I remember when I was 15 I watched Dave Chappelle's show, For What It's Worth, where he asked that, thereby bringing up the double standard in how black youth are more readily judged as adults than their white counterparts.
I still think it's a funny bit but, unsurprisingly, the argument's kind of specious:
- Elizabeth Smart, white, young, and innocent, is kidnapped and left unrestrained by her captors only 8 miles from home and does little to save herself. She's only 15, a child who couldn't know better, and cannot be responsible for not having done more.
- A 15 year old black boy killed his neighbour while play-wrestling and gets tried as an adult, resulting in life in prison.
Now that comparison was also further skewed because it wasn't mentioned that the boy, Lionel Tate, actually killed his 6 year old neighbour via injuries that went far beyond any likely bout of play-wrestling.
The court had the impression that his actions were "not the playful acts of a child". However, he was around 12 when it happened, and was given life in prison nonetheless.
Another case that comes to mind is Tamir Rice, who was also 12 when he was playing on a playground with his bb gun, and was thought to be an adult man with a real gun. Police arrived on the scene and got the impression he was a threat, about to draw his gun on them, so they killed him first.
Generally, white people, and perhaps other groups complicit with the hegemony, seem to look at young black people, and see them as older than they are. The majority of juvenile offenders in New Jersey who are tried as adults are black, which fits into a the general targeting scheme towards greater incarceration for black Americans overall, but still...
Why do white people see as black youth as adults?
I think being seen as older means you are seen as less naive, less innocent, more intentional, and more threatening. Seeing somebody as an adult makes an action of harm against them seem less repugnant, and any fear of them seem more reasonable. In this sense, there are two factors which feed into each other:
- White people use the perception of adulthood as an excuse or avenue for their fear and violence.
- White people innately have perception issues when it comes to black people which enables and exacerbates their tendencies towards fear and violence.
Number 1 is already pretty obvious as to why it would happen, as it bolsters the ever-continuing systematic oppression that has always resulted in an economic advantage for the colonizer-class, via slavery in antiquity, or modern day wage-slavery, and prison-slavery.
Number 2 is something else I want to explore, as it's more bizarre to me.
One simple, overarching reason for this is just that white people do not have much legitimate interaction with black people at all. Black identities are not relatable to them, stereotypes are pervasive, and negative portrayals in media outweigh any real-life humanizing interactions.
They don't really know what a young black boy looks like. Or perhaps most bizarre, the point in development for a black boy of age 15 looks like another point on the scale of white growth and development.
This connects to the general idea that all metrics are relative, but a dominant group establishes their own range as the centralized, "real", or "normal" one. Akin to Greenwich mean time, different group's attributes are either more or less than the sanctioned values of white people. Stereotypically, east Asian people supposedly have small noses, or are feminine, or are short - all established as such because the centre of the spectrum is whiteness.
(Generally though, there is perhaps no real way we can judge a normal appearance or age for someone, but our strong ideas that such a scale exists is damaging to our perception, and prompts harmful assumptions.)
(Generally though, there is perhaps no real way we can judge a normal appearance or age for someone, but our strong ideas that such a scale exists is damaging to our perception, and prompts harmful assumptions.)
And here is where maybe, white people have established a standard of how old somebody looks. Again, stereotypically, east asian people don't age much as they get older. The same is said about black people ("black don't crack"). Why don't we just say, white people age / expire more quickly? So with East asians supposedly looking young, combined with the perception of black people as looking older, I propose a biological mechanism.
Neoteny is the condition of some animals which retain their juvenile characteristics into adulthood, and adulthood really just means when they can sexually reproduce. The axolotl (below) looks so interesting because it is a neotenic salamander. A lot of salamanders look like that when they are larvae, but then they grow into the forms most people are familiar with (left).
Humans are considered neotenic as well. We retain the juvenile conditions of having thinner skull bones, smaller teeth, and shorter arms relative to our evolutionary sister groups. Perhaps the natural variation in these neotenic characteristics between ethnic groups is what leads to these perceptions of age. East asian people have shorter limb lengths relative to their torso, compared to european people, and african populations have longer limb lengths.
Overall what I'm thinking here is that biological factors may form some sort of innate knowledge, which has to be overcome through real life experience. There may be certain vulnerabilities in people's perception, which come from both media and our immediate culture, but also from the way we perceive other bodies relative to our own bodies, and the bodies of our most immediate in-group.
Firstly, there obviously should be diversity in the bodies that portray different characters in media, and representation of each ethnic group in the various roles that people can have. Following that, I think multi-racial societies could greatly benefit from exposure and physical interaction with other ethnic groups in their early lives. Predominantly interacting with a limited group of similar people can lead to the development of some implicit understanding of "standards", and in this particular case discussed, that standard is a double standard of where youth ends, and culpability begins.
