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The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be.
—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
You see, black people, black resistance, and black organizing, has changed the landscape of what is politically possible. Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it The Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter.
—Alicia Garza, “Why Black Lives Matter”
Though categories of age are often assumed to be universal and shared across multiple categories of difference, they are often conceptually deployed to maintain those very categories of difference. Many scholars have recognized the degree to which black and brown children are excluded from the conditions of dependency, protection, and innocence imagined to belong to the category child.1 Alongside childhood, the category of adolescence presupposes universality even while it does the work of differentiating and naturalizing racial hierarchies. In this sense, adolescence, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, is a fundamentally racial category. Claudia Castañeda explains how nineteenth-century racial science posited that white and black children had the same levels of intelligence and capability only to reassert adolescence as the moment of racial differentiation when development presumably stagnated in non-white bodies (37). The so-called father of adolescence, G. Stanley Hall, imagined adolescence as a racial category that replicated the evolutionary development of humankind, one in which the proper environment, guidance, and control were necessary to reach the “higher and more completely human traits” he correlated with the norms of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth (1: xiii). Like Sylvia Wynter’s deconstruction of the universal “Man” of...