Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells

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problems’ (Parreñas 2005: 99). A few men did ‘sometimes find themselves with no choice but to adjust accordingly to their new household arrangements’ (Parreñas 2005: 103).

      Commenting on the findings of research on immigrant children in Los Angeles that girls carry far more responsibility than boys in the maintenance of immigrant families, Parreñas says that this is also the case when the girls are at home and only the parent migrates. Girls translate; they do advocacy work in financial, medical and legal transactions; and they look after younger siblings. The eldest child helps younger siblings with schoolwork, helps them to get ready for school and feeds them. Daughters do more of this work than sons. Some resent it but ‘most daughters report finding they gain skills from their added responsibilities’ (Parreñas 2005: 111).

      Like all social identities race is based on a fiction that has real effects. The fiction is that race is biological and visible; that when we look at one another we know by looking how to classify one another into one racial category or another. Despite being a fiction the inscribing of people into racial categories has real effects on their life chances and their access to resources. The fact that race is a fiction means that a lot of work has to be done to classify people into racial categories and to maintain the boundaries between one classification and another.

      A lot of this work on racial classification gets done by state bureaucracies in collecting statistics, by census reports, equal opportunity monitoring reports, identity cards and so on. Throughout the history of racial classification people that cross the boundaries of racial classifications have generated anxiety in those whose world-view and privilege depend on the maintenance of racial boundaries. The ongoing debate in the USA about how to ask about multiracial individuals on the census form is a reflection of this anxiety (Brunsma 2005: 1132, 1136).

      All of the European powers and the settler states in the Americas, Southern Africa, East Africa, Asia and Australia anxiously and obsessively policed the classification of people into races and sought to maintain the boundaries between these classificatory groups by outlawing sexual contact between people of different races and persecuting their children. The forced removal of the children of white fathers and Aboriginal mothers from their mothers in Australia did not end until 1967 (van Krieken 1999). In the United States interracial relationships were illegal in many Southern states until 1967, when the case of Loving v. Virginia found that anti-miscegenation laws contravened the Fourteenth Amendment and were therefore unconstitutional (Pascoe 1996).

      In the United States the children of mixed relationships were classified as Black under the so-called ‘one-drop rule’; elsewhere in the colonies mixed-race children were more likely to be classified as mixed (métissage, mestizo) or coloured. In French West Africa (White 1999), in Belgian Congo and in Belgian-governed Ruanda-Urundi (Heynssens 2016), in Indonesia and Vietnam (Stoler 1995; Firpo 2017) and in Australia (Manne 2001; Moses 2004; Jacobs c.2009) the state and the church encouraged or enforced the separation of these children from their African, Asian or Aboriginal mothers so as to assimilate them into whiteness or to form a racialized middle class.

      While the impact of racism on African and Asian and on African- and Asian-descent children during the era of European empires is incontrovertible, there is a kind of commonsense discourse in the Americas and Europe that while race continues to exist, racism no longer shapes children’s life chances. From a sociological perspective this is, at best, illogical since racism is understood as the practice that forms race (rather than race being the underpinning fact that then leads in some cases to racism) (Fields and Fields 2014; Wells 2007). Furthermore, the persistence of racism (structural and interpersonal) towards people of African and Asian descent in the Americas and Europe and the ways in which racism has continued to structure children’s life chances demonstrate its continuing salience.

      In Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (2006) Jennifer Ritterhouse emphasizes the importance of experience and the recollection of experience as ‘fundamental to the interior process by which individuals came to think of themselves and others in distinctly racial terms’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 5). This emphasis on experience and memory is central to Ritterhouse’s method, which uses published autobiographies and (existing) oral history interviews. What she shows in Growing Up Jim Crow is that adults remember events from their childhood as formative to the production of a racial identity; race structured children’s lives, regardless of whether or not they experienced themselves as racialized people. Of course how race structured children’s lives was different for white children from what it was for Black, but in both instances race and racism erased any possibility of children living within the idealized protected spaces of childhood. It is important to recognize that it is not that in this period there was no vision of an ideal childhood as a space of protection and innocence; the point is that this vision was restricted by white racism to white children (Sallee 2004), and that this limitation on the rights of childhood was encoded in law. While the ‘ideal of an innocent and sheltered childhood took hold in the South in the early twentieth century . . . a surprising number of [white] families seem to have felt no need to shield their children from the most brutal acts of racism, as the many white children who appear in lynching photographs attest’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 19). In this section I focus on how racism under Jim Crow – the period from the end of the Civil War to the 1964 Voting Rights Act – shaped family life, and on Black children’s exposure to and white children’s involvement in racist violence.

      It was in the home and from the instruction of their mothers that white children learned what Ritterhouse calls ‘racial etiquette’ – the overly polite term that she uses to describe the spoken and unspoken rules that governed relations between white and Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. The gradual acceptance of a new ideal of childhood innocence and dependency was not extended by most whites to Black children: ‘even those white Southerners who devoted the most attention and material and emotional resources to their own children rarely saw any but the very youngest black children as innocents or extended the ideal of the sheltered childhood to blacks’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 63). Many white children were taught not to use terms of respect for Black people, including ‘Lady’ or ‘Sir’, ‘Miss’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Clifton Johnson in his Highways and Byways of the South (1904) recorded an exchange between a white girl and her grandmother whose home he was lodging at in Florida. ‘There’s a colored lady out on the porch wants to speak to you’, the girl told her grandmother. The grandmother shouted at the girl demanding that she use racist epithets to describe the woman at the door (Ritterhouse 2006: 55).

      It is one of the contradictions of the social relationships that economic inequalities produce that those with social power both despise those without power and are dependent on their labour. In Southern households domestic labour and the care of children were often done by Black servants. The intimacy of the contact between white people and their Black servants is illustrated by countless stories of white children’s emotional attachments to Black servants; this intimacy did not erode white racism in most cases. (A fact that should give pause to those

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