In arguing that the concept of childhood innocence has been inextricably linked to race in America, in order to exclude black children from the realm of childhood and to sanction social violence against African Americans, Robin Bernstein has produced a paradigm-shifting study of major significance, both for Americanists and for the study of childhood. Bernstein's methodology is highly innovative, bridging the gap between childhood as concept and childhood as experience, by a performative emphasis. The core argument focusses upon the material properties of objects, as “scriptive things” (dolls, picture books, soft toys, games and knickknacks) which issue cultural invitations to users. What matters is, what did a thing invite its users to do? Or, more exactly, what historically located behaviours did an artefact invite and what practices did it discourage? Black dolls, for example, usually made of rubber or cloth, invited their users to beat, whip, hang or hurl them. The advertising emphasized them as unbreakable, capable of being thrown about without injury to the doll. Nineteenth-century women's autobiographies frequently relate examples of such play, notably Frances Hodgson Burnett aged six (as Legree) mercilessly whipping her rubber doll, whose wide smile implied to her that she liked it really. Black children were repeatedly portrayed as feeling no pain. In A Coon's Alphabet (1898), for example, the African American characters are bitten by alligators, stung by bees, scalded, battered and blown up (e.g. “D is for Didymus, what blew down a gun,” and blew up himself and his sister). Advertisements for Cottolene lard-substitute feature a happy black child cuddling a doll-like lump of cotton, obscuring the reality of child labour. Some users did resist the script. Bernstein is no dogmatist and offers a fascinating discussion of the extent to which the “topsy-turvy” doll, half white and half black, could be a site for destabilizing racial hierarchies.

Social scripts, however, have very long lives. The study traces continuities from the illustrations and dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin through the Uncle Remus stories, to the whited-up minstrels of the Raggedy Ann doll and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, closing with a particularly trenchant dismantling of the infamous Clark tests (the inspiration for Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye) which supposedly demonstrated black self-hate via children's identification with white rather than black dolls, a result that failed to recognize the performative element of doll play. Bernstein demonstrates convincingly how innocence was raced white, and was transferable to surrounding people and things. Uncle Tom cuddling Eva is innocent because Eva is innocent, for example. Dolls guarantee innocence; white girls used them to smuggle morphine through the Union lines to the Confederates during the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin is a prime example of the whole process, in its multiple genres (play, novel, children's book, serial, poetry, sheet music, visual and material culture) and the associated physical practices – reading, looking, singing, weeping, and even drying one's tears on a handkerchief printed with sheet music for the “Little Eva Song” and images of the characters. Using it to blow one's nose would have been in decided defiance of the cultural script. The account of child star Cordelia Howard playing Eva underlines her importance for the circulation of childhood innocence; Staffordshire pottery figurines of Eva and Tom (painted in America) always show Eva with brown hair despite the heavy emphasis on golden curls in the novel, because Howard was a brunette. Adulation of Howard (a fine account of her fans) overlaid and interacted with adoration of angelic Eva. Howard was the lead in the Aiken dramatization, which Bernstein delineates as itself adapted from Billings's illustrations for the novel, which Aiken used as the sequence on which to drape the dramatic prose. The process of racing innocence continues into the twentieth century; the adventures of Raggedy Ann tend to involve her getting dirty, followed by punitive laundering, boiling, squeezing and hanging. Against the background of lynching, the imagery (the book is lavishly illustrated in colour and black and white) is haunting. Raggedy Ann always seems to be hanging, often with a peg through the crotch. One point failed to convince this reviewer. Bernstein ascribes significance to the sideways printing of illustrations in Uncle Tom's Cabin which necessitated the reader turning the book around to get Eva and Tom into the “right” position (side by side rather than Eva underneath Tom.) That seems to take for granted an individual silent reader, whereas any group reading would have placed various readers in different positions vis-à-vis the illustrations, which might thus be more easily read “correctly” by the listeners than by the reader. Accounts of reading aloud and the types of behaviour invited would have been invaluable – and might well have offered an example of the ways in which Bernstein's methodology could be transferred to other fields of enquiry.