Growing Up “Innocent”
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 …