Children absorbed racist hierarchy by enacting it in play before understanding it

Evidence

John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832) inaugurated the plantation genre that more or less recycled minstrel-show mammies and Sambos as characters in inebriating novels. … Reading Gilman (but more often, simply observing their parents), southern White children played master, or worse, overseer, with enslaved Black playmates, ordering them, ridiculing them, and tormenting them. Enslaved children took solace in outwitting their free playmates in physical games, such as anything involving running, jumping, or throwing. “We was stronger and knowed how to play, and the white children didn’t,” recalled one ex-slave. In slavery, both Black and White children were building a sense of self on a foundation of racist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 455

Categorization

• SEED: The detail that Black children found dignity by winning physical games against White playmates is a vivid, specific angle for an essay or narrative on how the powerless carve out selfhood within oppressive structures.
• XREF: connects to: Teaching uncritically maintains a status quo that harms children of color — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 614; Children absorb their teachers’ racism through internalized pedagogies of observation — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 244