‘This is almost like Ruby Bridges’: young children’s demonstration of racial literacy

ABSTRACT

Young Children of Color in the United States experience the effects of racism on a daily basis. There have been calls for anti-bias and anti-racist education across the field of education, yet most recommendations are based on older students or studies in laboratory settings. Additionally, state and local governments have enacted legislation designed to make it harder for teachers to engage in anti-racist, anti-oppressive education. In this ethnographic study of two early childhood classrooms, children explored individual and collective racialized identities and investigated the role of race in the lives of children across time, including 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated New Orleans schools in 1960. Children also applied theories of justice to ideas about race. Findings suggest racial education should support students’ racial inquiry by acknowledging what they already experience, do, and wonder about race.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• racial literacy
• ethnography
• race
• young children

Acknowledgments

I am most indebted to the participants in this study. I am grateful to Katherina Payne, Jennifer Keys Adair, and Amanda Vickery for their guidance on this research and feedback on earlier versions of this work. Thank you to Esther Kim, Delandrea Hall, and Noreen Naseem Rodríguez for your ongoing support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) defined cultural community as ‘a coordinated group of people with some traditions and understandings in common, extending across several generations, with varied roles and practices and continual change among participants as well as transformation in the community’s practices (see Rogoff 2003)’ (21).

2. All names are pseudonyms; many of the children chose their own pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Texas at Austin .