Like Children

A new history of manhood, race, and hierarchy in American childhood

In Like Children, Camille Owens argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Showing how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or stable boundaries. The recurring fascination of white Americans for Black children to perform as prodigies--exceptions to the rules of childhood--indicates how childhood's social and cultural capital was not only bound up in the marking of racial boundaries but also in their crossing.

Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around Black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Camille Owens argues that white men's power at the top of humanism's order has depended on those at the bottom. It was childhood's modern arc--from ignorance and dependence to reason and rights--that structured white men's power in early America: by claiming that Black adults were like children, whites naturalized Black subjection within the American family order. Like Children locates the creative strategies of Black children suspended outside of this order.

Through the stories of Black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in Black children's power and value, and a pattern of Black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet, Phillis Wheatley; the nineteenth-century pianist, Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom); a child known as "Bright" Oscar Moore at the end of the nineteenth century; and the early-twentieth century "Harlem Prodigy," Philippa Schuyler; situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. At the same time, she excavates prodigy's premodern meaning--monstrous birth--as it has underwritten and overdetermined Black childhood, while questioning the idea of monstrosity as a human-exclusionary concept.

Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain Black children's historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that Black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the Human in their own acts.