During an interview about the death of her 18-year-old son, Nolan Wells, Christine Wells-Wonsley told a reporter to stop referring to her son as a “man.” Nolan’s family has called for a more in-depth investigation into his disappearance and death following a Fourth of July boat trip off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon, CPE CEO and Co-founder, spoke with the lifestyle website SheKnows about the research into the adultification of Black teenagers and children and how this bias can threaten their safety:
“One other way to think about it is that adolescence is a kind of uniquely human developmental stage…and Black kids are essentially deprived of it, so that they’re either children, meaning that they are innocent and worthy of protection, or they’re adults, and nothing in between,” says pioneering researcher in the field Phillip Atiba Solomon f.k.a. Goff, the Carl I. Hovland Professor of Black Studies and Professor of Psychology at Yale University and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity.
Read the article at SheKnows’ website.