I'm just starting to make a bit of headway into my massive pile of to-read and to-review books. At the top of the pile is Robin Bernstein's stunningly informative book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (America and the Long 19th Century). Bernstein reveals and unpacks the moment when notions about childhood and innocence conflated and became racialized.
As I make my way through her book, I realized the broad implications of her work and how it relates to the ways in which society views children of color, especially black children.
In the clip above she explains how she came to examine the connection between childhood innocence and race through the lens of performance.
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