“Did I see what I really saw?” Violence, percepticide, and dangerous seeing after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid

Abstract

We use a violence framework to describe an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid, and the subsequent cultural and structural violence that played out in one community after the raid. First, we focus on testimonies given about the ICE raids at two city council meetings, compared with how the raids were characterized in the local paper. We document cultural and structural violence in the newspaper reporting, through ideology and narratives (as forms of cultural violence) and percepticide (as a form of structural violence). We then analyze the process undertaken by 9–12-year-old youth researchers to construct a problem definition, and the script they wrote to explain the problem. We describe the “dangerous seeing” they engaged in to decode fictions about violence and create a rupture for solidarity and social action. Finally, we examine how elementary school leadership responded to these youth. Through fieldnotes, we document the cultural violence (via the control of public space) and structural violence (via percepticide and the obscuring of the social origins of social problems) perpetrated by school leadership.