Construction of Childhood & Children’s Varied Experiences in the Context of Race

Scholarly work shows boundless variation in the experiences and construction of childhood in the context of race. Considering racial rites of passage specifically which suggest the lessons children learn about race as they mature, many authors have explored the positive and negative experiences of both Black and white children. Both Wilkerson (2010) and Rothenberg & Wright (2010) provide detailed descriptions of the experiences of children who learned lessons of race as they grew up. Rothenberg & Wright provide a set of detailed descriptions of experiences Wright faced as he grew up in the South and learned, sometimes by being harmed by others, the rules around race that existed at the time of Jim Crow laws (2010). Wilkerson’s biographical approach traces the lives of three people through the great migration which include the experiences of Black children as they also learned the nature of their social status (2010). Both of these pieces are incredibly informative and speak to the unimaginable challenges that Black children faced in comparison to their white peers. Furthermore, they show how Black parents were forced to construct a world for their children where they learned about the nature of racial oppression and the threat they faced as Black people in that society.

Ritterhouse’s work and interview accounts he provides are the most striking and offer similar accounts to that of  Wilkerson and Rothenberg & Wright but also provide stories from white people and the lessons they learned growing up in Jim Crow. This comparison is striking and clearly shows the varied experiences of white and Black children faced along with some of the less often cited lessons that white children learned about enforcing racist practices (2006). Lastly, Capshaw (2021) provides a more positive light to the discussion of the experiences of Black children while also recognizing the nature of the world they faced. Capshaw focuses on W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Brownies Book and the images in it as was part of the construction of Black children’s play that “encouraged the psychological practice of joy, the pursuit of inventiveness, and the ongoing building of community as a means of freedom and resistance to the racist American landscape” (2021, p.369). This is a very different approach to the other examples we have discussed and provides uplifting lessons of play and by extension race when this kind of construction of childhood was often only afforded to white children.

Construction of Childhood & Children’s Varied Experiences in the Context of Place

Scholarly work explores the construction of childhood and its associated themes as inextricably linked to notions of place. There is an abundance of local variation – contexts that are directly associated with the place of its origin – that prove to be integral to understanding a phenomenon in its complex form. For instance, in order to examine spaces of play, it’s beneficial to consider the work of Ann Marie F. Murnaghan who produced material that contextualized playgrounds in Toronto as sites of discipline (Murnaghan 2016).

Notions of home are made more dynamic when considered alongside their place as is seen in exploring Chicago tenements. Edith Abbott studied just that, and her scholarship rested on her understanding of the lakeside geography of Chicago, the physical segregation of the city based on race and class, and the physicality of the tenements themselves (Abbott 1936). 

In examining the constructions of childhood for a specific demographic in a certain era – Native American children around the turn of the 20th century -this emphasis on place becomes all the more relevant and interesting. Anthropologist K. Tsianina Lomawaima writes of her father, Curtis Thorpe Carr, and his experience as a child being directly impacted by place. He was sent away by court order from home in Wichita, Kansas to the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma. Eight years later, upon returning to Wichita, Curtis found his life and relationship to family had irrevocably changed (Lomawaima 2018). Sarah de Leeuw provides scholarship on the geographies of Indian boarding schools in British Columbia, Canada. This work focuses on dominant social narratives regarding the assumed childlike nature of Indigenous peoples and on the material consequences of that which emerged in British Columbia. With a focus on children’s bodies and physical space, de Leeuw integrates geography into this historical analysis (de Leeuw 2009). Julia Bates’ article on the racist justification made for the institutionalization for Native children highlights the importance of place in her analysis. Much Boarding School Era policy was meant to disenfranchise, divide, and otherwise disempower Native American communities, and one of the most effective tactics utilized was in the manipulation of space. Legislation required Native children to leave their homes on reservations for education at boarding schools, and this geographic distance aided in the cultural coercion that occurred at boarding schools. Bates juxtaposes the theory that required Indigenous people to endure institutionalization against the theory – being acted upon at the same time – that white children would only suffer from institutionalization. Bates uses the Carlisle Indian School as a potent example of the utilization of spatiality and materiality by government bodies to oppress and assimilate Native children to white American standards (Bates 2016).

Construction of Childhood & Children’s Varied Experiences in the Context of Gender

            The topic of material culture and rites of passage was most divided by gender. Boy and girls were given vastly different toys, with vastly different meanings. For example, boys were often given specific toys from their fathers that implied what jobs they may work later in life, like farm-oriented toys for example, (Cross, 1998). This was especially present in toys that were meant to educate the child. Boys were often given toys that would teach them subjects like science and philosophy, (Ayrton, 1853). For girls, the lessening of younger siblings on average meant that dolls were employed to teach traditional practices of childcare. This was just one of many ways children, primarily girls, were given toys by their parents by a certain age to try and tie them closer to home, where they could be deemed safe via supervision, (Cross, 1998).

Gender transferred over into what games and sports children partook in as well. A study in Worcester, Mass. in the late-1890s showed that which games children chose to play were most noticeably defined by the gender of each child. These same games also were only played by groups of all one gender, until a certain age in teenage years led to more common intermixing of genders. Team sports, such as barn ball, essentially an early form of what is now called baseball were often played by boys only in the late 1800’s. This was a sport for boys who had discovered how fun it was to hit a ball with a stick (Weaver, 1939). Sports like this were played once a boy was old enough to have the ability to hit the ball and were not phased out at a young age like other sports and games. The sport and skill of hunting with a bow an arrow was also taught as early as possible to young boys. “Boys were taught the use of the bow and arrow at an early age, and acquired considerable expertness in their use. One important pastime of our boys was that of imitating the noise of every bird and beast in the woods. This faculty was a very necessary part of education,” (Weaver, 1939). Education in hunting was just one of many examples of how children, primarily young boys, were trained as soon as deemed possible in a skill as a rite of passage.