Black Girls Detail Harsh Consequences Of Being Seen As Older Than White Peers

A new report details the negative consequences suffered by black women and girls when people perceive them as older than their white peers.

Researchers at Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality reported their findings Wednesday after speaking to groups of black girls and women across the country about whether their real-life experiences reflected what the same researchers found in 2017: the “adultification” of black girls. The women and girls said they did.

That prior study, which drew headlines two years ago, found that U.S. adults believe black girls seem older than white girls of the same age, that black girls need less nurturing, support and comfort, and that young black girls know more about sex than white girls do.

“Almost all the black girls and women we talked to said they’d experienced adultification bias as children,” report co-author Jamilia Blake said in a statement. “And they overwhelmingly agreed that it led teachers and other adults to treat them more harshly and hold them to higher standards than white girls.”

The researchers spoke to nine focus groups with a total of about 50 black girls and women of varied ages and in diverse regions of the country, over a year from 2017 to 2018.

“To society, we’re not innocent. And white girls are always innocent,” one participant in the focus group aged 17-23 told researchers.