Griffin Snyder Medium Post 3

Of this week’s work, I was most interested by the video about how black girls are treated in school and the unique issues that they must face simply because of the color of their skin. The discussion in the video of how black girls are perceived as greater threats than other girls because of their tendency to reach puberty earlier reminded me of the way that black actors have traditionally been characterized as simultaneously simple and dangerously mischievous. Similarly to how black girls are seen as threats because of their bodies, patriarchal white society has portrayed black men as a massive threat to the “pure” family units of white society, and specifically white women. White men have been so threatened by the idea of their precious white girls being with black men that they have designated black men as “animals” who want nothing more than to take advantage of innocent white women. This motif of black people being threats to the “order” of white society is incredibly prevalent in our media and everyday culture. Although the prescribed characteristics vary, both black women and men have been reduced to violent creatures of instinct in the eyes of our society, who exist only as a threat to whiteness and “purity” everywhere. This has led to black children being treated as if they are already criminals, which only continues to feed the school to prison pipeline that has been established in many schools today. All too often black children are not allowed to be kids, and any excessive emotion is treated as a threat, rather than a kid being a kid. This is again based in how our white supremacist society views blackness as an affront to whiteness (“barbarism” vs “civilization”) and how this is expressed through the suppression of emotions and childishness in black children.