The adultification of boys of color

The Little League World Series is in full swing, and along with it the adultification of young boys of color.

An annual international baseball tournament for ages 10 to 12, the LLWS has transcended youth sports to become one of summer’s most-watched sporting events.

The 2024 championship game topped out at nearly 5.5 million television viewers. Compare that to the most-watched regular season MLB game of that year — a June 8 matchup between the Yankees and Dodgers that drew in 2.91 million. The average LLWS game draws more than a million.

It is far and away the most popular youth sporting event, putting an immense spotlight on young athletes and inviting commentary on not only their play, but their appearance. That 10 to 12 age range is when kids are at their widest point of size divergence. Go visit a middle school to see this in action. The kids who hit puberty earlier than average end up towering over their similar-aged peers. This size advantage gives young athletes a physical edge that will normalize as they get older but, in the moment, causes them to stand out among the crowd.

I was reminded of this while watching an analysis of the LLWS Metro Region Championship between Connecticut and New Jersey. The video focused on a player for New Jersey who, for purpose of his privacy, I am going to keep unnamed. He’s 12 years old, nonwhite and stands 5’10” tall — one inch taller than the average U.S. adult male.

Afraid of his hitting power, Connecticut chose to intentionally walk this player every time he came to the plate. But they couldn’t avoid him on the mound, where his pitching led the team to a 6-4 victory. The video is overwhelmingly positive about all the kids, this kid included, but singles out this one kid as the kid who is just bigger and more physically imposing than the rest.

The most popular comments on the video, however, are all jokes about the kid’s size.

He is “a great kid,” reads one comment. “He was in my unit in Iraq.”

That player is “buying everyone beers after the game,” says another.

A third comment jokes that he was “being cheered on by his wife and kids.”

Other comments do away with the jokes and openly suggest his age must be falsified: “Nothing beats the strategy of having a 16-year-old on your team.”

All this feels rather light-hearted. Aside from the few folks legitimately questioning his age, the comments about his size don’t appear to be punching down. They aren’t making fun of him. If anything, it’s adulation. In a game of boys, here’s a man. What 12-year-old wouldn’t feel good about that?

I can think of one and here, I will say his name.

Tamir Rice.

The adultification of nonwhite children

Tamir Rice was a 5’7” Black 12-year-old who was killed by police while wielding a toy gun in a public park. The individual who reported Rice to police told 911: “There is a guy with a pistol. It’s probably fake, but he’s pointing it at everybody.” Police arrived, shouting at Rice to put down the weapon. When he reached into his waistband, presumably to comply with their demands, he was shot and killed. All this happened in less than two seconds. The justice system later determined the shooting was “justified” and “reasonable.”

After the shooting, an officer radioed dispatch to say he believed Rice was “possibly 20 years old.” They later told the court on record they believed him to be much older than he was, implicitly revealing that they may have approached a child differently.

How police viewed Rice’s adult-sized body — particularly his nonwhite adult-sized body — is part of why he became another statistic in the long list of police violence.

It’s not just Tamir Rice. In 2023, Lansing police briefly detained a Black 12-year-old boy who was just taking out the trash. Police claimed he fit the description of an adult man they had just been chasing on foot.

In 2024, police in Mississippi responded to a break-in by kicking down the door and shooting the Black 11-year-old who had placed the 911 call, mistaking him for the adult male intruder. He survived, but the home intruder was able to escape.

And it’s not always just about size. In 2022, Black 9-year-old Bobbi Wilson was outside spraying trees with a solution that killed spotted lanternflies. The flies are an invasive species and local governments had put out kill-on-sight requests asking people to help slow their spread. While Bobbi was doing her civic duty, a neighbor was inside calling police. “There’s a little Black woman walking and spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees,” he says in the call, “I don’t know what the hell she’s doing; it scares me though.”

These extreme, publicized instances are indicative of a larger, more generalized way of thinking: Nonwhite children often are viewed as older and less innocent than their white peers. In a seminal study called “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” researchers found a racial difference in perceived innocence emerges around age 10.

“The more non-white a child is, the less inherent innocence they are presumed to have.”

At age 10, “participants began to think of Black children as significantly less innocent than other children at every age group.” White children were perceived as the most innocent, with Latino children in the middle ground, virtually creating a color gradient from light to dark. The more nonwhite a child is, the less inherent innocence they are presumed to have.

While nonwhite boys primarily suffer from this adultification as it relates to them as perceived criminals or violent threats, nonwhite girls deal with adultification in a sexual sense.

Jahnine David, a UK safeguarding expert, found Black girls often are not seen as children, but as “hypersexual beings” who are perceived as more responsible for their sexuality. A Georgetown University study backs this up, stating that adultification of nonwhite adolescent girls “may influence officials to inaccurately attribute complicity to victims of sexual harassment or assault.”

The Essence of Innocence concludes that “although most children are allowed to be innocent until adulthood, Black children may be perceived as innocent only until deemed suspicious.” Academic research and lived reality bear it out. When nonwhite children are perceived as older than their true age, they are treated more harshly by figures of authority.

Even when they know

This adultification of nonwhite adolescents extends beyond just visual perception as well. Even when authoritarian figures know a nonwhite child is, indeed, a child, they are still more likely to treat them as adults.

In 2021, Rochester Police pepper-sprayed a Black 9-year-old girl they said was suicidal and upset after observing a physical fight between her parents. Police were aware she was a child undergoing mental distress. Bodycam footage shows an officer shouting at her, “You’re acting like a child.” She responds, “I am a child!” A child who had just witnessed and was reacting to traumatic domestic violence.

Within the justice system, nonwhite children are more likely to be treated as adults than their similarly aged white peers. One study found youth of color are 2.5 times more likely than white kids to be tried as an adult and 8.3 times more likely to be incarcerated by an adult court. Another found less than half (47%) of white youth were transferred to adult criminal court, compared to 73% of Black youth and 75% of Latino youth.

Adryann Glenn, a criminal justice advocate, told Cronkite News, “Where I come from, in my type of neighborhood, you’re an adult as soon as you’re over 5 foot, 5 inches; that’s the way the police deal with you. They don’t deal with you like a child; they deal with you like an adult.”

Academic research and anecdotal stories agree. Nonwhite adolescents are more likely than their white counterparts to be seen as “adults,” even when their juvenile status is known.

Standing tall

This one Little League World Series participant feels like an anomaly to the general populace because he is. He’s taller and more athletic than most of his peers, even among those peers who are themselves above average. The LLWS is for ages 10 to 12. The CDC reports the median height of a 12-year-old is 4’11”. A survey of the listed heights of this years’ LLWS participants reveals a median height of 5’4” with only one participant below 4’11”.

“Just because a child’s body is an adult’s size does not make it an adult body or them an adult person.”

LLWS participants already are bigger, stronger and more athletic than their peers. That’s how they got to this televised competition.

This player is an outlier among outliers, and the conversation about his height and athleticism stems from that. In a sporting context, it’s all in good fun. He’s a novelty. But we should be careful about the assumptions hiding underneath all this good fun.

First, should there even be commentary at all about the bodies of preteen boys? But deeper than that, just because a child’s body is an adult’s size does not make it an adult body or them an adult person.

Within a sports context, jokes about his “grown man” size don’t feel negative or seem derogatory. But take away the sports context and he’s statistically more likely — because of his size and skin color — to be treated harshly and assumed to be guilty in the context of policing and carceral systems. We love to see him as a threat on the mound or at the plate because that threat is warranted. He can throw it hard and hit it harder. But racialized perceptions about his size, research shows, also makes him look like a threat off the field.

So if you’re watching the Little League World Series this year, remember that kids are kids, no matter how tall. A child’s body is not an adult’s body simply because they happen to be the same size as an adult. A tall boy is still a boy. A developed girl is still a girl. A Black child is still a child. A Latino child is still a child. A nonwhite child is still a child.

And every child deserves to be seen as a child — even when we are lauding them as a sporting superstar.

 

Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.