White Adultocene. Rethinking modernity through figures of the Child in the history of racial oppression.

Abstract

This paper explores how the figure of the Child has been used to uphold colonial anti-Black racial oppression. By examining adultism-the subordination of Children within the Child-adult binary-I trace its roots to Western philosophical ideas about nature. I furthermore show, how these ideas of nature informed racism within the modern constitution, where Children and Black people have been framed as "incomplete" or "not fully human", revealing important intersections between racial and age-based inequalities. I introduce the concept of white adultism-the racialized separation of "being human" from "becoming human"-as a key feature of modernity and the Anthropocene. Recognizing this challenges the universalizing language used in the social sciences when discussing the "human" as the dominant force in this geo-social epoch. To critically engage with the colonial legacies within Western theories of modernization and to advance discussions on adultism in decolonial studies, I propose the notion of becoming(s) in figuration, which moves beyond fixed and developmental imaginaries of "being" to rethink the entanglements of race and age in the Anthropocene.