CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Race and Ethnicity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1482987
This article is part of the Research TopicAcademic Knowledge Production on Race and Racism – Reflections on Methodological ChallengesView all 4 articles
White Adultocene. Rethinking Modernity through figures of the Child in the history of racial oppression
Provisionally accepted
- 1Europa Universität Flensburg, Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies (ICES), Flensburg, Germany
- 2Technische Universität Berlin, Collaborative Research Centre 'Re-Figuration of Spaces' 1265, Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
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This paper explores how the figure of the Child has been used to uphold colonial anti-Black racial oppression. By examining adultism -the subordination of Children within the Child-adult binary -I trace its roots to Western philosophical ideas about nature. I furthermore show, how these ideas of nature informed racism within the modern constitution, where Children and Black people have been framed as 'incomplete' or 'not fully human', revealing important intersections between racial and age-based inequalities. I introduce the concept of white adultism -the racialized separation of 'being human' from 'becoming human' -as a key feature of modernity and the Anthropocene. Recognizing this challenges the universalizing language used in the social sciences when discussing the 'human' as the dominant force in this geo-social epoch. To critically engage with the colonial legacies within Western theories of modernization and to advance discussions on adultism in decolonial studies, I propose the notion of becoming(s) in figuration, which moves beyond fixed and developmental imaginaries of 'being' to rethink the entanglements of race and age in the Anthropocene.
Keywords: anti-Black racism, childhood, adultism, Whiteness, Colonialism, anthropocene, modernity, Sociology
Received: 19 Aug 2024; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mock. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Claudia Mock, Europa Universität Flensburg, Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies (ICES), Flensburg, Germany
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