Fat Girls of Color Grow Up Too Fast
Credit: The Author
When I was 11, the most stressful place on Earth was the Flynn O’Hara store near Westchester Square. It was the only retail store that sold the uniforms I needed for my brief stint in Catholic school.
Flynn O’Hara was the place where my mom usually realized I had gone up a size or two from the year before. The unforgiving cotton-polyester pants had no stretch and left marks on the lower part of my stomach in ways my jeans and skirts did not. My skirts were longer than those of the other girls, but too big around my waist. Her veiled disappointment in my body revealed itself in its entirety by the time she paid carefully budgeted money at the register.
On one visit, I walked out from behind the flimsy curtain of the dressing room wearing pants that fit too tight around my hips, but were too long and covered the tips of my toes. I could see my mother’s frown in a mirror nearby and the unflinching stare of a man with his wife a few feet away. I turned toward him while my mom inspected the pants. We met eyes before my mom told me to go back into the dressing room. The intensity of that stare followed me home, like I had looked too hard at a lightbulb.
By then, I was the biggest girl in my class. I was growing hips and breasts and had long been catcalled by men on the street. But, for the most part, I was just a normal girl. My body was just bigger. It shouldn’t have made my life that different.
It shouldn’t have.
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If you’re reading this, you may already know about the concept of “adultification.” As Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González detail in “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” adultification refers to the process by which children “function at a more mature developmental stage because of situational context and necessity.” It’s a “social or cultural stereotype that is based on how adults perceive children ‘in the absence of knowledge of children’s behavior and verbalizations.’” Essentially, adultification occurs when the notion of how and why a child acts doesn’t match up with their actual developmental stage. When a child is perceived as embodying the behavior, thoughts, and motivations of an adult, they are being adultified.
Black girls are often the main victims of adultification, and as a result, they are often seen as needing less nurturing, less protection, and less support. They are seen as being more independent and knowing more about adult topics and sex. One consequence of adultification for Black girls is being at disproportionate risk for harsher punishments and punitive treatment in the educational system. While “Girlhood Interrupted” is mostly specific to how carceral and education systems come together to disenfranchise Black girls, these realities for Black girls manifest in other settings and in other relationships as well and when crossing other axes of oppression.
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From my own experience, I can tell you that adultification is like a necklace you don’t remember putting on. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s there around your neck. You feel the weight of it all the time. You can tell when other people look at it. And, over time, it digs into your skin. Your neck thickens, the chain tightens. Years pass, and before you know it, you’ve been irreversibly scarred by someone pointing out that you’re different or difficult or mature—and aligning their expectations with that projection.
The first person to adultify me was my mother. Until I met my husband, I did not know that children were not supposed to manage their parents’ pain. I didn’t know that eight-year-olds should not have to worry about bills or advise their mothers about relationships with ill-suited men or refute her insults toward her body or make plans to fund her dream retirement home or take pride in being called a mujersota.
I am still unlearning prioritizing my mother’s feelings over my own. I still have trouble leaning on others and taking on my friends’ burdens and remembering that I’m twenty-fucking-three and that the opacity of the future is part of its mystique. Through her neglect, my mother first facilitated the social process Epstein and her colleagues discuss in their report. I learned to behave at a more mature developmental stage—but this only served to reinforce the adult-like expectations that were already being projected onto me by virtue of my body size.
The accepted archetype for girlhood is a thin, delicate white child. Girls who do not exist within these parameters, like my younger self, are not granted the protections of girlhood. They are not granted innocence or the benefit of the doubt. Similar to how certain personality traits (e.g., outspokenness, giddiness) have the potential to force girls into oppressive paradigms of Black femininity (Sapphire, Jezebel, or Mammy), fatness only needs to be visibly present for adultification to occur. The implications of this for fat Black girls is particularly harrowing as, on average, Black girls physically mature faster than white girls and, as a result, may experience adultification earlier and more intensely.
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Something that the “Girlhood Interrupted” report doesn’t really push forward is that adultification is not just something done by adults and institutions to children. Peers do it to each other in ways that mimic adultification from adults.
My first time really being around white people was when I started high school. I had gained admission to a prestigious school and was suddenly immersed in classrooms with thin white girls, the likes of which I’d never seen in person. They wore their hair long and their shorts high and liked to ask me about what it was like to grow up in “the hood.” They asked me if I padded my bra, what fights I’d gotten into, how long I’d been having sex, what kind of drugs I’d used. We were all in the same place, had taken the same exam to get in, but it didn't matter. The issue of what I knew or didn’t know was already settled by the time I opened my mouth.
Aside from being inaccurate and hurtful, the adultification I experienced actually put me in harm’s way.
There was an older guy who used to hang around my friends and me in our early teens. We all knew that he had graduated a while ago and liked to date younger girls. He often offered to give my friends and me a ride home. He claimed we were “too pretty” to take the bus.
One day, he followed my friends and me onto the bus. My friends pushed me in his direction and talked about how he should come over to my house. They told him the stop I get off at. When I got off the bus, he followed me to the place where the winding path into the projects opens.
Eventually, I lost him. But what if I hadn’t?
First published on Medium