Age also matters. Police are more likely to use or threaten to use force in their interactions with younger people than adults. And they are significantly more likely to shoot an unarmed, nonattacking teenager than an adult. Unarmed teenagers are nearly five times more likely to be shot to death by police than similarly nonattacking middle-aged people.

Advocates, scholars and doctors characterized the adultification bias emerging in the aftermath of Ma’Khia’s death as a form of misogynoir — a term coined by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey. It’s a way to describe how “anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world,” Bailey wrote.

He won release through a legal maneuver that has given hope to hundreds of other juvenile lifers all serving lifetime parole.

“The city of Rochester suspended police officers seen in an initial video from the 29 January detainment spraying a chemical irritant in the face of the distraught and handcuffed child.”

Childhood, much like race, is not a fixed category. It has not always been treated as a unique stage of social development. Childhood as we know it today — with children considered fragile and innocent — is a modern phenomenon that developed in the 19th century. And this modern version of childhood was racialized at its origins.

Because in the end, anti-racist classes — just like all those back-ordered copies of White Fragility — aren’t going to change anything until the systemic roots of campus racism are dismantled.