Children having children: Race, innocence, and sexuality education

This feminist ethnographic study considers the rhetoric of children having children in debates over school-based sexuality education, a rhetoric that is universalizing but racialized and gendered. I use participant observation and interview data I collected in a North Carolina school system that serves a predominantly African American, low-income student population. I explore educators', activists', and policymakers' responses to state legislation requiring that public schools provide sexuality education that teaches students to abstain from sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage. In school-board meetings, proponents and opponents of the mandated instruction alike cast low-income, African American girls as central to perceived problems of teen pregnancy, promiscuity, and disease. Those advocating abstinence-only sexuality education argued that their curricula would protect innocent children from others' corrupting influence; racialized language and images suggested that these others were poor, African American girls. Those promoting comprehensive sexuality education recast these girls as children having children-innocents who needed guidance and who could not be held responsible for their missteps. In some ways, the rhetoric of children having children is a redemptive response to notions of African American and low-income women and girls as sexually excessive. However, the rhetoric is ultimately constraining, for it forestalls concern about boys' and men's sexualities, elides the specificities of African American women's and girls' sexual lives, and fails to recognize African American girls and women as simultaneously sexual, struggling, and worthy of protection.