Introduction: Playing innocent : childhood, race, performance -- Tender angels, insensate pickaninnies : the divergent paths of racial innocence -- Scriptive things -- Everyone is impressed : slavery as a tender embrace from Uncle Tom's to Uncle Remus's cabin -- The black-and-whiteness of Raggedy Ann -- The scripts of Black dolls
Summary
Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocenceoa reversal of the previously- dominant Calvinist belief that children were depraved, sinful creatures. As the idea of childhood innocence took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding black youth from these qualities. Actors, writers, and visual artists then began pairing white children with African American adults and children, thus transferring the quality of innocence to a variety of racial-political projectsoa dynamic that R
