ABSTRACT
In this chapter, drawing on both separate and overlapping disciplinary locations—critical childhood studies, disability studies, and critical race studies—we explore how an abolitionist praxis is shaped by a relationship between childhood and innocence at the intersections of race/class/gender/sexuality/disability. We argue that the image of the child and the paradoxical invocation of innocence associated with it is used to reproduce, expand, and critique carceral logics. We begin by exemplifying how the “child” is a mobile artifact used to both defend and challenge the U.S. government’s practice of child separation and detention at the border. We then show the problematic of attributions of childhood to disabled adults, when deployed in an attempt to abolish certain carceral features (solitary confinement, death penalty). Lastly, drawing on these contradictory conceptualizations, we materialize this argument in a non-traditional carceral space—public education—to describe how a pathologization of childhood via the exploitation of disability is disproportionately applied to students of color. We conclude by underscoring how innocence makes possible racialized ableist/pathologizing notions in complicated ways and interconnected sites.
