2015 Sidney Kaplan Lecture
“Black Childhood on Trial: The Tragedy of William Freeman”
Robin Bernstein, Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University
Tuesday, September 29, 4:30pm
Cape Cod Lounge
Professor Bernstein’s most recent book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards: the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE, co-winner), the Grace Abbott Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Book Award from the Children's Literature Association, the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and the IRSCL Award from the International Research Society for Children's Literature. Racial Innocence was also a runner-up for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. My other books include the anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!. A refereed ebook, African American Children and Childhood, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Professor Bernstein’s lecture will come from her book-in-progress, White Angels, Black Threats: How Stories about Childhood Innocence Influence What We See, Think, and Feel about Race in America. This book, which addresses both academic and non-academic readers, explains how childhood innocence became racially distributed in the United States. She tells the story of how white children became symbols of innocence, and how children of color, particular black male youth, came to be perceived as threats. This history helps explain why 58% of American children incarcerated in adult facilities are black, and why black children are 18 times more likely than white children to be sentenced as adults. It explains, too, how killers of unarmed black youth, from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, justified their actions by claiming they felt threatened--and why that outrageous claim seemed, to many, credible.
Contact Name: Meg Caulmare
Contact Number: (413) 545-2575
Photo gallery of talk: http://www.umass.edu/english/photo#expanded
Written by Jenny Adams