Black Children’s Lives Matter: Representational Violence against Black Children

Neal A Lester

doi:10.3390/h11020041

Abstract

Black children have never been exempt from the violence and abuse that have beset Black adults. Any comprehensive attention to and understanding of systemic racism, anti-Blackness, and intergenerational Black trauma must consider the historical violence literally, representationally, and fictionally against Black children and youth. For each news story headline about violence against Black children, there is a comparable Black adult story, underscoring the interchangeability of Black adult and Black children subjected to racial violence. This essay is not a history of violence against Black children in literature but, rather, an effort to understand and demonstrate that Black children’s lives have not always mattered and that to address true racial justice in this country, systemic assaults on Black children and, by extension, on Black children’s families and communities, must be included in any justice conversation and work. This essay looks at representative children’s literature that normalizes violence against Black children.

Highlights

In regard to the many missing and murdered Black children in Atlanta, Georgia, between 1979 and 1981—often called the Atlanta Child Murders—poet and author ntozake shange (1983) beckons Black mothers to move beyond weeping, to screaming and hollering, to making loud noise about their missing Black children in “about atlanta”: “oh mary dont you weep & dont you moan/oh mary don’t you weep & don’t you moan/HOLLAR
While this essay focuses on the lack of humanity extended to Black children and Black adults, this argument extends to the historical past and present violence against
Latinx and Indigenous Americans, Asians, and Asian Americans—which includes the massacres of Chinese workers during the Gold Rush era, the WWII concentration camps for Japanese American families, and the current random horrific violence against Asian

Summary

Introduction

Assistant Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brooks and Lowndes Counties, Georgia, describes the lynching of Mary Turner, who had spoken out against the lynching of her husband the day before: distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons. In August 2020, a white woman slapped an eleven-year-old Black child and called him the Nword because his go-kart accidentally hit hers: “At Boomers, an entertainment center in Boca Raton, last weekend, Haley Zager, 30, took umbrage when a young. Black boy bumped her car at a go-kart track.

Education

Caricature

Conclusions