dehumanization – Contemporary Racism

Growing Up “Innocent”

Teagan Richichi — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:48:35 +0000

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 ...

The Dangerous Implications of Racialized Policing

Lily Bernecker — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:58:45 +0000

Racial disparities and discriminatory practices targeted at people of color remain a significant and deeply concerning issue in the United States. Built on hundreds of years of entrenched racism, the U.S. continues to show how both systemic and individual acts of bias shape institutions, influence public policy, and reinforce unequal outcomes across generations of marginalized communities. These racial disparities show up across nearly every domain of life, but the criminal justice system stands out as ...

Age and Dehumanization

Comack — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:19:54 +0000

Systematic racism can be defined as how discrimination weaves its way into policies and practices that exist within an organization or society. Racism comes in many forms, but the one area that does not often get talked about is how it can affect young black children, specifically in the context of police brutality and the judicial system. Dehumanization occurs when one is deprived of their human qualities, or subject someone to inhuman treatment and conditions. ...

Letting Black Children be Children

ShellyZK — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 20:11:34 +0000

Children are defined by their innocence, playfulness, curiosity, and youthfulness. However, those characteristics are defining White children. A set of studies titled, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” conducted by Phillip Goff and colleagues, explains that with the prejudice and discrimination surrounding Black children, they need fewer basic needs and protection. In other words, their innocence is stripped away. But why? Why are Black children treated differently than their White counterparts? In ...

Black Children At Risk

Madeleine Kemo — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 19:11:32 +0000

Children of color are at a high risk of being negatively impacted by implicit prejudices and biases. The way that people manifest their prejudiced beliefs can be dangerous to children’s ability to learn and be successful outside of the classroom. In a study done by Goff et al. (2014), children of color were much more likely to be perceived as older than they actually were. Young boys of color are then treated as older when ...

Fostering Racism

lauerbach — Mon, 09 May 2016 00:52:37 +0000

For our final project for Contemporary Racism, we were placed into groups, asked to pick an interesting topic concerning race, do individual research, and record a podcast with our group. My group chose to look at racial disparities in the American foster care system, a subject about which I had no prior knowledge. At first, I was uneasy about choosing a topic that I knew nothing about, feeling as if my unfamiliarity would provide me ...