To Be Young, Defective, and Black: Adultification Bias, Maternal Morbidity, and Black Femininity as Defective Adulthood

For Black women, Anura Bracey writes, childhood never fully exists—and yet adulthood never truly begins. Instead, Anura coins the phrase “deficient adulthood” to describe Black girls’ and women’s experiences throughout their lifetime. Black girls and women, she tells us, “occupy a paradoxical space where they are simultaneously viewed as too strong and too weak, too adult and too childlike.”