Part 1: Childhood Innocence in the Western World

Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we’re going to talk about the monsters of childhood innocence. That may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I actually have a whole series of videos planned around this topic. It turns out that when we look at “innocence” historically, the conversation quickly becomes, in the words of the great sage Britney Spears, not that innocent.

Before we get started, I want to give you fair warning that some of the topics in this video are going to get pretty heavy. You probably already guessed that from the title, but just in case: we will be talking about some very real violence that children of color have endured, both in the past and in contemporary times. In particular, I’ll be focusing on anti-Black racism today, especially in parts two and three of this video, as this is a crucial element in the development of the concept of white childhood innocence over time. I hope that this video will help make it clear just how important it is to unpack the ideas about childhood that we take for granted.

So now that I’ve made you nervous, let’s see what this innocence thing is about. I have to lay some groundwork before we get to the monsters of it all, but rest assured, they’re coming.

The notion that children are naturally innocent is so ingrained in contemporary Western society that many people will go their whole lives without questioning it. After all, how could a child be anything other than innocent – no matter how we define that term? Because we can approach “innocence” in a few different ways here. First, there is the understanding of innocence as ignorance or lack of experience. Kids aren’t born knowing a lot about the world, or how to do very much. Just by virtue of how time works, they have less experience living than adults do. So, yeah, on the whole, adults have access to a lot more knowledge and context than kids have – including about the bad stuff. Very, very young children do not yet have a fully formed concept of death. Babies and toddlers do not have access to or a way of contextualizing the experiences of many others beyond their immediate caregiving communities. So while a little kid’s parent may hear about and feel grief for lives lost in a natural disaster a few states away, their kid will remain blissfully ignorant – innocent – of knowledge of that tragedy.

Except, of course, for the kids who actually live in the area where the natural disaster happened. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll have plenty of time to poke holes in these narratives later.

The other main way of understanding innocence is through a moral lens. Innocence can mean an absence of guilt, or it can mean a presence of moral purity. There’s a small but important distinction there. An absence of guilt is pretty straightforward, and especially when we’re talking about, like, babies, actually true in terms of material actions. A baby isn’t out there committing crimes. Cognitively and physically, they don’t know how to yet. But a belief in the presence of moral purity means that a child is not just seen as not guilty, but as an addition of inherent virtue into the world. Just by being a child, that child is capital-G Good. More Good, in fact, than any corrupted, compromised adult could be. Tons of people accept this as just a natural law of the universe. But that has not always been the case.

If we think about the Western world, it is hard to think of a system more historically powerful than Christianity. And many of the permutations of Christianity, and certainly those that have held a great deal of historical power, have the doctrine of Original Sin. This refers to the belief that all humans are born with the inherited sin of Adam and Eve’s disobedience already staining their soul. So it doesn’t actually matter that an infant has not had a chance to do any wrong yet; they still don’t have that absence of guilt I was talking about, let alone the presence of moral purity. Now, different denominations have different approaches to dealing with this sin. I was raised in the kind of relaxed American Catholicism with a somewhat shoddy religious education that comes from random moms recruited into teaching CCD classes, where I was basically taught that we baptized that Original Sin right off at my christening. So plenty of modern Christians have managed to synthesize a dogmatic belief in Original Sin with a cultural belief in childhood innocence.

But not all theologies are so easily resolved. St. Augustine of Hippo, who in the development of Christianity was a very big deal, argued that Original Sin meant that humans were born not just with, like, a little mark that needed to be buffed out, but rather an irrevocable predisposition to sinfulness. If left to our own devices (i.e., without strict religious structures), we’ll be out there sinnin’, and that starts from birth. St. Augustine’s ideas are still hugely influential in Catholicism, and some sects of Protestantism really ran with it. Enter John Calvin, who developed this interpretation of Original Sin into the charmingly named doctrine of total depravity. Calvinist theology was particularly influential in much of colonial America, due to the proliferation of Puritans throughout the land. In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Robin Bernstein explains that the Calvinist Puritans believed “children were inherently sinful and sexual – even more so, potentially, than adults, who had learned, through rationality and self-discipline, how to control their damnable impulses.” And when she says damnable, she means that literally: Calvinist communities believed that child-rearing was first and foremost a project of redirecting children’s otherwise inevitable progress towards Satan and hell.

So hey, we wound up encountering some monsters already. You can imagine how stressful this theology can be for those who adhere to it. It is important to remember that no matter what a culture’s social constructions of childhood, the majority of the people are going to care about their kids, and care deeply. It’s just that for Puritans, caring meant an extremely strict regimen of breaking the child’s sinful will into obedience. Hey, it may be oppressive now, but at least maybe the kid won’t be turned over to the devil at the end of their life. Monsters can be very motivating.

Still, it’s probably not surprising that when other philosophies offered a reprieve from this unremitting bleakness, many people found themselves receptive. And there were competing ideas floating around in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke had put forth a notion of tabula rasa, or blank slate, in which all humans are born – well, as a blank slate. We start fresh, and all we ever learn is written upon us by experience and education. We don’t have the presence of moral purity in this philosophy, but we do now have the absence of guilt. There’s just nothing there yet.

But on this blank foundation other philosophies could be laid, ones that more directly contradicted notions of Original Sin or total depravity. Enter Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the guy who basically all Childhood Studies scholars are a little sick of talking about. Rousseau was all about Nature with a capital N. He believed that humanity’s natural state was at one with the rest of the natural world, and therefore blameless and peaceful. Robbie Duschinsky explains, “The natural endowments human beings have been allocated by God, according to Rousseau, permit them to avoid death: self-love to ensure self-preservation, and pity for the suffering of others” (82). This sounds very nice, but if you are now looking around at the world and thinking, okay, if that’s where we started, how’d we get here, Rousseau has an answer for that, too. Duschinsky – whose article “Augustine, Rousseau, and the Idea of Childhood” is great further reading if you are interested in this topic, info in the works cited in the description – goes on to explain, “According to Rousseau humankind left the state of nature through a series of material revolutions” (82). Basically, as soon as we started making tools, it was all over for us. Our inventions may have protected us from some of the more dangerous elements of nature, but they also required us to form societies, which then led to economies, which led to competition. By and by, we wound up in the mess we’re in now.

However, every child, in Rousseau’s estimation, starts in that ideal state of nature. It is only their immersion in society that gradually corrupts them. You will recognize this as the literal opposite of the Calvinist view of enculturation. So now we have finally arrived at this vision of childhood that is actively better, morally and “naturally” speaking, than adulthood. It is the period of life in which we are closest to what we were supposed to be.

Of course, this philosophy has pretty drastic implications when it comes to how children should be treated. Instead of breaking children’s will, Rousseau advocated for children to have a “natural education.” This means removing “any artificiality from the life of the child” (Duschinsky 83). So only the mother’s breast milk, not a wet nurse’s; don’t teach them to read too early; and let them learn from experience out in the natural world as much as possible, with guidance from a philosophically right-minded tutor as they get older. (This is the subject of Rousseau’s educational thought experiment Emile.)

We can definitely see how Rousseau’s ideas were grounded in a privileged position in society, and we can also, from our twenty-first century vantage point, poke a lot of holes. For one thing, there was no period of human history, even the farthest reaches of prehistory, where we were predominantly asocial, coming together mostly only to mate, before wandering off again into nature with no thought of past or future. Before we were even fully homo sapiens, we were always an intensely social species. Society and nature aren’t opposites when it comes to humanity, as much as they have come to be seen as such in Western thought. But regardless of their historical and scientific veracity or lack thereof, Rousseau’s notions of the child embodying an innate, pre-social goodness and unity with nature became very, very, very influential.

Rousseau was an important precursor of the capital-R Romantic era of the late 18^th and first half of the 19^th century in Europe. And damned if those Romantics did not love the innocent child. That cherubic symbol showed up in in their literature and their visual arts – and paved the way, even as we move out of this era, for lots of innocent kids on consumer goods. Rather in contrast to the more famous saying but no less true: innocence sells.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no such thing as a totalizing philosophy, especially for, like, the entire Western world. Obviously, Original Sin still exists as a doctrine. I absolutely intend to do a future video on American Christianity and childhood, because hoo boy are there monsters to be found in that topic. There’s a ton of cognitive dissonance when it comes to our social constructs of childhood; children are often disparaged in the same breath as they are practically deified. Not really a surprise when we think back to those multiple definitions of innocence: morally pure, sure, but also ignorant – less capable and competent and rational than adults. In my previous video, I talked about adultism, which is a term for the systemic marginalization of children in society. Though on the surface, a belief in childhood innocence may seem like the opposite of anti-child prejudice, it can be used to enforce restrictions on children’s autonomy and agency in the name of preserving that innocence. Also the topic of a future video. This is the problem with this issue of innocence – there’s so much to cover! That’s why I’m doing this as a series – okay, focus on one thing at a time.

So where do monsters come in?

Well, monsters are what exist outside of and opposed to our definitions of humanity. (At least that’s what I argue in my Monsters 101 video.) If part of what it means to be human is that childhood is a period of innocence, then it makes sense that we create monsters to represent threats to that innocence. An innocent child is, after all, a perfect victim – which I talk about in Monsters 102. But even more than that, monsters can also represent our fears that our ideologies about humanity don’t always hold. If a rule of humanity is childhood equals innocence, what does it mean when that’s not true? Now that’s a monstrous idea.

Let’s take a look at The Omen. In this film from 1976, Robert, an American diplomat currently in Rome, is told that his child is stillborn. But, the priest presiding over this Catholic hospital tells him, there’s a silver lining: another baby has just been born whose mother has died in childbirth. Why not just take that one? Also, don’t tell your wife. Just pretend that’s the kid she delivered. It takes a little convincing, but Robert goes along with it, generously because he’s also grieving, but also because it probably didn’t take that much to talk a man into lying to his wife for the rest of his life in the 1970s. At least the film puts this idea in the mouth of an actual Satanist.

Because, uh-oh, yep, that kid ain’t human. He seems it for a while. Aside from some mild spookiness in his toddler years, Damien appears to be a normal – innocent – little boy. The family lives in wealthy domestic bliss as Robert is promoted to be ambassador to the UK and they move to a gorgeous London mansion. But then, at Damien’s fifth birthday party, his nanny very publicly kills herself after calling out, “Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!” A new nanny shows up with some obvious ulterior motives, a hellhound follows Damien around, and his mother Kathy starts having horrible nightmares and anxiety about her child. Meanwhile, Robert starts receiving warnings from a priest about Damien being the son of Satan – the Antichrist. Understandably, Robert is resistant to this information. Sure, the family’s had some bad luck – and, yes, Kathy has started to fear she’s going insane because she feels like Damien isn’t actually her biological son, which he isn’t, which Robert still doesn’t tell her – but Damien himself hasn’t done anything wrong.

Until … the evil nanny opens the door of the nursery to let Damien on his tricycle loose as his mother is fixing a hanging plant over a railing. He rides right into her and knocks her over. Kathy manages to hold on for a moment, but Damien watches while her grip slips and she falls to the floor below. Yet even then, did he mean it? He didn’t seem scared or remorseful, true, but it could still be an accident. Besides, the film keeps cutting back to the nanny’s eyes during this scene, which can lead a viewer to wonder if she’s actually running the show – maybe she’s controlling Damien in some way.

Robert certainly wrestles with these doubts, even as evidence mounts about the mysterious circumstances of Damien’s birth. Robert and a photographer who has started piecing together the mystery join forces and uncover the remains of Robert’s biological son – clearly having been murdered – along the jackal that gave birth to Damien. He is literally not a human child. And even then, when Robert is told that he must kill Damien to save his wife, himself, and the world, Robert is adamant that he cannot “murder a child.” Damien is in the body of helplessness, of blamelessness – of innocence. There has to be some mistake.

Doubt remains until Robert finally sees the birthmark hiding beneath Damien’s hair: 666. Only then does Robert attempt to go through with the ritual slaying of the Antichrist, though he is clearly still agonized as Damien cries, “No, Daddy, no!” Robert is ultimately unsuccessful – the police catch up with him, and, seeing a man about to stab a child, they open fire. Damien is placed in the custody of the president of the United States … and at the funeral of his father, in the very last shot of the film, he turns towards the camera with a sinister smile. It is only this final image that removes all doubt, more than the 666 or the hell hounds or the jackal or anything else. If Damien really were an innocent child, he would be devastated, traumatized, but he is not.

The Omen requires its audience to believe in childhood innocence, because it is the absence of that quality that makes Damien so spooky. But, as multiple characters insist to Robert throughout the film, despite what Damien looks like, he is ultimately not a child. Because he is not innocent, he can’t be. Though it may seem like The Omen presents us with the destruction of childhood innocence, it actually upholds it by supporting the notion that innocence is required for “real” childhood to exist.

In Evil Children in the Popular Imagination, Karen J. Renner argues, “As strange as it sounds, the history of evil child narratives has largely been a series of efforts to confirm the essential innocence of children” (7). She studies a large corpus of supernatural horror and comes to the conclusion that the fantastical forces that create the condition of “evil” – purposeful, powerful malice – “symbolize those causes of deviant juvenile behavior so often pointed to in the real world as causing an individual child to stray from the ideal of The Child, such as defective genetics, flawed parenting, faulty educational practices, bad influence like violent video games and a sex-obsessed consumer society, or a war-mongering culture” (7). In other words, it’s that pesky society to blame, not the Child itself – just like Rousseau would have it. Now, in The Omen, most of Damien’s exposure to society doesn’t seem that bad. His parents love him. Maybe they are a touch too indulgent, with their lavish house and birthday parties for him, but, you know, everything from the outside seems fine. But, a couple videos ago, I discussed the case of Samara in The Ring as a specifically adopted child: an intrusion into the biological nuclear family, a threat from outside that most sanctioned and sacred cultural institution. Damien’s intrusion also literally invites dishonesty and deceit into the family, as Robert conceals his origins from Kathy. He is the embodiment of the imposter, the façade of perfection concealing a rotten foundation.

Now, just as I pointed out with The Ring, the implications here are, shall we say, not great. Yes, much of the Western world has incorporated the notion of the innocent child into its cultural hegemony. But corruption happens at some point – and that corruption is the enemy, because it threatens our most precious, pure, perfect commodity. (And remember, it is a commodity.) So we have to root out that corruption wherever we find it. We may not be able to raise an Emile-style natural, unsocialized child, but we need to identify the threats that seek to end the state of childhood innocence before its time. That may mean locking down the nuclear family to only biological children – and only, as you may have noticed in Renner’s list, children without “defective genetics.” Put a pin in that one, because that’s the subject of my next video. Does that leave actual real children out of this equation of innocence? Yes. Yes, it does. It always does. We may sigh with relief that Damien is not actually a child, but real adopted kids, real kids with behaviors deemed as problematic, even real violent kids are still all kids. But because innocence is considered a literally defining characteristic of childhood, those kids are frequently denied that category of childhood socially, even as they biologically still embody it.

And this categorical denial stretches very far, to cover entire populations of children. So now it’s time to talk about race.

Part 2: Creation of the Innocent White Child through the Monstrous Child of Color

When I was planning this innocence series, I debated whether I should just begin with a video entirely dedicated to the overview I just gave you – Rousseau, Romanticism, The Omen, done. There’s enough there. But I decided that I didn’t want that introduction to stand on its own, even just for two weeks. I think there’s still such a temptation, after being introduced to that history, for people to say, okay, so innocence is socially constructed. Maybe it’s not a natural law of the universe. It’s still good, though, right? Why shouldn’t we uphold this idea of childhood innocence? Doesn’t it make us appreciate kids more and treat them better? By believing in innocence, do we not actually create innocence by ensuring a happy childhood?

To which I would have to ask, a happy childhood for whom?

You may have noticed that, so far, I’ve been talking about white European and American historical figures and media representations. I’ve repeatedly referred to childhood innocence as a philosophy of the Western world. This philosophy has never been universally applied. Indeed, even Damien’s whiteness, along with the whiteness of most of his fictional evil child counterparts, points to an underlying racial ideology, according to Renner. She explains, “I think that excluding minorities from the evil child genre reflects racist thinking. To me, the underlying assumption is that ‘those’ children have a natural propensity for evil, and so casting them in the role of evil child would be redundant, or at least anticlimactic. It is the supposed contrast between whiteness and evil that creates tension” (6-7). In other words, if Damien had been a child of color, would audiences be so shocked that he was not innocent?

History supports Renner’s argument that they would not. Robin Bernstein argues that childhood innocence has historically been “raced white.” Think back to all of those images I showed you: the visual representation of the innocent child is the white child. This holds true even in some narratives and representations with what we would consider good racial intentions. Bernstein studies Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an abolitionist novel that was, in its time, highly influential in the fight to end slavery in the United States. In this text, the most innocent of innocent children is Little Eva, the white daughter of an enslaver family, who sympathizes with the enslaved people around her. Little Eva’s innocence is represented visually through her fair hair and blue eyes. Little Eva, who is literally too pure for this world and therefore dies beautifully before she can ever become a corrupted adult, meets her death in a snow-white setting, as Bernstein points out: “everything in Eva’s bedroom, from statuettes and pictures, to the bed and bedside table, to the girl’s corpse itself, was draped in white.”

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explores the dichotomy of white and black as moral categories in her book The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. She does so by unpacking the “Dark Other” in fantasy narratives, the monstrous antagonist who is physically marked as darker than the heroes. She writes, “The traditional purpose of darkness in the fantastic is to disturb, to unsettle, to cause unrest. This primal fear of darkness and Dark Others is so deeply rooted in Western myth that it is nearly impossible to find its origin” (19). One really obvious example of the Dark Other would be King Kong: a black ape, worshipped by native “savages,” stolen from its land for the benefit and wealth of its white captors, who goes on a rampage against symbols of white civilization like skyscrapers, and has to be subdued with white military might. Most importantly, King Kong’s monstrousness is both contrasted by and directed at the whiteness of the human woman that he falls in love with and kidnaps. (Note to self: another future video topic can be how white innocence often bridges both childhood and femininity, to the detriment of actual kids and actual women!)

We can also see the Dark Other in the European fairy tale tradition. Ann Schmiesing points out that in the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, or KHM to use the German acronym, the color black is associated “almost exclusively with negative attributes or situations” (210). In some cases, fairy tale monsters are colored black, and in others, human characters are turned black, either through magic or with substances like pitch or soot, as punishment for their misdeeds (210). There is nuance here, as some negative associations with blackness derive from environmental darkness. We can’t see in the dark, therefore it is more dangerous. But Thomas’s work demonstrates how this fear has been grafted onto populations of people, in what ultimately serves as a justification for their ill treatment under white supremacy. Schmiesing also acknowledges that this is at play in the Grimms’ tales: “It would be reductionistic to collapse all connotations of blackness in the KHM into a colorist or racist context, but it is probable that European views of skin color influenced some portrayals of blackness in the KHM and that, in turn, negative depictions of blackness in nineteenth-century literary texts such as the KHM reinforced existing colorist attitudes” (211). And as the name of the Grimms’ collection implies, these depictions are part of a genre of storytelling that is highly associated with childhood. The associations of blackness with the “Dark Other” begin to be learned from the earliest ages in white supremacist societies.

So we have two equations or social scripts here. Childhood equals innocence; darkness or blackness equals threat. Clearly, we can’t have both at the same time; innocence and threat are mutually exclusive. So where does that leave children of color – particularly, Black children?

Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence is all about this question. Here is where we’re going to start digging into some particularly awful history, and I will be discussing a term that feels very unpleasant to say, which is “pickaninny.” Some people nowadays may be unfamiliar with this term, because depending on where you grew up, it may have already been relegated to the realm of only really old-timey racists who’d actually say it. But as a cultural construct, this figure is important to discuss, because it shows us how Black children have historically been excluded from the category of “childhood innocence.” So I’m going to spend a little time explaining some of Bernstein’s research and analysis of this cultural trope, and then we’ll circle back around to the idea of monstrosity after that.

Bernstein analyzes representations of childhood in nineteenth century America, and she acknowledges that these representations are diverse. No society is a monolith, especially when we’re looking at a “society” as large as a whole nation. Like we discussed before, we can have completely contradictory ideas and ideologies – such as Original Sin and childhood innocence – existing at the same time. But following the trends in representation, Bernstein argues that as white childhood was defined more and more by its association with innocence, “representations of black children, in contrast, were increasingly and overwhelmingly evacuated of innocence” (33). That means that these children literally are no longer seen as children, because childhood is innocence. Therefore, “the black child was redefined as a nonchild – a ‘pickaninny’” (33).

Bernstein defines this term as “an imagined, subhuman black juvenile who was typically depicted outdoors, merrily accepting (or even inviting) violence” (34). Oftentimes, these were visual depictions that derive from the visual language of blackface minstrelsy. The pickaninny’s defining characteristic is the inability of the pickaninny to experience real pain, despite being frequently physically attacked, often by animals. Bernstein points us back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the character of Topsy, who frequently declares that she is unhurt by both physical punishment and verbal racist cruelty. However, since Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist, the reader is not actually supposed to take Topsy at her word. Indeed, contact with the angelic Little Eva and her declarations of love for even such a wretched being as Topsy brings Topsy back to the less hardened, more emotional state of a nineteenth-century innocent child. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like a lot of abolitionist literature written by white people, can be a frustrating study in contradictions, but despite the lack of equality between Eva and Topsy, Stowe did still intend for readers to see Topsy as a child, undeserving of the pain of enslavement. It was only the cruelty of that enslavement that stripped her of the trappings of innocence that she should have, in Stowe’s view, “naturally” held.

Unfortunately, this is not what all audiences took from Topsy. Bernstein tracks how adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin transformed her into the embodiment of the pickaninny caricature in American pop culture. In these representations, Topsy’s declarations of immunity to pain are taken at face value, because racism destroys, among other more important things, all vestiges of reading comprehension. This type of representation became so popular that, Bernstein explains, “unrestrained violence against representations of black juveniles was, by the turn of the twentieth century, normalized in American popular culture” (52). Usually, this immunity to pain was intended to be humorous. While the Rousseauian white child, the Emiles of the world, were anxiously guarded against the corrupting influences of society so that they could retain their natural state of innocence for as long as possible, the Black child’s exposure to the most extreme violence was a source of entertainment. The construct of childhood innocence requires vulnerability. Innocence is always on the verge of being lost if the child experiences too much. Immunity to pain is a clear absence of vulnerability, and therefore absence of innocence – and therefore again, absence of childhood.

So now back to monsters. Is the pickaninny a monster – and is that metaphor useful here? At first, it may seem like a stretch. After all, as I just said, the pickaninny is primarily intended to be funny, not fearsome. But Bernstein repeatedly asserts that the pickaninny is constructed as a nonchild and therefore a nonhuman. So, by my own favored definition of monstrosity, we already have the first ingredient: the expulsion from the category of humanity.

Now, I also typically argue that that opposition between monstrosity and humanity is antagonistic. Here’s where we have to kind of hold two things in our minds at once: the narrative, and the reality. Obviously, I think we can acknowledge that the construction of the pickaninny is, in reality, antagonistic to Black children. But the victims and perpetrators in a story and the victims and perpetrators of a story are frequently flipped. Think back to King Kong: the victims in the story are the white lady who gets abducted to the top of the Empire State Building, and I guess all the people in New York who suffer during the giant ape’s rampage. The victims of the story are the people of color who the narrative associates with characteristics of animalistic violence and mindlessness. So the victims of the narrative figure of the insensate pickaninny obviously are Black kids, but are there any victims in the narrative? Not on the surface. As Bernstein describes the trope, the pickaninny doesn’t pose a threat to anyone but themselves.

But what are some of the implications of expelling Black kids from the cultural category of innocent childhood? Well, for one thing, that means that these kids are seen to enter the category of non-innocent adulthood much earlier than their white counterparts. Some of the consequences of this mindset are listed in the works cited in the description, such as an often-cited study by Philip Goff et al. that showed that surveyed college students overestimated the ages of photos of Black kids ages 10-17 by an average of four and a half years. Studies from the National Association of Social Workers show that Black minors are much more likely to be sentenced as adults and sent to adult prisons than white minors in the criminal justice system. And if they don’t feel pain in the same way as white kids, then why shouldn’t they, no? The pickaninny haunts the logic of racist mass incarceration – as well as extrajudicial violence young people of color face. We have some very famous examples of Black kids, from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, being murdered on the basis of being perceived as a threat or just an affront to white society, and not as children at all. The pickaninny may not be a scary monster yet, but it is a facet of Thomas’s Dark Other. Its inherent non-innocent un-childishness and therefore inhumanity is a necessary ingredient for the monster-ification of Black kids at very young ages.

Part 3: Challenging White Innocence

One of my favorite quotes about monsters is by W. Scott Poole: “Monsters do not mean one thing but a thousand.” It is true that a lot of fictional monsters are steeped in racism. King Kong is only one example: we also have the giant elephant-riding Southrons of Lord of the Rings, the Romani werewolf curse in The Wolfman, and like a lot of H.P. Lovecraft’s overall deal. I’ve focused in this video on anti-Blackness, but childhood is divvied up by racial and ethnic category just as finely as the rest of humanity is, and race, age, and monstrosity all intersect in unique ways across the axes of different identities. But, since monsters have a thousand meanings, some monster stories exist not to reinforce the narratives of racism, but instead to challenge them.

For one such narrative that is particularly pertinent to issues of race and childhood, let’s take a look at the 2011 sci-fi-horror-comedy Attack the Block. If you have not had the pleasure of watching this movie, I highly recommend it. We’ve got early career John Boyega, incredible alien creature design, and some often funny and always sharp commentary about class, race, and adolescence in the U.K. John Boyega plays Moses, the leader of a group of teenage delinquents on a poor London council estate – the titular block, a high-rise impoverished apartment complex. The movie opens with the boys robbing one of their neighbors, a white lady named Sam. The mugging is interrupted when something falls from the sky, and Sam runs away. When, understandably upset, she retreats to the nearby flat of another older white woman, this neighbor calls the boys “monsters.” The boys themselves are almost as shaken as Sam, though they try to play it off with bravado. An alien creature pops out of the unidentified falling object and scratches Moses in the face. The boys chase the alien down and kill it with fireworks, before recovering its corpse to see if it might be valuable.

This, it turns out, is a mistake. More aliens appear, and they are not as small and easily killed as the first one. The movie has some fun with the associations of blackness and danger here, as it calls deliberate attention to the impenetrable darkness of the aliens’ fur. Meanwhile, Moses and the boys have to team up with Sam to fend off the invasion and save the block. No one else is coming to their rescue, and Moses has a theory about that. He says, “You know what I reckon, yeah? I reckon the feds probably sent them anyway. Government probably bred them creatures to kill Black boys. First they sent drugs to the ends. Then they sent guns. Now they sent monsters to get us. They don’t care, man. We’re not killing each other fast enough, so they decided to speed up the process.”

The film doesn’t excuse the boys’ opening robbery or alien slaying, but it does contextualize these acts. Moses is under pressure from an older gang leader to work for him. All of the boys, due to conditions of racism and poverty, don’t trust adults to protect them or even care about them. They feel like they have to fend for themselves; they know they aren’t part of a category of safeguarded innocence. But, counter to the cultural narratives about them, they can feel pain and fear, and they are capable of courageous and selfless acts. In other words, they can be both victims and heroes – the human characters of a monster story, not just the monsters themselves.

The film even specifically points out the warped perception of age that Black children endure. Sam at one point has to go into Moses’s flat while he is on the phone with her for plot reasons that I don’t want to spoil in case anyone wants to watch it. But anyway, she sees a bedroom with a Spiderman bedspread. She asks Moses if he has a little brother; he does not. She then asks how old he is, and he says fifteen. Sam is clearly taken aback and forced to reevaluate her original perception, and she tells Moses, “You look older.” He takes this as a compliment, but the framing of the scene communicates to the audience that it really isn’t. The return of Moses to the category of childhood is a key facet of rehumanizing him in Sam’s eyes. He is not the “monster” that she agreed he was in the beginning of the film; he is a child, and he doesn’t have to be 100% innocent for that to still be true.

This is something I particularly appreciate about this movie, and it’s something that Robin Bernstein also argues in her New York Times editorial “Let Black Kids Just Be Kids.” Modern Western culture holds so tight to the notion that childhood innocence is sacred that it loses sight of the fact that children deserve rights and care just because they’re humans. They shouldn’t have to earn or prove their childhood and therefore their humanity via their innocence. They’re just people, capable of mistakes and good deeds at the same time. Flattening childhood into types and categories like the innocent white child or the painless pickaninny turns real kids into stock characters. Obviously one category is worse than the other here, but in order to dismantle one, we need to deconstruct the other, as well, because narrowing our definitions of humanity is always going to lead to more monstrosity.

So that’s kind of going to be thesis statement for my entire series of videos on childhood innocence. You know, cards on the table, I’m not a fan of the concept. That has sometimes made people feel like I’m anti-kid, but hopefully, after going through the history of this construct’s very unequal deployment across childhood, you can see how important it is to be critical of some of the ideas we take for granted – even the seemingly nice ideas. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion, and if you did, I would greatly appreciate a like on the video. I would also love to hear from you in the comments. What are some of the ways you see childhood innocence playing into the monster stories we tell?

As I mentioned before, in my next video, I will be discussing childhood innocence and disability, and the many monster stories that lie at the crossroads of those two concepts. I hope to see you back here in two weeks for that discussion. To make sure you don’t miss it, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel and ring the bell for notifications. I hit my first hundred subscribers, and I am extremely grateful to everyone who’s gotten in on the ground floor of this new venture! I hope you are enjoying it as much as I am. I’m really excited for all the topics I have lined up – and if you want to give me any requests or recommendations for topics, I’d love to hear those, too! So until next time, take care, and I will see you soon on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• The Omen, dir. Richard Donner (1976)
• King Kong, dir. Merion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1933)
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
• Attack the Block, dir. Joe Cornish (2011)

References:

• Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York University Press.
• Bernstein, R. (2017, June 6). Let Black Kids Just Be Kids. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/black-kids-discrimination.html
• Duschinsky, R. (2013). Augustine, Rousseau, and the Idea of Childhood. The Heythrop Journal, 77-88.
• Goff, P.A. et al. (2014). The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106(4), 526-545.
• NACDL. (2022, Nov. 29). Race and Juvenile Justice. National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Race-and-Juvenile-Justice
• Poole, W.S. (2011). Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Baylor University Press.
• Renner, K.J. (2011). Evil Children in the Popular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Rovner, J. (2025, Aug. 12). Black Disparities in Youth Incarceration. The Sentencing Project. https://www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/black-disparities-in-youth-incarceration/
• Schmiesing, A. (2016). Blackness in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Marvels & Tales 30(2), 210-233.
• Thomas, E. (2019). The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press.