Group B: Summary Post (The Innocent vs. The Beast)

An opinion article in the Washington Post, “In America, black children don’t get to be children ” by Stacey Patton, the readers get an opinionated article from a reporter at the Chronicles of Higher Education about her views on how black children are seen as monstrous to society and society officials. Patton constructs this article to create the argument that African-American children never truly have a point in time where they can be considered and recognized as innocent children. She starts off by making her argument and distinguishing clear boundaries of how he believes black and whites are viewed; whites are seen as “innocent white child”, opposed to black children who are described as a “big, black beast”. Patton argues that black children do not stand a chance of innocence. They always seem to be wrong to the judicial system, even when they were the ones harmed. They are always, even in a state or position of criminal matters, evaluated as the one in fault. Her argument was based around the idea that although black people have been granted to equality in all stages of their lives, they never seem to fully achieve it.

The author, Stacey Patton, then goes on by exemplifying three primary examples that were recent cases in US history Wilson vs. Brown, Zimmerman vs. Martin, and to prove her argument of black people, especially adolescence, being viewed as a harmful and faulted race. She highlights that most of the time black children are not assessed by age in moments of distress but rather appearance and size, which strikes them as intimidating. Police that harmed African American children always seemed to emphasize their hand size, height, estimated weight, and how dangerous they are. I found physical traits to be an interesting topic that Patton paid attention to when defending her argument of a way blacks were seen as monstrous and animalistic.

Moving forward, Patton mentions society using the term “juvenile” to describe how the world communicates black as always young—with underdeveloped brains that aren’t fully capable of being considered to be like everyone else (aka normal). Without exploring this term in detail, Patton leaves us to question what it actually means to be juvenile to an African American child, and how the world may categorize and define a certain group of people. Stacey Patton later on refers back to the Ferguson case to explain how the government officials do not prioritizes the protection of black children and/or the inequality of children. Lastly, Patton takes us back to the past to remind us of how inhumane people thought the development of black bodies were, and how much of that still remains in our society’s judgment to African American children today.