The Kid's Contested Identity

Charlie Chaplin's silent film, The Kid, follows the story of an orphan boy from the moment his mother abandons him as a baby to the rambunctious and deviant childhood he develops on the street. Unlike most children, John is deprived of both fun and safety at birth, which leads him to adopt a somewhat adult-like outlook on the world during his youth. In some ways, this forced assimilation causes him to be more competent and less playful than other children usually are his age, as he cooks breakfast for his adoptive parent, Charlie, and helps him plot a scheme to make money. Yet on the other hand, John's deprivation of a carefree and safe childhood also results in a great deal of idle time, which he spends damaging others' property and engaging in fights with other orphans when he is bullied. Each of these dichotomous expressions of premature adulthood is reflective of a contested childhood in which normalcy is for the privileged.

In many ways, John's situation is a metaphoric representation of what it is like to grow up in a marginalized community like that of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. Like John, many of the African-American children in the ghetto are deprived of a "normal" childhood, given that it is unsafe to play in dangerous neighborhoods and most children are not sheltered from the harsh reality of their poor, addict-filled community. Like John in The Kid, these children had no influence on their circumstance, but they still must either prematurely assimilate into the surrounding adult culture or seek unconventional (and often troublesome) ways of exercising their youth. Situations like this, unfortunately, are where a great deal of African-American stereotypes come from, as both the news and entertainment media reproduce criminal or pitiful portrayals of black youth. This, in turn, has an extremely damaging effect on the perception of African-Americans in contemporary American society, as they depreciate in the eyes of the hegemony and are treated accordingly through the institutions they dominate.

Yet the implications of structural inequality go far beyond this; on the flip side of the dichotomy is the production of benefits for those children who are privileged enough to have a traditional childhood. But what is normal about being showered with superfluous gifts on one's first birthday or expecting a college savings account at the ready by the time one turns eighteen?  What is healthy about being sheltered from life's forbidden fruits until one stumbles upon them himself, uneducated and intrigued? Arguably, traditional ideas about what it means to be a child are as equally damaging as the identity contested, although in a much different way. So does there exist a healthy middle ground between the traditional and contested identities of a child? Perhaps so, but it can neither be perfect nor permanent. In Herbert Marcuse's words, "We live and die rationally and productively. We know that destruction is the price of progress as death is the price of life, that renunciation and toil are the prerequisites for gratification and joy, that business must go on, and that the alternatives are Utopian" (pg. 145).