White Americans have weaponized the idea of girlhood

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/22/white-americans-have-weaponized-idea-girlhood/

 

 

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On Dec. 26, Miya Ponsetto, a 22-year-old woman, was filmed assaulting a 14-year-old African American boy in a New York hotel after accusing him of stealing her cellphone. Within minutes of the assault, Ponsetto would learn that her phone had not been stolen and, in fact, had been left behind in a taxi.

 

In the days after the incident, Ponsetto attempted to explain her actions in a now-viral interview on “CBS This Morning.” She reacted aggressively when host Gayle King observed that Ponsetto was an adult who should take accountability for her actions. Ponsetto responded, “He’s 14, that’s what they’re claiming? I’m 22. I’ve lived probably just the same amount of time as him, honestly. I’m just as much a kid at heart as he is.”

 

What was notable in Ponsetto’s interview is that she not only infantilized herself, she also adultified the Black 14-year-old, making him out to be an adult to justify her behavior toward him. Ponsetto also described herself as a “woman of color” and patronized the boy’s father by saying she was sorry if she made them “feel inferior” or “hurt their feelings.” These were all attempts to absolve herself of blame as a “girl” and of racism as a “woman of color.” But while Ponsetto may identify as a woman of color now, she has claimed Whiteness in thepast.

The incident exposed how Ponsetto’s race and age are shifting identities that she navigates deliberately. Her attempts to traverse these identities — Whiteness and girlhood — are part of a long history in which White men and women have used perceptions of childhood in ways that have damaging and deadly consequences for African American children.

 

Historically, Whites have attempted to claim childhood for themselves and adulthood for African Americans, regardless of age. They have used ignorance, innocence and immaturity to avoid blame while challenging the legitimacy of Black childhood innocence. They’ve used these behaviors to make false accusations, to evade prosecution and blame, and to justify racism and maintain racial hierarchies. Ponsetto may not know this history, but she nevertheless deployed it when she attacked the young boy and then attempted to say she was too young to know what she was doing.

 

Childhood, much like race, is not a fixed category. It has not always been treated as a unique stage of social development. Childhood as we know it today — with children considered fragile and innocent — is a modern phenomenon that developed in the 19th century. And this modern version of childhood was racialized at its origins.

Conditions of childhood varied drastically among racial and economic groups. From the 17th century to the 19th, White people denied enslaved children any semblance of protection or special treatment. At the same time, White children received increased social protection and, by the late 19th century and early 20th century, unprecedented legal and social protection after the public school movement, enactment of child welfare/labor laws and the development of such criminal categories as juvenile delinquency. However, Black children were denied these protections, as they were excluded from equal schooling, their labor was continually exploited, and they were increasingly criminalized.

 

As childhood evolved into a more protected category, White people attempted to appropriate it to gain sympathy and reinforce white supremacy. During the 19th century, White people used claims of White childhood innocence to manufacture racist ideas that African Americans were inherently violent and sexually predatory. Ida B. Wells’s famous investigation of Southern lynchings uncovered how this worked. In Indianola, Miss., in 1892, an African American man was lynched after being accused of raping the purportedly 7-year-old daughter of the sheriff. But Wells discovered that the 7-year old “girl” was actually “more than 18 years old, and was found by her father in this man’s room, who was a servant on the place.” The public perception that a Black man had raped a child was used to justify murdering him. In fact, it was a lie. The man was lynched to maintain white supremacy — as happened routinely in this era.

 

These patterns persisted, as White women made false accusations against Black boys and saw them upheld by state authorities.

Regardless of whether the women claimed to be children themselves, they made false accusations and relied on established social and legal perceptions of Black children as dangerous, potentially deadly and adultlike. In 1931, for example, the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine African American boys (largely minors), were falsely accused of raping two White women. Eight of the nine were convicted and sentenced to death; eventually, all were released after several lengthy trials, appeals, retrials and time spent in prison.

Years later, in 1955, White people in Mississippi murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till after a White woman accused him of whistling at her. She recanted 62 years later. And more recently, in 2018, a White woman named Teresa Klein falsely accused a 9-year-old Black boy of groping her in a New York corner store. Like Ponsetto, when Klein apologized, she continued to adultify the child, saying, “Young man, I don’t know your name, but I’m sorry.” White women have made such false claims about Black children without fear of consequence because of established assumptions of White women as fragile and Black men and boys as violently dangerous.

 

White Americans benefit from associations with childhood, and definitions of childhood are ever-changing. Increasingly, studies of brain development indicate there is no biological significance to age 18 as the developmental entrance to adulthood. White men, even those who commit heinous crimes, are sometimes infantilized as boys who do not know any better. Brock Turner, a 20-year-old White man sentenced in 2016 to three counts of sexual assault, received six months in prison after officials suggested that he be treated with leniency because of his “youth.” In contrast, young Black boys receive severe punishments, including life in prison, and are more likely to be tried as adults. This process of the adulfication and criminalization of Black children has resulted in the harrowing statistic that today African Americans boys are six times as likely as their White peers to be shot by police.

 

This history is the reason that Ponsetto’s attempt to claim girlhood innocence was not only outrageous but also rooted in a historical precedent that sustains white supremacy. Ponsetto may not know this history. However, she appeared to realize she could create doubt about the legitimacy of a Black boy’s claims to his own boyhood while simultaneously inserting herself into childhood innocence, because White society has affirmed that she can, and it has been done many times before.

History has shown Ponsetto how to deploy girlhood and Whiteness because categories of race and childhood are not discrete but are contextual, racialized and gendered, and that she may use them as she sees fit. And in her defiance against being apologetic or accountable, Ponsetto apparently believes she has mastered her performance of them. It may appear that this performance is ludicrous or foolish, and it is. But it is also historically rooted, racist and violently dangerous.