Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 30

One of the starkest instances of how even those children who were supposed to be living a sheltered childhood, that is to say white children, were not sheltered from racist violence, indeed were encouraged to participate, as actors or spectators, in acts of racist violence is found in accounts (written and photographic) of the lynching of Black men by white mobs (Ritterhouse 2006: 64, 71–8). Lynchings and race riots (attacks by whites on Black neighbourhoods) were a common experience in the South, and children were as exposed to the possibility and reality of violence as adults were. Walter White, the future executive of the NAACP, describes his experience of being caught up, at the age of 13, in a race riot. The riot taught him, he says, ‘that there is no escape from life’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 109). This telling phrase grasps exactly why children’s lives cannot be considered as if children live in a separate space from adult society and politics: there is only one life and children are as much a part of it as adults are.