Unfolding Research is a recurring series in which people answer questions about their experiences conducting research in the Manuscript Division. Kelsey Henry is the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, and a former research fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). She is an interdisciplinary historian whose work integrates perspectives from Black studies, histories of science and medicine, and disability studies.
Could you tell us about your dissertation?
Sure! My dissertation, “Racing the Life Course: Antiblack Epistemes and Ethical Foreclosures in U.S. Child Development Science, 1830s–1960s,” is a history of “developmental disability” as a racial category. I interrogate how the persistent, and often unquestioned, pairing of whiteness and developmental normality and blackness and developmental abnormality has estranged Black children from normative age markers, whether they are clinically diagnosed with developmental disability or not. To do this, I study the legacies of nineteenth-century scientific metrics of human development and racial difference – specifically theories of Black developmental incapacity that were used to justify chattel slavery – in twentieth-century developmental psychology, child psychiatry, and pediatric science.
I argue that despite the ascendance of “universal” developmental standards in child development science, these metrics were normed around white children and subsequently (mis)diagnosed Black developmental delays and misunderstood antiblack racism’s developmental impact on Black children. Ultimately, I contend that child development science has supplied an understudied evidentiary source for withholding human recognition and legal personhood, of which the capacity for “mature” adulthood is a prerequisite, from Black Americans. Despite this, the project concludes with the complex motivations of Black child development scientists who wanted to reform the field to further racially liberatory aims.
What collections did you explore while you were at the Library of Congress? What did you find that surprised you, or pushed your research in a different direction?
I worked with Kenneth B. Clark’s and Arnold Gesell’s collections. Both men were twentieth-century developmental psychologists, and Clark