"Nothing Without Labor:" The Work(ings) of Whiteness in a Child-Saving Institution

The United States has a long and troubling history of child-saving– a term used here to describe the interworking institutions, policies, practices, and individual efforts aimed at uplifting economically and racially marginalized youth. Centering on Cunningham Academy, a child-saving institution with deep historical roots in the rural community of Cedar Grove, this ethnographic dissertation examines how child-saving persists in the present as an enduring racial project. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, this study traces how child-saving narratives and practices mobilize longstanding eugenic logics which reinforce the traditional family ideal, secure white benevolence as moral authority, justify state intervention into the lives of families marked as deficient, and continually (re)produce child-saving as good and necessary work. Although framed as rehabilitative and protective, these interventions routinely translate difference into deviance through heightened surveillance and racialized constructions of dependency and delinquency. Across four analytic chapters and three youth-centered ethnographic interludes, the dissertation shows how these dynamics take shape in the everyday routines, decisions, and classifications that organize life at Cunningham Academy. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that child-saving endures not because it consistently serves youth well, but because it remains politically and culturally legible within broader structures of white supremacy, naturalizing control as care, casting governance as benevolence, and sustaining racial hierarchies even as youth continue to imagine lives beyond the frame of being “saved.”