This article intervenes in the scholarship of race by way of the child, demonstrating how childhood is a doubly strategic site in disrupting the ontology of race as natural type or kind. One path involves disentangling children's association with nature, a tragic knot conjoined through a particular conception of the human. This strategy reveals the savage child that apprehends and sorts bodily differences, working to sustain the nature of race. Rejecting the savage child opens up a space to view actual children through a distinct posthuman lens that emphasizes laughter, play and surrealism in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic material where children in New York City struggled with the visibility of the body, I demonstrate that alternative ontologies of race are possible and do exist. These tasks allow both race and childhood to emerge in a new light, with important implications for anthropology's cherished idea of the human.
In this article, Maria Kromidas explores how nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old children in a diverse neighborhood school in immigrant New York City navigated and often undermined hegemonic notions of difference and belonging offered by mainstream multiculturalism and raciology. Based on ethnographic research and utilizing a finegrained sociocultural linguistic analysis, Kromidas demonstrates how the children subverted the most dehumanizing elements of these ideologies—most notably their essentialism and absolutism and their basis in blood, birth, and bodies. She argues that the children provide a compelling vision for living with difference, one that emerged from the rich experiences and everyday-ness of multiracial living.
Based on ethnographic research in a diverse New York City neighborhood, this article examines issues surrounding the practice of crossing from children's perspectives. Crossing refers to the use of language varieties to which one does not have conventional access, practices that could be disparaging or affiliative. The author explores how children distinguished the two types through the principle of authenticity, itself derived by means that went beyond the usual determinants of blood, birth and bodies. While playful, the author argues that crossings were one way for children to participate in the everyday politics of difference and critique the existing racial order.
The tragedy of September 11th produced immense controversy and re-ignited simmering culture wars in the media over the presentation of these events in American schools, or what students should know. The ethnographic research conducted with fourth-grade students in a public school in Brooklyn, New York, side-stepped this debate in order to contribute to it. Specifically, the goal was to capture what children do in fact know through an investigation of their modes of speaking and writing about these events. What figured most prominently in the students’ talk and writing was their racialization of a far-away and ill-defined enemy. By showing how this racialization was also evident in the students’ interactions and friendship, and contextualizing these patterns in the racial (dis)order of the United States, I suggest that the events of September 11th and the war on terrorism have produced a culture of fear that will have lasting, if as yet unintelligible, effects on the racial dynamics of the United States.
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