Thelife- A video of 7-year-old Wynta-Amor Rogers marching and chanting during a
Black Lives Matter protest in Merrick, New York has gone viral on Twitter, with commenters calling the child "fierce" and "inspirational." - The video has received nearly 23 million views in just five days and sparked intense debate about what the role of
children of color should be in the nationwideprotests . - Some feel that participation in protests robs black children of their innocence and "normal" childhood experiences, in addition to reinforcing a harmful stereotype of the "strong black woman."
- Others have said that viral videos and photos of children participating in protests make them "proud" and represent community healing and power.
In a now-viral video, 7-year-old Wynta-Amor Rogers marches along the Babylon Turnpike in Merrick, New York with her mother, Lakyia Jackson, chanting, "No justice, no peace." She holds up her fists and points to the camera.
Scott Brinton, the executive editor of Herald Community Newspapers, filmed the 15-second video during Wednesday evening's Black Lives Matter protest and posted the footage on Twitter. By the time the protest concluded later that night, the video had been viewed 25,000 times. By midnight, Brinton wrote in an article, the video had received one million views. As of Monday morning, the clip has racked up nearly 23 million views.
"I think she was really caught up in the moment and had really internalized it," Brinton told Insider of his first impression of Rogers. "You could see the passion in her eyes."
—Scott Brinton (@ScottBrinton1) June 3, 2020
In five days, the video has circulated widely; it's been shared by the NAACP and Kamala Harris tweeted that Rogers "gives [her] hope."
Rogers' mother responded to the online attention on Twitter, writing, "Wynta-Amor wanted to be heard and she has been. we must show the kids of the world the right way and I will start with mine."
While the video's viral fame was unexpected, Brinton says, the widespread interest in Rogers' activism makes sense.
"I think, in part, people are responding to it because she added a young child's voice to this," he explained. "That's sort of been the missing voice. I mean, you hear from adults, but how are children affected by this? And, clearly, they're affected like everyone else."
Brinton's video, however, is sparking debate about what the role of children is — and should be — in protests and in the current political moment.
One Twitter user, a 24-year-old graduate student and aspiring social worker who goes by Cindy Noir on social media, was angered and disappointed by the video which, she believes, reinforces a harmful narrative for children of color.
"Please don't turn this into a glorified 'shes so strong' narrative," she captioned a retweet of the video. "No CHILD should be at a protest about her own life. This is SAD, not a story of bravery."
—Cindy Noir✨ (@Ebony_QT) June 4, 2020
"I knew that the reaction would be 'Oh, my goodness, she's so strong. Look at this little girl in the streets, this is such a great thing,'" Noir told Insider. "It's just that the whole video symbolizes a loss of innocence. She doesn't get to be a child at home, playing with toys. She's out in a pandemic, protesting for her own rights."
The frustration, she explained, comes from personal experience.
"It's just sad in my heart because, as a black woman, I can recount my own loss of innocence of realizing that the color of my skin meant something to people as a child too," she said. "And it is a repeated generational loss of innocence that black children experience at a very young age."
Noir worries about protesting's short-term impact on physical health — as well as the long-term impact on black children's emotional wellbeing.
"How much damage is this doing to this child's brain to be retaining this information — of breaking quarantine and risking her own health to protest for her own life?" she said. "You know, that's a very heavy message for a child to be receiving."
Twitter user Mary B., a black woman working in the tech field, also took issue with the video and the thousands of positive comments calling Rogers "fierce" and "inspirational."
"I'm sorry I'm not for this," she commented on the video in a tweet that received over 3,000 likes. "She should be at home playing with dolls not being a racial justice warrior protesting for black lives."
—Mary (@Girasol_Mary) June 4, 2020
The video, Mary told Insider, ultimately reinforces what she believes is a harmful stereotype of the "strong black woman," a label that has far-reaching implications.
"It makes people desensitized and people view black girls, particularly dark-skinned girls, as less innocent," she said. "We're seen as naturally stronger and responsible for carrying the whole community on our backs. Health care professionals are less likely to believe us when we describe our pain. We're more likely to be sexualized at younger ages. We're seen as never needing help."
While Mary says she believes that children need to understand structural inequality, placing young black girls on the "front lines" can lead to catastrophic outcomes.
In Seattle, police ended up pepper-spraying a young girl who was brought to a protest, according to BuzzFeed News, highlighting the physical dangers of bringing children to the demonstrations about police brutality.
But for Mary, there is a specific type of risk bringing black girls to protests. "This isn't just about our kids being aware of what's going on. I get it. They need to know," Mary wrote in a follow-up tweet. "But young black girls at the front lines? Damaging their psyche early on only continues the damaging perception of the strong black woman stereotype and it's killing us."
—Mary (@Girasol_Mary) June 4, 2020
Dr. Jameca Cooper, a counseling psychologist and adjunct professor at Webster University, had a different reaction to the video. Cooper, whose scholarship and clinical work has focused on bringing awareness to mental health conditions and reducing the stigma associated with mental health in communities of color, described her first instinct when seeing the video of Rogers' activism as "pride."
While Cooper says she understands commenters' concerns, she doesn't believe that protesting itself is robbing children of color of their innocence — rather, it is a powerful response to the structural inequality that has robbed them of innocence since birth.
"If you're a person of color, you know that children of color in this country are not granted the luxury of childhood innocence," she said.
While protests are a good way for children to learn, Cooper says, children's introduction to activism must include broader discussions about history and inequality.
These discussions, she says, need to begin from a point of personal experience.
"For many children of color, they've already kind of had their first eye-opening experience — probably at school or with friends — where they have realized or been told by someone that they're different," she explained. "So that's probably where you would start with most children, and maybe to also refer to books they read or movies that they watched where a child or an individual has been singled out or isolated."
A personal point of reference, Cooper believes, then needs to be supplemented with historical context.
"They have to be able to get in the context, the historical context of why this is important by talking about things like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and civil rights protests and marches, like the March on Washington," she explained.
For some, photos of children at protests represent moments of community healing.
Photographer Mateo Zapata, who has been documenting protests taking place around the South Side of Chicago, captured a moment of two young girls connecting during Wednesday's march in the Pilsen neighborhood. In the shot, Tia James and Nivea Sandoval, who have been friends for two years after meeting a modeling casting call, hold hands and march down the street. The post, captioned "Brown Pride can't exist without Black Love," has been circulated widely on social media and received nearly 200,000 likes when it was reposted to the official E! News Instagram account.
James' mother, Jennifer Hill said that she Sandoval's mother, Blanca Martinez, decided to bring their girls to the march be "more than just models" and to witness "a celebration of unity from the black and brown communities."
Zapata told Insider that he was contacted about taking photos of the event by a group of women from Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood who were looking to address the intensifying racial divide between black and brown communities in the area amid protests.
"The idea was that as a community that's predominantly Latino on the South Side, we were standing in with the Black Lives Matter movement. And we wanted to physically, through action, show that we support BLM and that we support the black community as brown people," he said. "Because at the end of the day, you know, where we're confronted with the same system that's incarcerating our immigrant children and separating our families at the border."
Zapata, who agreed to take photos as a way to use his skills and platform to express solidarity, estimates that an "overwhelming" 3,600 to 4,000 people attended the protest.
When he encountered the two girls — one black, one brown — holding hands, he was struck by the impact of the visual.
"I thought power, I thought healing," he said. "I think that those two young girls represent the healing, right?"
Zapata rejects the critique that child protesters are inheriting generational trauma — in fact, he believes that their activism demonstrates the opposite.
"You know, I think children have to be presented with the opportunity to break our generational trauma," he said. "Their role is to realize the power of showing up — in a protest, in a demonstration, in a march. There's power in that. And the best way to teach that — to explain that — is by having them participate."
Hill agreed, saying that critiques of children's involvement in protests miss the mark.
"That isn't the narrative we're teaching them," she told Insider. "What we're teaching our daughters is that people of different races coming together should be the norm. It was a celebration for them. They were dancing, they were having a good time."
Hill says her daughter already wants to "do it again."
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