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

Robin Bernstein’s impeccably researched book sets out to reveal the racial violence embedded in one of American culture’s most cherished myths: the innocence of childhood. In the process, Bernstein acknowledges and offers a theoretical remedy for the difficulties of engaging the child as a historical and cultural actor. As scholars, including Karen Sánchez-Eppler, James Marten, and Kristen Lindenmeyer have noted, the historical child can be a frustratingly ephemeral subject. Often overwritten by adult preoccupations and demands, children’s voices and experiences are so densely mediated that critics such as Jacqueline Rose have suggested that we can never truly access the lives of young people. When we attempt to understand the lives of children doubly marginalized by youth and minority status, the obstacles proliferate.

Bernstein addresses this theoretical impasse, moving adroitly between performance theory and literary close readings to articulate a model that extracts a realm of childhood experience previously hidden from view. Until now, children have not received extensive attention from performance theorists, perhaps because adult investment in children’s innocence can prevent us from granting children any sort of critical distance from the roles they carry out in our schools, our homes, and our imaginations. Bernstein broadens our understanding of both performance and childhood by making the case that children are continually being asked to perform and that they are often quite aware of the performative texture of “natural” childhood behavior.

More precisely, Bernstein traces how the artifacts of childhood come with embedded scripts that call for certain behaviors, types of play, and emotional responses. Like all of us, children are enticed by such “scriptive things” (12), and they can embrace, alter, and reject these scripts. By understanding the unspoken instructions that objects and narratives often provide, Bernstein argues, we gain insight into how children respond to these prompts. Bernstein is careful to stipulate that these insights do not necessarily allow us to close in on the particular action of an individual child but rather open a host of possibilities about ephemeral childhood experience. “The method of reading material things as scripts,” Bernstein explains, “aims to discover not what any individual actually did but rather what a thing invited its users to do” (11).

After delineating her methodology in the introduction, Bernstein brings it to bear on several “scriptive things” that helped to instill violent racial narratives through both adult and child behavior. Bernstein takes on an ambitious range of objects and texts drawn from a broad chronological scope, scrupulously placing each piece in historical context while still tracing links that lead to a broader story. Her chapters move through an array of literary material and performative artifacts—including texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and the Uncle Remus stories, performance reviews, advertisements, and Raggedy Ann and Topsy dolls—to reveal how scripts pass among texts, objects, and people to construct childhood artifacts as sites that weld together race, violence, and affect.

In a particularly illuminating reading of a childhood object that many would perceive as an innocuous, nostalgic plaything wholly removed from a violent history, Bernstein uncovers the violent racial scripts inherent in the Raggedy Ann doll after the turn of the century. Through careful historical analysis, Bernstein reveals how Raggedy Ann carefully evoked antebellum innocence, functioning as part of the national reckoning with the legacy of the Civil War (1861–65) that swept the nation during the semicentennial of that divisive conflict. With a physiognomy that evoked the often-violent antics of minstrelsy, Raggedy Ann contained a script that invited children to perform acts of violence. In just one of many examples, Bernstein cites a poem that scripts love and punishment as the proper play for the Raggedy Ann doll: “I love ’er ’n spank ’er ’z much ’z I can,” the supposed child-narrator tells us, “But that never bothers my Raggedy Ann” (193).

Bernstein’s careful excavation of the hidden...