Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells
so the argument goes.
In this post-class discourse, class is reduced to an economic category and is talked about in terms of ‘poverty’ or ‘income levels’, both terms that elide the structures that produce class. Despite their limitations, documenting the impact of poverty on children’s lives is important to establishing the continued salience of class to life chances in every country in the world. In developing countries over eight million children under the age of 5 die each year from preventable causes including malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles and malaria (Pemberton et al. 2012: 19). These deaths are directly linked to poverty. One third of children globally live in houses with more than five people per room and with mud floors. Just over one in four (27 per cent) have no toilet facilities and nearly one in five (19 per cent) only have access to unsafe, open water sources (Pemberton et al. 2012).
Class clearly structures life chances, as the statistics cited above show, but explanations for class inequality and the effects of class inequality are lived out in the lives of racialized and gendered subjects (Bettie 2003). Clearly class does not always map onto race, and certainly it does not map onto gender: to put it simply, not all working-class people are Black and not all whites are middle class. Nonetheless, the exclusion of a racialized or ethnicized group from access to material and symbolic resources has the effect of making all struggles over resources racialized struggles.
Race is not understood here as having a reality outside the social; it is not that races exist and then they are mobilized in order to naturalize class divisions. It is rather the case that race as a social fact is brought into existence through the praxis of capitalism.
How race–class signifiers are experienced is also shaped by gender: the experience of being a white middle-class girl/woman is different from being a white middle-class boy/man. However, this difference of gendered experiences within a race–class nexus does not mean that shared gender identities make the lifeworlds of, say, Black boys/men and white boys/ men interchangeable. While people might make political alliances across race–class lines on the basis of gender – as with feminism – these alliances cannot erase the material inequalities and symbolic differences between Black people and white people or between working classes and middle classes.
These points about the social construction of race, about the ways that racialized inequality and class inequality reinforce one another and are expressed through racialized and gendered identities, are perhaps uncontroversial, at least within a particular tradition of social theory, when we are speaking of adults. However, when we speak about children’s race–class and gendered identities, the picture is different. The classed experience of children is hidden from view. This is partly because class is widely understood as being related to waged labour – particularly manual and factory work. Even those analyses that accept that bureaucratic, mental or intellectual labour is also work often attribute the class position derived from work only to the worker and not to his or her dependants. In other words, if a man works for a wage and his family are dependent on that wage he is recognized as having a class position but they are not. Nor is it only being in work that identifies a working man’s class but not his dependants. It is also to do with a presumption that men derive identity from work in a way that women do not; that women’s identity is defined in relation to family, children and neighbourhood. If women’s relation to class is perceived as derivative and tenuous, so much more is this the case for children.
Summary
Analysing the effects on childhood of race, gender and class as both cultural categories and material structures in ways that allow meaningful statements to be made about childhood in its global context is fraught with difficulty. To say that class affects children’s life chances on a global scale seems uncontentious enough; and yet even UNICEF’s 2006 report on Excluded and Invisible Children does not use the language of class to describe economic inequality and its manifestation in inequalities in health and education. Similarly, in the same report, although ethnicity and gender are both mentioned as lines of social difference that affect life chances, we find no talk of racism or sexism but are told that ‘the root causes of exclusion are poverty, weak governance, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS’ (UNICEF 2006: 11). If these are the root causes of exclusion, then how can we explain their tendency to be unequally distributed by race, gender and class?
I have argued in this chapter that race and gender remain salient in the formation of cultural identity and access to resources, both material and symbolic. The tendency of governments and international bodies to discursively deny the continuing salience of these social categories is congruent with the emptying out by neo-liberal states and the international system (manifested through international bodies and regulations) of the political sphere and its replacement by economic criteria. In short, we are left with individual answers to social questions: poverty becomes a matter of individual failure or success, while race is reduced to cultural expression (hence its substitution by ethnicity), and both ethnic and gender discrimination are blamed on outmoded ideas left over from semi-feudal pasts. If such a view of inequality as being essentially outside of modernity were accepted, then, of course, there would be no need to speak of childhood in the plural. However, what I have tried to show in this chapter is that class structures children’s lives (its effects are not simply haphazard or unpredictable) but class is experienced by raced and gendered subjects. These social categories are not outside of modernity; they are constitutive of modernity (Goldberg 2001), understood here as (global) capitalism. Indeed race, gender and class overdetermine childhood. That is to say, the model of childhood that is usually described as being a ‘Western’ model or a Western/contemporary model is not only specific to a particular space and time, it is also specific to a particular class, race and gender. In other words, the model child is in some respects more accurately the model bourgeois white boy. However, even this recognition of the specificity of the ideal of contemporary global childhood does not quite capture the ways that race, gender and class overdetermine childhood because, in fact, the childhood envisaged in this model, above all its innocence of political calculation and economic interest, can no more be true of a white middle-class boy than it can be true of a Black working-class girl (to make the point in its most Manichean form). Indeed, once childhood is seen as a racialized, gendered and classed position, the notion of childhood as having the possibility of being innocent, in the sense of existing outside of the symbolic and material nexus of political economy, has to be abandoned entirely (Wells 2018).
Recommended further reading
Austin, Paula C. 2019. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press.
Drawing on archival sources of the research of African American sociologists in 1930s DC, Coming of Age is a rich account of the development of youth subjectivity and interiority in and against conditions of racism and poverty.
Firpo, Christina Elizabeth. 2017. The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
A significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship on colonial governance and mixed-race children. This book is based on ten years of archival research into a database of over four thousand children and interviews with people who were taken as children from their mothers. Christina Firpo shows how the French government and non-government agencies, both religious and secular, not only sought to recruit Métis children to the project of French imperial rule but continued to separate these children from their mothers even in the postcolonial period.
Lewis-McCoy, R. L’Heureux. 2014. Inequality in the Promised Land: Race, Resources, and Suburban Schooling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
An ethnography of a public school in a US suburb that analyses how in the same space resources are distributed differently based on the racist frames through which educators view Black families, especially working-class parents.
Nayak, Anoop and Mary Jane Kehily. 2013. Gender,