In America, the notion of childhood innocence is fairly ingrained within our cultural imagination, but who gets that innocence is, like many things, largely dictated by race. The hypothetical child is assumed innocent of knowledge around topics like sex and violence, and the hypothetical child is also assumed White by the White social imagination. For Black children, this assumption of innocence and of childhood itself is often denied, but how it happens is altered by gender. The adultification of Black girls is a known phenomenon to those who study racism, with this often leading to the sexualization of teenage girls, generally holding Black girls to unfair standards, and giving them more work to do – often framed as simply responsibility. But, for young Black boys and Black teenage boys, the revocation of childhood and its innocence usually comes in the form of casting them as aggressive, disruptive, and violent, with this even having fatal consequences when it comes to encounters with law enforcement or racist White people.
I was nine when Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman for being Black in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood, and the knowledge of it and how it was handled by the media at the time has stuck with me. My mother made a comment to me that if I was Black, she wouldn’t let me wear hoodies, and that I would’ve been getting to the age where she would’ve sat down and given me a talk about how to interact with the police. Additionally, she told me about Emmett Till, who was even closer to my age when he was beaten to death by a White mob in the 50s. This cracked the shell of my innocence, a glimpse at the fear and violence which people in this country are subjected to solely because of their skin color.
The loss of childhood is also seen in the criminal justice system, which not only disproportionately arrests Black youths, but is also more likely to try them as adults for crimes and more likely to deliver the death penalty to those tried as adults than they are for White youths of a similar age. In fact, the presumption of childhood innocence is afforded to White kids to the degree that they are often punished less severely for the same crime then the average offender would be. The denial of childhood by society is a fundamental way that Black people are mistreated and people, especially White people, must try to make sure that future generations of Black children can be children. Why do we allow society to rob children of their childhood because of the color of their skin?