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Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein (review)

The enduring popularity of the trope of “internalized racism” in the pedagogy of minority empowerment has always been somewhat paradoxical. The explanatory power of this catchphrase would appear weak. Since racism is targeted at people, how could it be other than internalized, given that it hits its mark? Furthermore, the strategic value of this trope is hard to see, insofar as it redirects attention from the perpetrators of hatred and racism and toward their victims, among whom an invidious distinction is drawn between those who manage to ward off the racist interpellation and those who reenact it upon themselves and all who share their identity. Such a pernicious dualism between good and bad victims of racism would appear counterproductive to any robust psychology of empowerment and liberation. But this has not prevented the dualism from being drawn, as taxonomies of racial self-hatred continue to proliferate in the vernacular. Robin Bernstein’s impressively researched, cogently written, and deeply theorized new book, Racial Innocence, offers one ingenious answer, at least in the case of the U.S. black/white dichotomy, to the popularity of internalized self-hatred as an explanatory model. Turning to the rich archive of childhood as lived, imagined, and performed, she argues that we must turn to a critical genealogy of the concept of childhood innocence to understand the paradoxical appeal of “damage.” Children, she reminds us, were not always considered innocent, vulnerable subjects, but (at least within Calvinist orthodoxy) as guilty of original sin. When children began to be reimagined as innocent in romantic and sentimental American culture, their innocence found a privileged figure in the little white girl. It wasn’t American childhood as such that became innocent but a specifically raced and gendered childhood. This had important consequences for abolitionist and, later, civil rights activists. Embracing the culture (or was it