How We Fight Adult Supremacy in Black Communities

by Tayler Simon

I remember when I was a child, I told my mom I never wanted to grow up. Adults complained about bills and errands, their days already spoken for in advance. It did not look like a fun time, moving through a script you didn’t write. Now, as an adult, I agree with my kid-self. Being a kid comes with so many perks and little responsibility. As a kid, I had the luxury of play, people to cook for me and do my laundry, and my own personal chauffeur. School was my only responsibility, and that came easily to me.

I knew everyone’s childhood wasn’t like mine. It wasn’t perfect, but I knew from my friends that they couldn’t wait to be grown to gain some semblance of control over their lives. There are so many children out there who yearn for the freedom and independence of adulthood because of the control they experience from the adults in their lives. There are so many children out there with parents and other adults in their lives who abuse them. Children who have been parentified, forced to grow up too fast to take care of parents suffering from disabilities or addiction, as well as younger siblings. Queer and trans children out there, where home is the most dangerous place for them. There are children at the mercy of their impoverished conditions. And these children do what they can to survive with the little agency our society gives them.

In the introduction to the book No! Against Adult Supremacy by Soling, et. al., it says,  “We are all indoctrinated from birth in ways of ‘Because I said so…’ [T]he suppression of our agency, the dismissal of our desires, the reduction of our personhood…at its root lies our dehumanisation of children.”

When we dehumanize children, we learn to dehumanize ourselves. We all have been children once, and when we mature into adults, we like to forget the powerlessness of childhood. Trauma allows us to recreate those power dynamics with our own children, with the assumption that the power and control we were subjected to made us well-adjusted adults, when we really need to do healing work with our own inner children.

Through phrases like “Because I said so”, we learn to blindly accept authority. We are told not to question the powers that may harm us. We internalize that we should accept that we don’t know what’s best for ourselves. Through capitalism and other systems of oppression, we accept giving away our rights just because someone with power said so.

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So much of our policymaking and public education system claims to be in the best interest of children, without asking them what they really need. We, the adults, center our needs and expectations and believe that children don’t understand what is best for themselves.

A few years ago, I saw this term circulating on my social media feed: adult supremacy. Essentially, adult supremacy is the belief that adults are superior to children and should control every aspect of their being. Adult supremacy aids the power structures rooted in dominance, such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Through these structures of dominance, children experience compound oppression.

Some Black parents and adults might bristle at this concept of adult supremacy, since many of us come from an upbringing that “children should be seen, not heard,” and that children need to “stay out of grown folks’ business.” We were taught to respect our elders, and any pushback or protest was met with “Because I said so.” We often internalize this tradition and, instead of challenging it, perpetuate it because that is all we know.

However, there is a difference between promoting respect for elders and exerting control over children, and many adults seek to control the children around them–whether that be because of the influence of our own upbringing, using our children as pawns in our relationships, or believing them to be a vessel in which we can live out the dreams we never got to achieve. The purpose of the power we have over children is for their protection as a vulnerable population, not to control them because we believe they are completely incapable of making their own decisions.

In our public education system, we prioritize teaching children obedience over fostering their ability to think critically and to question unjust authority. According to Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “[S]ince people ‘receive’ the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better ‘fit’ for the world.” Education in schools is less about sharing knowledge and more about preparing children to accept the world of the oppressors unquestioningly. School is about speaking only when the teacher grants permission, even when asking a question. Students are not allowed to leave their seats or attend to their basic needs, such as using the bathroom. The tests we give them only serve to assess how much they can regurgitate information, rather than to help them discern how that information affects them as people. Teachers and administrators, as adult “experts,” determine what is best. 

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Here in the United States, we don’t give children the opportunity to fully participate in our democracy through civic engagement. Adolescent students are subjected to policies that directly affect them without being allowed to vote for the representatives who are supposed to serve them. We don’t have opportunities to hear directly from students to provide input on the policies of public education, foster care, and other state-run agencies that serve their well-being. Politicians, as adult “experts,” determine what is best. 

In South Carolina specifically, we currently have a bill called the Parental Rights Act that would “affirm and enumerate the fundamental rights of parents to direct the upbringing, education, healthcare, and general welfare of their children…” Here, we are actively trying to codify parents’ rights to control children, even if parents are the biggest threat to the safety of their children, especially with cases of sexual abuse or abusive parents of LGBTQ+ children. This bill is set to harm more children than it helps, and it completely ignores the fact that parents already have many of these protections as legal guardians.

Authoritarian parents, or parents who engage in a one-way mode of communication, establish strict rules that the child is expected to follow without question or negotiation. They believe force is the way to rear well-adjusted children, but this style treats children as property rather than autonomous beings. Just because you brought a human into the world doesn’t mean you own them or that they owe their eternal servitude to you. Even more benign parenting styles of over-protection and coddling treat children as incapable of being their own person. Parents, caregivers, and other adults in the community determine what is best. 

Within the religious context, in Christianity and other monotheistic religions, we are taught to see God as the authoritarian father, and we refer to ourselves as his children. We are taught to obey his word, or at least the interpretation of his word through a patriarchal head of a church, without question. Many Christians believe that since they are children of God, they have little autonomy in their lives, since everything is God’s will. We are recreating the same structure in which children are at the whims of a powerful father, whether that means more harm comes to us than love.

Despite adult supremacy being pervasive in our society, there are several ways we can challenge it:

1. Respect the bodily autonomy of children: Do not force them to hug or kiss other adults or children. We may think showing affection is a sign of affection and closeness with children, but not all children feel comfortable speaking up to say no to an adult when it comes to affection. This is also a great strategy to empower children against sexual abuse if they feel agency to speak up about their boundaries and know that it isn’t normal for adults to make them feel uncomfortable through touch.
2. Include feedback and requests from children: Try to involve them in as much decision-making as appropriate. Ask children to share their feelings about decisions they don’t control. Create an environment where children feel empowered to share their feelings, opinions, and feedback. They deserve the respect of adults, too.
3. Model or involve children in civic responsibilities when you can: Because of the way the system is designed, it is difficult for many people, including adults, to stay engaged. Make sure children see you involved in civic life when you can. Take them to school board meetings so they can learn about the decision-making process that directly affects them. Help them register to vote, or show them what to do when it is time for them to vote. 

Children, as with all humans, intuitively know what they need to feel safe, even if they may not always have adequate language to speak up for themselves. Many of them are intimately attuned to the behaviors and moods of the adults around them, whether or not the adults try to minimize a situation. How can we, as adults, respect this knowing that children possess rather than continuing to socialize them to forgo that knowledge for the sake of obedience?

Tayler Simon (@tayler_made_books)(she, her) is a writer, book lover turned bookseller, social worker, and seeker of liberation for all. She comes from southern roots, raised by three generations of love warriors. She is the owner of Liberation is Lit, a bookstore that aims to spark collective action for liberation and community building among readers and book lovers by promoting stories from intersectional experiences. Tayler wrote her first book in second grade but resisted calling herself a writer until she started her own blog in 2019 and contributed to numerous online publications works on anti-oppression. She has self-published four books, Phases: Poems, Writing Our Truths: A Guide to Self-Publishing for BIPOC Writers, Love and Other Forms of Heartbreak and Black Madonna. Through her books, she has made a commitment to radical vulnerability, curiosity, and connection.