Simone Biles, the world record-breaking gymnast we all know and love, was offered a coloring book on a flight by a flight attendant. Simone is 25.
The amount of anti-Blackness there is overwhelming. The way the media, police, government, enslavers for 100s of years now have both infantilized and adultified Black folks, is steeped in white dominant culture. Steeped in the colonization culture of the United States.
Now, Simone Biles had a great comeback to this and ended up being able to share it on social media, but we’ve seen this type of infantilization and adultification lead to so many examples of fatal consequences for Black folks.
BIPOC adults have historically been infantilized to be trafficked, exploited, and dehumanized. Enslavers and colonizers have historically adultified children to justify enslavement.
For example how many times have we witnessed police claim that they saw an adult, when it was just a child? And often full grown BIPOC adults are condescended and exploited.
While the media makes light of this incident, it actually points to a deep, dark, deathly history of anti-Blackness.
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