Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 22

This chapter is about how race and gender shape children’s lives, and how class is experienced through the prism of race and gender. The aim of the chapter is to show that childhood cannot be understood without an appreciation of how it is lived through gendered and raced identities and experiences. This aim is achieved by showing how children learn gendered roles and racial identities and how their identifications shape their life chances and their experiences. In the first part of the chapter I show that the child’s work of learning that she or he has a gender does not begin and end with the simple announcement that ‘it’s a girl’ or ‘it’s a boy’; the child has to learn what these statements mean: what it is that is involved in being a boy or a girl. The second part of the chapter shows how the founding and globalization of racial capitalism has shaped children’s lives. It explores firstly one of the most obvious examples of how race is created through discursive state practices and does violence to children’s lives: the categorization of mixed-race children in the European empires and the separation of these children from their African, Asian or indigenous mothers. It then shows how in the USA, after the end of the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the violent resistance by whites to Black Reconstruction, children’s lives were shaped by a series of laws and social practices (Jim Crow) that overturned many of the liberties that had been won by African Americans. I then explore several studies of how race and racism shape the US school system and the ways in which children learn, in school, the significance of race in shaping their childhoods and their futures.