Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America [Hardcover]

2025 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Honorable Mention, 24th Annual William Sanders Scarborough Prize, given by the Modern Language Association
Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Literature

A new history of manhood, race, and hierarchy in American childhood

Like Childrenargues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white mens power at the top of humanisms order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhoods modern arcfrom ignorance and dependence to reason and rightsthat structured white mens power in early America: by claiming that black adults were like children, whites naturalized black subjection within the American family order. Demonstrating how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or possess stable boundaries.

Like Childrenrecenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black childrens power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as Bright Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century Harlem Prodigy, Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately,Like Childrendisplaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black clÓu