Taking on the project of whiteness to reproduce itself as a silent non-identity-identity, Robin Bernstein argues that “[c]hildhood innocence — itself raced white, itself characterized by the ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under claims of holy obliviousness — secured the unmarked status of whiteness, and the power derived from that status, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (8). Not a peripheral effect of, but rather a central, game-changing player in, the material constructions of whiteness and “racial difference constructed against whiteness” in this country, images of childhood both fundamentally shape(d) — and can be used to reveal — the invisibility of whiteness in white supremacist societies like this one (8).
Bernstein does not only intervene in the what constitutes childhood and therefore children’s literature conversation with this crucial argument: she also offers scholars an important method of analyses with which to force the whiteness of childhood innocence into visibility. Through her text, she reads “scriptive things”, a process which she defines as such: “using archival knowledge to analyze items of material culture in order to discover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past behaviors… to understand how a nonagential artifact, in its historical context, prompted or invited — scripted — actions of humans who were agential and not infrequently resistant” (8).
Making a pain-based argument in her first chapter (which the dis/ability scholar and dis/abled person in me desperately wants to explore further) and several analyses of dolls along the way, Bernstein reimbues objects with power not in themselves, but in the scripts they passed on to the people who use and buy and sell and give and make and steal them. In doing so, Bernstein charts a path in children’s literature which can potentially allow scholars to examine how texts script reactions. Analyses, especially in children’s literature, often get complicated (or rather, unsatisfyingly uncomplicated) when scholars argue that, “this book/object/etc encourages children to x” (unsatisfying because of the assumption of the importance/definitiveness of authorial intent, but mostly because of the question of ‘which children, when, where, etc?’). Instead, paying attention to the scripting at once connects and disconnects the maker of the object and its users/viewers/etc.: I think chapter 2 (analyzing the subtle subversions scripted into the topsy-turvy dolls) is an excellent example of how this can be effectively utilized.
It seems to me, then, that Bernstein’s principle thesis that whiteness is scripted into the multiple layers of communication about supposed childhood innocence — which Black children are not afforded (indeed, not even able to feel pain in the dominant script [chapter 1]) — challenges the very fundamentals of the discourse of “innocence” and defining “childhood.” In other words, taking Bernstein’s arguments seriously — and I think that we must — means that we need to unlearn, or at the very least, relearn, much of what Rose has argued about childhood innocence and many have reproduced (a theory of childhood innocence that ‘forgets’ race precisely in the ways that Bernstein warns against).
In laying out Bernstein’s argument and challenging Rose’s and others’ assumptions about the universality of innocence in doing so, Racial Innocence refuses to unlink any conception of “children” — whether drawn out of adults’ desire or not (or with Gubar’s “collaboration”, or some other configuration) — from the various violent morphologies of the material and lived histories of race and racism.
In this way, it seems to me that this book is one answer to Danny’s call to examine the power that underlies any conception of childhood and children. However, I wonder about the direction of power flow that Bernstein spends most of her time discussing. Though she offers plenty of experiences of young Black girls interacting with, and thereby contributing to the construction of, childhood (especially in her last chapter on dolls), I wonder if a Gubar-esque critique is possible here. Gubar criticized Rose (as we discussed, perhaps as a straw (wo)man in certain instances) for flattening children into agentless beings, with adults constructing childhood for them; can we enact a similar critique of Bernstein, in which except for her examination of the resistance embedded in the scripts of topsy-turvy dolls in chapter 2, formations of childhood driven by people of color are not generally emphasized?
I am super curious how these kinds of questions will impact her next book, to be called White Angels, Black Threats: How Stories about Childhood Innocence Influence What We See, Think, and Feel about Race in America. She will be using stories like those of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to make it clear how absolutely vital children and childhood studies are to state violence in this country today, including police violence, media propaganda, and mass incarceration.* I am even more curious how Black girlhood, so emphasized in Racial Innocence, will play a role in this new book: often in the current discourse about state violence, violence against Black women is ignored in the face of sole attention being placed on violence against Black boys, teens, and men (see what I did there? Where does childhood end? I’m sure she will analyze that in media reports, and I’m sure the conclusion will be: sooner for Black people and other people of color than it does for white people). How will Bernstein interweave these questions? How should she?
Discuss.
* This is also a hugely powerful function of Racial Innocence, as well. Even as we know that children’s lit is becoming something more and more ‘acceptable’ to study in the academy, despite its persistent feminization and therefore devaluation (etc.), it’s becoming more and more conventional as a mode of professional study. BUT. Issues such as these — the exigency that Bernstein brings to the proverbial table — is precisely what I believe we need in studying children’s lit (and in studying… well… everything else) and something that we often forget when we evacuate our conversations about innocence and childhood from the fundamental issues of power that shape them to begin with.
