Adolescence, Blackness, and the Politics of Respectability in Monster and The Hate U Give

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

You see, black people, black resistance, and black organizing, has changed the landscape of what is politically possible. Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it The Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter.

—Alicia Garza, “Why Black Lives Matter”

Though categories of age are often assumed to be universal and shared across multiple categories of difference, they are often conceptually deployed to maintain those very categories of difference. Many scholars have recognized the degree to which black and brown children are excluded from the conditions of dependency, protection, and innocence imagined to belong to the category child.¹ Alongside childhood, the category of adolescence presupposes universality even while it does the work of differentiating and naturalizing racial hierarchies. In this sense, adolescence, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, is a fundamentally racial category. Claudia Castañeda explains how nineteenth-century racial science posited that white and black children had the same levels of intelligence and capability only to reassert adolescence as the moment of racial differentiation when development presumably stagnated in non-white bodies (37). The so-called father of adolescence, G. Stanley Hall, imagined adolescence as a racial category that replicated the evolutionary development of humankind, one in which the proper environment, guidance, and control were necessary to reach the “higher and more completely human traits” he correlated with the norms of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth (1: xiii). Like Sylvia Wynter’s deconstruction of the universal “Man” of Western thought as a narrow and exclusionary view of being human, the category of adolescence requires scrutiny and disassembling for the ways it works to uphold Western notions of human development foundational to the construction of antiblackness.

Categories of age have been central to the formation of racial and hierarchical frameworks since at least the nineteenth century. Castañeda shows how the child in nineteenth-century science was “used to establish hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality as ‘facts’ of the natural human body” (9). Robin Bernstein argues that “childhood figured pivotally in a set of large-scale U.S. racial projects” supporting both white supremacist and antiracist objectives (3). And Crista DeLuzio observes that “in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notions of gender, race, and class figured into the scientific production of adolescence as a ‘universal,’ ‘developmental’ category that privileged maleness, whiteness, and middle-class status as its normative characteristics” (5). These normative characteristics operate as if they are synonymous with the arrival at adulthood, marking minoritized populations including women, people of color, and those who are queer, trans, neurodiverse, and/or disabled as regressive and subordinate according to a universalized conception of human development.

As a normalizing and regulatory concept, adolescence continues to produce the logic of these social hierarchies today. When young people occupy normative categories and roles, they are imagined to be on their way to maturity and thus on their way to social recognition of their personhood and right to civic participation. Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams comments on this phenomenon with regard to Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, young white men who, even after committing mass murder, left the media and the predominantly white community of Littleton, Colorado in disbelief: “Still their teachers and classmates continue to protest that they were...