Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement. Innocence is not just sexual deflection but a deflection of one’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, based on the confidence that one is “unmarked” and “free to be you and me.” The ironic result of this innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.” Children
