Beyond innocence: fostering care for black children in the nineteenth-century and now

Abstract

“Beyond Innocence” examines how white nineteenth-century literary representations of racialized innocence, seen in texts, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom Cabin (1852) and Jacob Abbott’s The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky series (1859-61), have an explicit bearing on how Black children were seen in the nineteenth century and how the legacies of these literary representations still have a bearing on how we talk about and care for Black children today. The project begins by connecting nineteenth-century depictions of Black children as “pickaninnies”—the racist depiction of Black children that “[o]ften characterized [them] by their jet black skin, exaggerated facial features, insatiable hunger, state of being threatened or attacked, and ragged dress suggesting parental neglect” (Bernstein 34)—to the adultification of Black children. The pickaninny figure imagined Black children as subhuman and far removed from the innocence of white childhood that was embodied by characters such as the angelic Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thus, Black children were seen divorced from childhood. Because Black children weren’t seen as being innocent, they were culturally adultified. My project continues by interrogating how Black children characters in white liberal depictions of the nineteenth century are “saved” by whiteness and transformed from racist pickaninny figures to aspirationally innocent Black children. I intervene by pointing to Black writers of the nineteenth century, namely Harriet Jacobs and Susan Paul, to show how Black women writers resisted racialized innocence as a framework to care for children. Instead, these writers fostered an ethic of care that focuses on the interiority of Black children rather than just their survival in a white world. Such interventions continue to be relevant in today’s debates on how to care for Black children. For the latter half of my project, I trace how this ethic of care set out in the nineteenth century is further extended by Black writers in contemporary works — namely Lydia Diamond’s drama Harriet Jacobs (2011) and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) — that fully center Black children’s interiority in the narrative.