<meta property="og:title" content="Double Dutch" />

Of course, every person is a child before they become an adult. But not everyone has the same experience of childhood. Many people perceive white children as young, innocent, and needing protected places to play. Meanwhile, too often, children of color have been “adultified”—meaning that others perceived them to be older than they were, more responsible for their actions, and less deserving of protection and play. In the 1970s and 1990s, when Double Dutch was growing in New York City, some spoke of Black and Latinx young people in New York with stereotyping and racist language.¹ They seemed to pay more attention to what they thought of as young people’s faults rather than the challenging circumstances some faced while growing up.

In this context, some Black New Yorkers created spaces for safe and joyful play for Black children. Double Dutch is a joyful, physical kind of play that developed in the United States. Children and adults can jump Double Dutch anywhere they have jump ropes and level ground. In the 1940s and 1950s, it became especially popular among Black girls, who had less access to organized sports (like basketball or baseball) than did their male peers (until school sports programs expanded access for girls in the 1970s). Girls could jump Double Dutch with each other on sidewalks, in parks, and, sometimes, in tournaments, as discussed in these primary sources. Jumpers sometimes added fancy tricks from gymnastics or breakdancing. And they played with rhymes, rhythms, and songs while jumping. People who didn’t want to or couldn’t jump could participate by turning the rope.

Double Dutch meant joy, play, exercise, healing, and community building.

On “adultification,” see Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center for Gender and Opportunity, 2017), https://genderjusticeandopportunity.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/girlhood-interrupted.pdf. On histories of Black childhood, and especially Black girlhood, see Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and LaKisha Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). On policies and attitudes that treated Black children as criminals, see Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York: New York University Press, 2019). ↩︎