Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 28

While the impact of racism on African and Asian and on African- and Asian-descent children during the era of European empires is incontrovertible, there is a kind of commonsense discourse in the Americas and Europe that while race continues to exist, racism no longer shapes children’s life chances. From a sociological perspective this is, at best, illogical since racism is understood as the practice that forms race (rather than race being the underpinning fact that then leads in some cases to racism) (Fields and Fields 2014; Wells 2007). Furthermore, the persistence of racism (structural and interpersonal) towards people of African and Asian descent in the Americas and Europe and the ways in which racism has continued to structure children’s life chances demonstrate its continuing salience.

In Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (2006) Jennifer Ritterhouse emphasizes the importance of experience and the recollection of experience as ‘fundamental to the interior process by which individuals came to think of themselves and others in distinctly racial terms’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 5). This emphasis on experience and memory is central to Ritterhouse’s method, which uses published autobiographies and (existing) oral history interviews. What she shows in Growing Up Jim Crow is that adults remember events from their childhood as formative to the production of a racial identity; race structured children’s lives, regardless of whether or not they experienced themselves as racialized people. Of course how race structured children’s lives was different for white children from what it was for Black, but in both instances race and racism erased any possibility of children living within the idealized protected spaces of childhood. It is important to recognize that it is not that in this period there was no vision of an ideal childhood as a space of protection and innocence; the point is that this vision was restricted by white racism to white children (Sallee 2004), and that this limitation on the rights of childhood was encoded in law. While the ‘ideal of an innocent and sheltered childhood took hold in the South in the early twentieth century . . . a surprising number of [white] families seem to have felt no need to shield their children from the most brutal acts of racism, as the many white children who appear in lynching photographs attest’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 19). In this section I focus on how racism under Jim Crow – the period from the end of the Civil War to the 1964 Voting Rights Act – shaped family life, and on Black children’s exposure to and white children’s involvement in racist violence.