Black women and girls experience discrimination, microaggressions and stereotypes every day. Living with daily racism has a profound impact on the mental health, well-being and lives of all those coping with it. This special program explores the unique mental health burdens of Black women and girls in the United States and features an excerpt of
Now a junior, Green said she wrote “Reclaiming Girlhood” to draw attention to the “adultification” of Black girls — the treatment of young girls as if they are older. The piece was inspired by a report from Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” and from her
Segment aired on WPFW FM (DC) on the adultification of Black girls, May 2021
“Examining patterns of police treatment towards Black youth highlights a prominent issue: the adultification bias, which is the phenomenon where adults perceive Black youth as being older than they actually are. When the adultification bias was examined, one study found that Black girls as young as five years old were perceived as being less needing
“Because of layers of gendered racism, adults tend to view Black girls as more threatening, more aggressive, more mature and less innocent than white girls of the same age, robbing Black girls of the freedom to be children, according to a 2017 report by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. The report found