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Robyn Maynard is an author and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.

For issue #159 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Maynard's book, Policing Black Lives. Here she writes how the anti-Black racism in Canadian institutions is rooted in a historical denial of Black childhood innocence, a construct reserved for white children, which continues to justify the dehumanization, excessive punishment, and systemic disregard for Black youth's safety and suffering today.

To fully grasp the treatment of Black youth and children across Canadian institutions, it is necessary to look at how Black childhood has been historically represented (and denied), both by the state and more broadly. The state’s negation of Black childhood innocence has been an important part of the maintenance of white supremacy. Since the end of the nineteenth century in Canadian society, and Western society more generally, children have been construed as innocent, vulnerable and in need of the state’s protection. The concern for child welfare correlated to the state’s focus on building the nation: “Children represented the future of the young dominion, and their healthy growth and development became inextricably linked to the welfare of Canadian society.” As the symbol of society’s future, young persons were seen as requiring and deserving protection, guidance and societal investment. However, the purported innocence of children, and thus the worthiness of their security and protection, was largely determined by their race. Youthful innocence, according to historian Robin Bernstein, was raced white.

Many children have been formally or informally excluded from ideas of innocence and thus fallen outside of those seen as vulnerable and deserving of safety. While the protection of (white) children was, in many ways, more ideological than actual — many poor white children remained exposed to a multiplicity of harms — Black children have, as a group, been excluded from even the conception of childhood purity or vulnerability. That Black and Indigenous children were considered property in earlier Canadian history testifies to the delineations of sanctified childhood. At the turn of the twentieth century, white toddlers were associated with attributes such as purity, innocence and fragility, qualities denied to Black and Indigenous children. The preservation of white childhood innocence has often taken place at the expense of the safety and security of Black children. In Nova Scotia, the vulnerability of white children was invoked to push for the exclusion of Black children from many public and church-based institutions: “For members of the white community, segregation of the black child was thus a natural part of child saving, just as was maintaining religious separation.” (White) childhood innocence could be protected, in part, by maintaining distance from the corrupting force of “uncivilized” and immoral Black children. Their innocence negated, Black children were therefore denied the protections that would safeguard it. The new articulation of (white) childhood innocence meant that while white children were construed as requiring nurturing and protection, Black children were thought to be impervious to suffering; this thinking was a relic of an era in which enslaved children were not, as a whole, considered “children.” Bernstein states, “Pain, and the alleged ability or inability to feel it, functioned in the mid-nineteenth century as a wedge that split white and black childhood into distinct trajectories.” This belief has ramifications to this day; though segregation is formally over, the desanctification of Black childhood is ongoing.

Black children and youth remain outside the construction of innocence, as well as that of childhood itself, and the suffering they are exposed to is frequently erased or negated. In a large-scale study of US police officers’ perceptions of Black children, psychologists found that racist dehumanization plays a significant role in the designation of innocence:

'As the perception of innocence is a central protection afforded to children it follows that this social consideration may not be given to the children of dehumanized groups such as Black Americans in equal measure as they are given to their peers.… In this context, dehumanization serves to change the meaning of the category “children.” '

In other words, Black children are still not considered to be children. The authors found that once Black children reached the age of ten, they were perceived as “significantly less innocent than White children and adults or children and adults generally,” and by thirteen they were perceived as adults.13 Childhood takes on a different meaning depending on race, which has substantial and harmful effects: “The evidence shows that perceptions of the essential nature of children can be affected by race, and for Black children, this can mean they lose the protection afforded by assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults.”14 Not only are Black children and youth denied the protections that accompany presumptions of innocence and vulnerability, but they are imbued with the quality of danger. Black youth, like Black adults, are frequently attributed with “superhuman” capabilities, as white people believe they possess supernatural qualities that transcend the laws of nature and have a decreased ability to experience pain.

Numerous publicized cases illustrate the impact that dominant conceptions of Black (non)children can have. One must look only at the killings of Tamir Rice or Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Black children killed by police in the United States. In Canada, a similar picture emerges. The above-cited handcuffing of the six-year-old Black girl in her school is only one example of how Black youth are widely treated as if they are threatening and possibly dangerous even to adults. Age is no protection for young Black people. In a 2021 national study, young Black people in youth and adult detention centres described being racially targeted, beaten, called racial slurs, woken up at all hours of the night for no reason and having religious texts and family photos destroyed by custodial staff — one described being hog tied in his underwear and sprayed with a hose.16 Nor did their youth protect two Black children from having the car they were inside of pepper-sprayed in 2015. In this incident, two girls aged seven and ten were treated in the hospital after their father, the driver of the car, was pepper-sprayed by the police while they were seated in the back. The parents described the incident as a traffic stop that was unwarranted, noncriminal and nonviolent until the pepper spray.17 Black children and youth are frequently exposed to traumatic and violent state actions, with little regard to their vulnerability, because their suffering is not conceived of as suffering. Black youth of all genders, sexual identities and abilities are forced to suffer a severe punishment for merely existing in an anti-Black society.

Though these examples highlight how police and corrections staff consciously or unconsciously dehumanize Black youth, this fundamental disregard for young Black lives is endemic across state institutions. Black children are often the receptacles of the negative projections of a society mired in the fear of Black life. Societal hostility is often woven into everyday life for young Black persons; everywhere they go, they encounter psychological violence in terms of systemic disregard, surveillance, suspicion and the presumption of guilt. The demonization of Black youth and children is visible in the hostility, surveillance, punishment and neglect woven into the fabric of the education system.

Excerpted with permission from Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present by Robyn Maynard, published by Fernwood Publishing, 2025. 

The Internationalist Archive