Heidi Stevens: So much is stolen when a grown woman calls a child a racial slur -- including the child's innocence

It’s hard to even know where to start when you talk about the recent incident at a Rochester, Minnesota, public park, where a white woman called a 5-year-old boy the N-word.

The fact that she uses the word at all is disgusting. The fact that she slung it at a child is abhorrent. The fact that she doubles down and repeats the word in a viral video captured by a 30-year-old witness is repugnant.

The fact that she was holding a young child the entire time is heartbreaking.

The fact that an online fundraiser to support the woman has raised more than $675,000 is another level of depressing.

The fact that the fundraiser comments had to be disabled “due to the unacceptable volume of racist and derogatory remarks,” according to the crowdfunding site’s co-founder, is hard to muster a lot of surprise over, I guess. Outrage though. Outrage is easy to muster.

It feels like all that should go without saying.

It feels like the United States in 2025 should be a place where a child can play in a park without being called a racial slur.

It feels like we have fought enough wars and crawled out of enough dark and tragic chapters and signed enough legislation and debunked enough lies and worked to heal enough wounds and been gifted the wisdom and guidance of enough transformative, grace-filled, love-filled leaders to know, by now, that we are strongest and steadiest and brightest when we embrace and celebrate our diversity. When we refuse to drink or share the poison that tells us to hate and fear one another because of our differences.

It feels like we should understand, through the wonders of knowledge and the strength of our humanity, that a society functions best when all of its children are loved and lifted and supported equally. That a 5-year-old child in a park is automatically, unconditionally, in need of and deserving of grace and care and tenderness.

Five years old.

But I suppose that’s wishful thinking.

One thing that keeps striking me as I read about the incident is the allegation that the 5-year-old boy “stole” something from the woman’s son.

“The woman accused the boy of stealing from her child's diaper bag, according to the description of an online fundraiser created by her,” CBS News reported.

“He took my son’s stuff,” the woman says in the viral video.

Five-year-olds don’t steal. They take things that don’t belong to them, sure. They need to be gently redirected here and there, of course. They’re learning boundaries and rules and social norms and manners and sharing and empathy during every waking moment, during every single encounter.

If you see a child engage in extremely common, developmentally appropriate, childlike behavior and your mind goes to crime, it’s time to examine your worldview. A 5-year-old child taking something at a park that doesn’t belong to him is no more stealing than a 5-year-old child who draws on a wall is vandalizing property.

Research consistently shows that Black children are viewed as older and less innocent than white children. A 2014 report titled "The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children" and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that young Black boys were significantly less likely to be viewed as children than their same-age white peers.

“When adults see children, we see people that are in need of protection, people that we want to help and keep separate from the worst that society has to do,” Phillip Atiba Goff, one of the lead authors of the 2014 research, told NPR when the report came out. “When we see adults, we don't feel that same kind of need.”

A 2017 study called “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood” found adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers, especially in the age range of 5 to 14.

“And when we rob children of that protection of childhood, then they can be treated like adults in the criminal justice system, they can be punished more harshly, they can be given less of the benefit of the doubt,” Goff elaborated on NPR. “We try less hard to help them understand their mistakes, and we believe less that they can, over time, fix their mistakes. So all of the good things we want to give to children are taken early from Black children, and that can't happen.”

And yet it does.

It’s hard not to wonder how the woman in the video would want her own child to be treated if he took something that didn’t belong to him at a park. It’s hard not to wonder what kind of world we could live in if we started, as our baseline, by treating everyone’s children the way we’d want anyone to treat our own.

It’s not the only thing there is to say about this incident. But it’s the thing I keep coming back to, as I try to make sense of how we got here and, just as bewildering, where we go next.