For Riis, as for many of his contemporary sentimentally-informed reformers, the heart of this individuality lies in the ability to exist as a feeling subject, and the most fruitful site for reform in the emotionally and physically malleable child.

Said differently: If we believe that children and young adults are not mature enough to engage in difficult conversations about sexuality and race, then that is only true because we have failed to prepare them to engage in those difficult conversations. It’s the adults that need to grow up, not the children — and Louisa May Alcott knew that way back in 1875.

All three identities— disability, childhood, and racial identities like whiteness and Blackness—have a shared genealogy, emerging as codified social formations in the nineteenth century by way of enlightenment rationality, empirical science, and the nineteenth-century’s drive to classify.

The discourses that deny Black girls the capacity for nonconsent stabilize those that render that capacity easily and irrevocably lost so that girls of both colors are subsumed into the population of the always willing and accessible.