Adultifying

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

— Thomas Szasz

The mayor of Columbus, Ohio, is under assault for calling Ma’Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old fatally shot by police this week, a "young woman."

The mayor is guilty of “adultification bias,” a form of discrimination against Black girls.

Adultifying Black girls makes them out to be "more adult-like than their White peers," according to The Washington Post.

“We as a society view Black girls as grown women who aren’t capable of being talked to and respected and protected as children,” Ijeoma Opara, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, told The Post.

The professor failed to mention that Bryant had been stabbing people with a knife when she was shot.

We learned earlier this month that Brandon Hole, the 19-year-old "FedEx shooter," was obsessed with the fictional Applejack of the TV show “My Little Pony.”

“I hope that I can be with Ap­ple­jack in the af­ter­life, my life has no mean­ing with­out her,” Hole wrote on Facebook less than an hour before he killed eight people and himself.

I won't make the mistake of calling Hole a "young man," because he wasn't. He was a baby who wielded rifles.

Parents and teachers at large are doing a crappy job. 

They're infantilizing kids and permitting tantrums in public—some of which turn fatal.

When I was 19, I didn't obsess over a fictional pony. I obsessed over my girlfriend, the atrocity of the Vietnam War, where I'd earn enough money for rent, and whether I should major in psychology or something else.

I was far from mature; but my world was an adult's, not an infant's, world.

The 14th-century word adult comes from the Latin adultus, meaning "grown, ripe, mature."

We need young men and women to quit acting like two-year-olds—particularly when they're armed.

It's time for more adultifying, not less.