internal experience of trauma. Gonzalez repeated throughout the beginning of her speech the total amount of time of the school shooting, “Six minutes and about 20 seconds.” Approximately 2 minutes into her delivery, Gonzalez fell silent behind the podium and fixed her eyes out onto the crowd. During the silence, the audience observed her breathing as her body pulsed with inhales and exhales. Tears welled in Gonzalez’s eyes and the microphone amplified the sound of her sniffles. As pooled tears overflowed down her cheeks, Gonzalez locked her eyes into the camera, her eye contact unwavering except for when she periodically closed her eyes, drawing the audience inward with her. The crowd attempted to cheer and offer chants of encouragement, and Gonzalez remained silent and still. The camera panned to people in the crowd looking around, uncertain how to respond. Eventually, a timer on Gonzalez’s phone sounded and she spoke into the microphone, “Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest,” and she exited the stage. Gonzalez’s silence forced her audience to bear witness with her. Cheryl Glenn (2004) considers silence a “rhetorical art” that has the ability to deploy power through its disruption. Barry Brummett (1980) likewise observes that a refusal to verbally communicate works as a “strategic silence” when one is expected to speak and violates those expectations. Gonzalez disrupted the expectation that she would continue the verbal delivery of her speech. Instead, she strategically leveraged silence to shift the audience’s focus to her internal pain, inviting her audience inward to observe the storm of trauma raging inside of her. In turn, for approximately 4 minutes, the gathered crowd held that space for Gonzalez, receiving the display of her body on stage.

Employing similar tactics albeit to different ends, Alex King and D’Angelo McDade, two Black students from Chicago, walked onto the stage with thick, bright tape on their mouths and a clenched fist held up in the air. ⁴ Each kept the tape on his mouth until it was his turn to speak. The tape on their mouths symbolized how their Black bodies have been silenced from the ability to express their trauma, resulting in others failing to acknowledge their experiences. McDade told the crowd, “I come from a place where minorities are controlled by both violence and poverty, leading us to be deterred by success.” He then drew attention to his Black body specifically, “I stand before you representing the body of those who have experienced and lost their lives due to gun violence.” Both King and McDade discussed the effects of structural racism, speaking to differently positioned bodies and the experience of racialized trauma. Their comments substantiate Eric King Watts’s (2021) claims regarding society’s uneven racialization of bodies that mark Black and Brown bodies as more disposable than white bodies. King and McDade called attention to the ways marginalized bodies have attempted to raise awareness of their trauma only to have those attempts go unheard. This example illuminated how the March For Our Lives speakers resisted the notion of youth as a monolithic category and instead highlighted the structural differences among speakers.

Negotiating different identities and backgrounds

The speakers’ narration of their traumatic experiences illuminated their differently positioned identities and disparate gun violence experiences. Half described everyday occurrences of gun violence, speaking from the position of Black or Latinx students representing communities conditioned by structural racism and other inequities and plagued with gun violence. Chicago student Mya Middleton told the crowd, “Chicago goes through this every day and you don’t realize how much of a toll it is taking on our city until you see it in our communities, you see it on someone you know, you see it on someone like me.” Describing her encounters with gun violence as ordinary, Middleton highlighted this as a racialized issue, drawing attention to her Black body in remarking “you see it on someone like me.” Likewise, Washington D.C. student Zion Kelly said, “I am here to represent the hundreds, and the hundreds of thousands of students who live every day in constant paranoia and fear on their way to and from school.” Unlike student survivors of school shootings, Kelly’s experience was not a fear of a singular act of violence at his school, but rather a persistent fear experienced daily during his commute to school. He also spoke to the magnitude of students like him that share this fear. Los Angeles student Edna Lizbeth Chavez likewise indicated such collective levels of anxiety: “I lost more than my brother that day . . . I also lost my mother, my sister, and myself to that trauma and that anxiety. If the bullet did not kill me, that anxiety and that trauma will. I carry that trauma everywhere I go . . . And I am not alone in this experience. For decades my community of South Los Angeles has become accustomed to this violence.” Through recounting the ways these everyday experiences of gun violence impact their day-to-day lived realities, these students importantly highlighted how the pervasiveness of on-going gun violence impacts communities of color.

Students in the other half of the speeches narrated experiences of trauma stemming from a singular, deadly, mass school shooting. They framed these singular episodes as exceptional occurrences of gun violence, rather than an ongoing epidemic in their neighborhoods. Parkland student Aalayah Eastmond described, “I am a Parkland survivor. I was in Room 1214 studying Holocaust history, when bullets started flying in.” She described this singular, exceptional event at her school rather than broadly speaking to ongoing gun violence within her community. Newtown student Matthew Soto told the crowd, “At the age of 15, I sat in my high school Spanish class while my sister Victoria Soto was being slaughtered in her first-grade classroom.” These students focused on the fear of gun violence as specifically located within the school site, as opposed to an everyday fear within their communities. Parkland student Ryan Deitsch described being “full of fear,” at school stating, “you can be taking a calculus exam, and. . . have in the back of your head, where is the shooter going to enter, where will he come in, where can I hide?” Their traumatic experiences are isolated to the academic spaces of their classrooms and to a singular, deadly event. The stark differences in these two positions illustrated the youth speakers’ varied personal backgrounds with gun violence trauma, and it is this dual focus that they leveraged in their gun violence prevention advocacy.

Collectively identifying as youth gun violence survivors

Although representing two distinct forms of gun violence, each speaker collectively identified as a youth gun violence survivor. They engaged in this identification process through the ritual of naming someone close to them that they lost to gun violence. To illustrate, Parkland student Delaney Tarr declared that she was at the rally for her classmates, “my 17 fellow Eagles pronounced dead because of gunfire.” Parkland student Samantha Fuentes specifically called out the name of one of her deceased classmates in recognition of his eighteenth birthday: “Today is March 24, March For Our Lives. It is also the birthday of Nick Deward, someone that was senselessly murdered in front of me.” Similarly, Chicago student Trevon Bosley told the audience that he was there, “to speak on behalf of my brother Terrell Bosley who was shot and killed while leaving church April 4, 2006.” Chicago student Alex King told the crowd, “My nephew, DeShaun Moore, he was taken away on May 28 in the year 2017, two weeks after his 16th birthday.” Each speaker at some point naming someone they knew that fell victim to gun violence marked a consistent feature across all 20 speeches. When presented together, this naming ritual creates an act of collective mourning, despite the gun violence occurring in different locations and at different times. It demonstrates that all the speakers share in common tragedies from gun violence and the resulting trauma that lingers afterward. Their collective trauma as youth gun violence survivors facilitates a shared basis for political participation. Loss, pain, and grief function as the unifying factors among the speakers, regardless of whether experienced everyday forms of gun violence or exceptional school shooting episodes. All of them have felt the pain of losing a loved one to gun violence, enabling them to collectively identify with one another’s trauma.

The collective identification of trauma among the youth produces group solidarity. This sense of connection to one another is exemplified through the familial intimacy Chicago student Alex King employed in his speech:

Good afternoon, family. Yes, I said, family. I said family because we are here joined together fighting for the same goals. I say family because of all the pain I see in the crowd . . . that pain is another reason why we are here. Our pain makes us family. Us hurting together brings us closer together to fight for something better.

King illustrated a sense of belonging to one another akin to a family unit, suggesting how the collective identification of their trauma produced a sense of solidarity and shared purpose. King explained how he and a few students from his community traveled to Parkland, to “share our trauma with one another.” The experience of sharing their “trauma with one another” produced a familial like intimacy among these differently positioned students, reflecting Atilla Hallsby’s (2021) concept of “intimate spaces of mental wellness,” or “ground up communities” that foster intimacy through “shared vulnerability to relieve anguish” as a response to trauma (p. 56). King indicated the levels of intimacy and vulnerability exchanged among these diverse youth with disparate gun violence experiences and the resulting sense of community built from such exchanges. Other speakers likewise indicated a sense of connection and shared desire to mobilize toward unified political action. Chicago student Mya Middleton expressed, “Together we can make sure that what happened to me, the students in Parkland, and the individuals who stand here now does not repeat itself to other people.” Middleton indicated a sense of “togetherness” necessary to advocate for their parallel, yet related issues. The experience of recognizing and affirming one another’s trauma produced a familial-like intimacy among the students. This collective identification fomented group solidarity around their gun violence prevention advocacy.

Their youth public formation mobilized their disparate gun violence experiences toward a unified vision for political action. The Parkland students recognized the breadth of gun violence as one that impacts urban communities and non-Parkland students, viewing gun violence as a shared problem while recognizing structural differences. White Parkland student Jaclyn Corrin acknowledged her privilege and how she shared the stage with speakers that live the effects of structural racism daily:

We openly recognize that we are privileged individuals and would not have received as much attention if it weren’t for the affluence of our city. Because of that, however, we share the stage today and forever with those who have always stared down the barrel of a gun.

Corrin acknowledged the students’ unequal social positioning and a desire to work together in coalition toward collective goals. Edna Lizbeth Chavez, a student of color from Los Angeles, reciprocated this intent to join with the Parkland students, declaring “I am here to honor the Florida students that lost their lives and to stand with the Parkland students. . . I’m here today to uplift my South L.A. community.” Chavez signaled her desire to stand in solidarity with the Parkland students while simultaneously committed to representing the issue of gun violence as it distinctly affects her own community. The speakers indicated the need to support one another and work toward gun violence prevention advocacy that accounts for their parallel issues. To illustrate, white Sandy Spring, MD student Matt Post declared, “We know that to only focus on school safety instead of American safety is to dismiss the thousands of tragedies in between the massacres. It ignores the people, disproportionately people of color, who died by bullets without making a headline.” Post’s remarks illustrated how this youth public advocated for gun violence prevention through a dual focus rather than succumbing to the tendency of collapsing gun violence prevention advocacy to a singular focus on mass shootings. Their mobilization demonstrated an ability to mediate their individual backgrounds and distinct experiences with their collective identification as youth survivors of gun violence.

Claiming ownership over the future

As a unified public, the students negotiated the constraints of their liminal status as youth as they demanded that their political engagement be taken seriously. They recognized how adults tend to dismiss youth for possessing a limited capacity for social change. Parkland student Alex Wind challenged this perception:

People believe that the youth of this country are insignificant. People believe that the youth have no voice. When Joan of Arc fought back English forces, she was 17 years old. When Mozart wrote his first symphony, he was eight years old. To those people that tell us that teenagers can’t do anything, I say that we were the only people who could have made this movement possible.

Through dismissing the implications of their age, Wind debunked dominant perceptions of youth as incapable of effecting political change and instead framed their political engagement as impactful. The students also spoke about their capacity to actively develop political beliefs in the present that will inform their future democratic engagements. Naomi Wadler, a fifth grader from Alexandria, Virginia, expressed:

People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own. People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It’s not true. My friends and I might still be eleven and we might still be in elementary school, but we know . . . life isn’t equal for everyone and we know what is right and wrong.

The students’ remarks expressed their passionate beliefs about societal injustices, suggesting their active process of developing core values that will inform their future political engagement. Despite their age constraints, they asserted their perspectives and experiences as worthy of the attention of dominant publics.

Yet, the students also indicated the degrees of resistance they encountered due to the age-related power inequities with adults in positions of authority. For instance, Chicago student Mya Middleton implored the youth in the audience to:

Help us by screaming to the government that we are tired of crying for help to a group of people that have turned their backs on us . . . Help us by screaming as loud as you can that we are tired of being forced under the rug . . . Help us by vociferating the voices of those who are too oppressed to even speak for themselves.

Middleton’s exhaustion with how dominant publics have ignored their demands for gun control legislation illustrated feeling marginalized or discounted as a result of inequitable age relationships. The speakers recognized how their arguments often went unheard or were dismissed as insignificant. Parkland student Delaney Tarr acknowledged the difficulty in confronting dominant publics, referencing politicians and the National Rifle Association in her remarks: “They want us to forget. They want our voices to be silenced and they want to retreat into the shadows where they can remain unnoticed. They want to be back on top un-questioned in their corruption.” The age-related inequities between the youth and politicians with greater positional power are stark. As a result, the students expressed difficulty in feeling as though their demands for gun control policies were taken seriously.

The students rhetorically circumvented their present age-related constraints through threats of future change directed toward current politicians. Leveraging their position as future voters guaranteed by their natural right to become adults, they waged threats toward political leadership. Parkland student Sarah Chadwick threatened: “To the politicians that believe that their right to own a gun comes before our lives, get ready to get voted out by us, the future.” Presenting themselves as “the future,” permitted them to assert claims of ownership over the future despite their limited capacity to enact sustaining transformation via institutionalized political channels in the present. Fifth-grade student Naomi Wadler from Alexandria, VA, reminded the audience that she and her classmates, “stand in the shadow of the Capitol” and it is only “seven short years until we too have the right to vote.” Articulating a vision of themselves as agentic, the youth advanced a unified message that leveraged claims of ownership over the future.

Together the students imagined a more just future, offering a vision of a country willing to enact inclusive and comprehensive gun violence reform. To illustrate, Black Chicago student Trevon Bosley insisted the nation needs to realize that gun violence is not an isolated “Chicago problem,” or a “Parkland problem,” but is “an American problem”:

It’s time to care about all communities equally. It’s time to stop judging some communities as worthy and some communities as unworthy. It’s time to start to stop judging youth that look like me or my brother that come from impoverished communities any different than anyone else.

Bosley called out the racialized dynamics of gun violence in demanding inclusive gun violence reform that recognizes the breadth of the issue as impacting communities of color differently than affluent white communities. Similarly, white Sandy Spring, MD student Matt Post expressed his vision of a united “we”: “we the new, diverse, inclusive, and the compassionate face of America will lead this country once again down the path of righteousness.” Speaking in a future tense that imagines the youth’s arrival into positions of power, Post cast his vision of this coalition as both “diverse” and “inclusive” and motivated by a sense of justice. Their speeches reflected a future-directed hopefulness of changing social conditions.

The rhetorical move of casting their capacity to enact change into the future marked a consistent feature of this youth public’s gun violence prevention discourse. This is well-exemplified by Colin Kasky, a Parkland student, who offers a message of hopefulness:

For the first time in a long while, I look forward ten years and I feel hope. I see light. I see a system I’ll be proud of, but it all starts with you. The march is not the climax of this movement, it is the beginning. It is the springboard off of which my generation and all who stand with us will jump into a safer future. Today is a bad day for tyranny and corruption . . . Today is the beginning of a bright, new future for this country. And if you think today is good, just wait for tomorrow. We must protect, educate, and inspire the future and everybody here is proof that we will do that, and the future is looking very bright for this country.

Kasky concluded his speech: “We hereby promise to fix the broken system we’ve been forced into and create a better world for the generations to come. Don’t worry we’ve got this.” Kasky exemplified the manner in which students rhetorically circumvented their limited capacity as youth through leveraging claims of ownership over the future. They reclaimed the liminal status as youth and reframed it to argue for their future power. Addressing politicians and other dominant publics that tend to dismiss youth as not fully developed political citizens, and who themselves are well into adulthood, the youth claimed their territory as the next generation of voters and aspiring political actors. They expressed a hopeful perspective for their generation as they maturate into an adulthood that is not burdened by the weight of the status quo. In doing so, they reclaimed the typical criticisms of youth publics as inexperienced, naive, or unable to vote, and instead reframed their liminal status as youth as their source of empowerment.

Although Kasky and others asserted high degrees of confidence in the youth’s future ability to effect change, such claims carry an inherent risk. Articulated in the uncertainty of the present moment, the youth’s declaration of a future capacity for change hinges on the ability to realize such future visions. Their messages of hope suggested that their generation will assume control of their future simply through the right guaranteed to them of becoming legal adults. This youth public’s realization of their agency depends on the natural process of maturation, a process that they personally have witnessed the unnatural forces of gun violence interrupt. Their future is the very thing that gun violence would strip from them if the issue failed to be adequately resolved. This case reveals how youth publics formed around gun violence trauma rhetorically circumvent their present liminal constraints due to age through confidence and assurance over the future; yet, because the pervasiveness of the gun violence epidemic repeatedly robs youth of their futures, such arguments put them at risk of losing their claims of control and their sense of empowerment. Thus, a distinctive feature about gun violence trauma as the basis for political participation among youth publics is the ways it threatens to interrupt the realization of the promise of the status of youth: claims of ownership over their future.

Conclusion

In the wake of immense tragedy and death, survivors struggle to make sense of the loss they experienced as they process their grief. The March For Our Lives speakers represent a courageous group of young people that offer an inspiring model of harnessing pain toward productive ends. I have turned to this case to consider how this particular youth public navigates their structural racial differences and disparate gun violence experiences with their shared gun violence trauma. I have argued that their collective identification as youth survivors of gun violence trauma functions to constitute this diverse youth public. In doing so, I have conceptualized a framework for how diverse youth publics negotiate gun violence trauma, asserting that youth publics are characterized by both present constraints and a future-oriented agency, members of youth publics must account for tensions across racial differences in their gun violence prevention advocacy, and gun violence trauma functions as a shared basis for political participation. Through my analysis, I complicated this framework by revealing how gun violence trauma as a shared basis for youth public membership threatens this youth public’s source of empowerment: ownership over their futures.

This argument has broad implications for publics theory in terms of the relationship between diverse youth public formation and gun violence trauma. Deepening our understanding of youth publics might be instructive to public sphere scholars as we consider trauma’s constitutive role as a shared basis for political participation when groups represent distinct platforms or issues. On the one hand, my argument suggests a hopefulness for a generative function of gun violence trauma that enables the formation of diverse youth publics. Despite the fact that multiple mass shootings have occurred in the years since the 2018 March For Our Lives rally and everyday acts of gun violence have proliferated in communities of color, this case offers important lessons in terms of how this youth public negotiated the tensions of racial difference in their coalition building. Their advocacy offers an illustrative example of how to negotiate racial coalition building in ways that attempted to provide an equal spotlight onto two distinct issues of gun violence that often receive unequal collective attention. To be sure, in the time that has passed since the March For Our Lives rally, the event has largely become remembered for leveraging the issue of school shootings and not for the ways it also deliberated violence against communities of color. The March For Our Lives speakers by no means solved structural racism or extinguished white supremacy’s pervasive effects on gun violence. Indeed, the fact that it is the tragic experiences of the privileged white students that the public largely remembers of this event demonstrates how deeply ingrained the racialized tensions of white supremacy and gun violence remain. However, this case represents an attempt, albeit not perfect, at a youth public engaging the racialized nature of gun violence through coalition around disparate yet related issues and the significance of their collective trauma in constituting that formation.

On the other hand, public sphere scholars must account for the generative possibilities for diverse youth public formation in tension with the constraints posed by the liminal status of youth’s age. This case demonstrates the depressingly tragic limits of trauma as the basis for youth public participation as it highlights the constant risk gun violence poses to youth’s source of empowerment. As the social marker of age casts a temporary constraint over youth’s ability to change the status quo via institutionalized channels of political engagement, youth remain limited in their capacity to fully resolve this violent issue—an issue that looms over the realization of their futures with deadly consequences. Perhaps, as one beacon of possibility, we might examine the potential of multigenerational coalition building among publics as part of intersectional politics.