Ain't I A Child: Reframing Childhood and the Protection of Children through a Womanist Lens

When we ask “what is meant by childhood?” and “who gets protected,” there is a sub-question of to what extent we consider children human, and further, what interlocking identities might make some children considered subhuman in relation to others? It is my suggestion that the current dialogue around childhood and child protection falls into the trap of paternalism because the normative gaze has deemed only white male children as fully human. To this narrative, I suggest introducing an expanded womanist framework that draws on both Alice Walker’s Four-part definition, with specific attention to the first and second sections, and the tenets of Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas’s womanist framework: Radical Subjectivity and Traditional Communalism. In this cross-section, this paper illuminates how Womanism allows us to redefine who gets to be a child, our concept of innocence, and how we read the humanity of children, thereby determining whether they are (un)protectable.