No abstract

Black children around the globe develop and learn in persistently racist environments. Decades of early racial awareness research primarily center on the development of young children’s self-esteem, racial biases, or friendships. Researchers have yet to learn all that can be understood about young children’s perspectives on structural racial inequities. There is a dearth of research that examines young African American children’s emergent sociopolitical consciousness. As such, this article explores the following inquiry: What research conditions make it possible to elicit young African American children’s racialized sociopolitical awareness and knowledge? Over the course of one school year, I studied five African American first graders’ literacies, racial awareness, and sociopolitical knowledge who were enrolled in an independent neighborhood elementary school. Through a synthesis of my methodology, I detail three foundational orientations: (a) privileging intraracial spaces as contexts for narrating and grappling with racialized, sociopolitical realities, (b) utilize children’s literature by and about Black people with critically conscious narratives, and (c) operating from the belief that young children are competent to speak about the racialized conditions in which they live. The implications from this research demonstrate the possibilities of pro-Black research at the intersection of racial awareness and sociocultural literacy studies. To combat antiblackness in education research and in schools, we need to hear the voices of African American children and carve out spaces that center Blackness for them to express racial sociopolitical truths. Conducting early racial awareness research about and with young African American children requires that we believe they possess the developmental capacity to name and resist inequity and imagine the possibilities of racial justice.

In this article, we share findings from three qualitative studies, illustrating how children of color and their families make meaning of the racial, linguistic, cultural, and gendered worlds in which they develop. The first study examines how White adoptive Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) parents engage in race conscious child-rearing of their young African American son and the dialogism of racial identity formation and racial literacies; the second study examines the family literacy learning and teaching practices of one adult English to Speakers of Other Languages student; the third study examines how Latinx parents engage intergenerational sharing of stories as tools of resistance. Utilizing critical race theory, LatCrit theory, and sociocultural perspectives on literacy and intergenerational learning as analytical lenses, this article illuminates the consequential nature of intergenerational learning that occurs through the lived and embodied literacy practices of children and families of color and the implications for literacy researchers and practitioners.

This article illustrates how one elementary school centers Black history to amplify children’s role in curricular development and as liberatory literacy pedagogy and practice.

Decades of research demonstrate that young children make meaning about race and racism. Yet there remains a dearth of scholarship about whether and how African American children are thinking across racial and ethnic difference to make sense of systemic inequities. Moreover, there are but a handful of scholars who have documented the ways that children and youth engage in acts of solidarity. Extending the growing body of literature that privileges young children of color's critical perspectives, this article examines African American first-graders’ sociopolitical awareness; in particular, it explores how they expressed their understanding that racial discrimination undergirded contemporary US immigration policies. These data reveal that the children possessed a capacity for demonstrating solidarity with other non-white people, in that they named and critiqued the marginalization experienced by immigrant communities of color. Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies, critical literacy, and critical consciousness, the author argues that the children's emergent solidarity can be understood through their three rhetorical moves: (1) interchanging Black and Brown people in name; (2) advancing a critical moral ideal by juxtaposing current and former political leaders; and (3) invoking knowledge of US history. Although popular media and political discourse seldom portray immigration as an issue that concerns Black communities in the US, African Americans have long understood that their own liberation is connected to that of other marginalized groups. As such, this article urges early childhood researchers to examine the nature of the questions being asked about young African American children's racial meaning-making practices and knowledges about belonging, equity, and inclusion within and outside schools.