Black Girlhood Persists: Pecola’s Persistence as Non/Child in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 1

Abstract

On February 1, 2021, a police officer pepper-sprayed a nine-year-old Black girl outside her home in Rochester, New York, alleging that “she was behaving like a child, which elicited a response from the young Black girl proclaiming, ‘I am a child!’ (Smith-Purviance 196). This exemplar of “anti-Blackgirl violence” elucidates that Black girl’s lives are illegible (196). Black girls are treated as “non-children” unworthy of protection and outside the realm of “child/human” (196). Consequently, as Audre Lorde surmises, Black girls often sacrifice their right to childhood innocence to survive the conditions of white supremacy. Dorothy E. Hines and Jemimah L. Young articulate this non/being status as “antiBlack girlhood,” stating that for Black girls, childhood is often “contentious, disrupted, or non-existent” (283, 285). Indeed, Black girls are systematically perceived as “less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers,” a phenomenon that has been termed “adultification” (Epstein et al. 1–2). The adultification of Black girls contributes to their harsher sentencing or “hyperpunishment,” the hypersexualization of their bodies, and their criminalization in educational settings leading to the “school-to-prison pipeline” that causes the disproportionate representation of Black girls in juvenile detentions and prisons (Battle 116–120). Moreover, there has been an “exponential increase in the deaths of Black women and