Time moves differently for women. There’s a thread on Reddit from 2015 that summarizes this better than anything we could write: “Women of Reddit,” the original post asks, “when did you first notice that men were looking at you in a sexual way? How old were you and how did it make you feel?”
There are over 20,000 responses. You only have to scroll through a few to see the pattern: I was 11, I was around 12, I think I was 10. I was scared, I didn’t understand, I was never the same. The corresponding pattern in the comments, from men reading the thread: I had no idea this happened to girls so young, I had no idea, I had no idea. People like to talk about women maturing faster than men like it’s a biological truth, but our caution, our physical awareness, our habit of sitting with our legs crossed — these are not behaviors we choose. They’re a matter of survival in a world where 12-year-old girls are regularly approached by adult men, where we are vessels for adult desires for as long as we can remember.
Adulthood never descends gracefully on the marginalized. It is assigned by those in power. Research has shown that adults are far more likely to overestimate the age of black boys and girls, and the consequences can be deadly. The police shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy, because they saw an adult threat. We — as women and people of color — are forced to be the collateral damage of adult prejudices and fears when we’re young, but are rarely given the platform or credibility to do anything about it.
The irony is that violence often stems from the inaction of adults. The youth of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School experienced firsthand the awful, bloody consequences of gun violence, yet were told repeatedly to quiet down, to let the grown-ups do the talking. It’s inspiring to see them refuse, today’s student walkout being just one example.
This week, we’re celebrating a few “young” women of color who spoke up. It’s comforting to look in the same direction as these women and catch a glimpse of the world they want to create. It’s a world without gun violence, in which young girls of every background see themselves in media, in which the boundaries of cultural spaces are not only respected, but understood. It’s bittersweet. They’ve been given this burden unfairly early, but we’d rather listen to them than anyone else.
The kids are the future. Lift them up.
—Natalie
EMMA GONZÁLEZ
Emma took a proud, vocal stance against the NRA and the Congress members who take its money after 17 of her classmates were killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. She’s now known as one of the most outspoken, passionate critics of the gun lobby and the people implicit in it. Read her essay in Harper’s Bazaar (the dek says it all: “Adults are behaving like children.”).
RAYOUF ALHUMEDHI
Rayouf Alhumedhi was 15 years old when she emailed Apple to suggest a new emoji of a woman wearing a hijab. After all, about 550 million women around the world wear one, and they all deserve to see themselves represented. Read Rayouf’s incredibly detailed proposal to Unicode here, and this AMA in which she fields insensitivity and harassment with more poise than the average adult.
AMANDLA STENBERG
The erasure of people and characters of color no longer comes as a surprise. But 19-year-old Amandla Stenberg recently demonstrated a thoughtfulness that many of her adult peers do not demonstrate, walking away from a role in Black Panther because she supported it going to a darker-skinned woman: “There are spaces that I should not take up.” Read this interview with Amandla, in which she explains her thinking.
