“‘You cannot come to this country’—that's what the government says sometimes,when you’re Brown”: African American children's critical literacies and emergent solidarity

Abstract

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.

Keywords

African American children critical literacies immigration solidarity

Introduction

We live in a society where destruction has become the dominant culture. To be truly revolutionary, we need to create space built on love and solidarity. (Robin D.G. Kelley, as quoted in Anderson, 2016)

As our global societies continue to grapple with how to achieve racial justice and eradicate (economic, environmental, educational) inequity, solidarity between marginalized people has served as a source of strength for enduring and overcoming a myriad of hardships. Throughout history, African American scholars and activists in particular have demonstrated the necessity of solidarity for survival. Examples include WEB Du Bois’ concern with Afro-Asian solidarity in his writing; Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Muhammad Ali's opposition of the Vietnam War; Fred Hampton and his founding of the Rainbow Coalition; Black and Asian solidarity throughout the Civil Rights Movement, as evidenced by Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs’ lifelong commitments; and Ella Baker's support of the Puerto Rican independence movement. In education research, scholars have illustrated the varied manners in which youth have forged relationships across difference and sustained one another (e.g. Jocson, 2013; Malone et al., 2023; Player, 2021; Terriquez and Milkman, 2021). Aside from discussions of their cross-racial friendships, young children's perspectives are largely absent from conceptualizations and theorizations of solidarity amongst people of color (Aboud et al., 2003; Epstein and Oyler, 2008).

Drawing on a larger study that documented the nature and depth of five African American¹ first-graders’ racialized awareness, this article explores the following questions:

• What sociopolitical issues emerge when young African American children are provided with a literacy-centered, dialogic, and intra-racial space to engage their racialized perspectives and experiences?

• What rhetorical strategies do they employ when discussing these issues?

I describe how my participants engaged in sociopolitical critiques by connecting non-white groups’ racialized experiences. In particular, I examine their views on immigration—a form of racialized discrimination they had not experienced first-hand. Within their discussion of immigration, I argue that they demonstrate their capacity to read (Freire, 1985) and critique society as inequitable; distinguish power dynamics that exist along the lines of race, ethnicity, and citizenship; and further notions of justice. In this way, they challenge the binary Black–white paradigm that often dominates US political discourse and demonstrate nascent forms of cross-racial solidarity.

Young children and critical discussions about racism

For many years, developmental psychologists have provided empirical evidence that very young children are aware of race and racism (e.g. Byrd, 2012; Clark and Clark, 1939; Quintana, 1998; Williams et al., 2020). Moreover, in the US, a society that has been racialized in its law, policies, and practices from its origin, children are inevitably surrounded by and inculcated in inequity and injustice. Despite this legacy of research and the persistently racialized societal context, the field of early childhood education has overwhelmingly felt that discussing racial issues with young children is inappropriate or too complex (Boutte, 2008; Doucet and Adair, 2013). Increasingly, however, researchers have urged the field and early childhood educators to recognize the urgency and necessity of eschewing color blindness and embracing race consciousness (Boutte et al., 2011; Husband, 2012; Sachdeva and Adair, 2019). A growing body of early childhood education research has demonstrated that young children have the capacity to engage in conversations about race and racism (e.g. Falkner, 2019; Fontanella-Nothom, 2019; Johnson, 2022a). Furthermore, a number of scholars have developed and documented methods and approaches for facilitating conversations about racism and racial difference in elementary contexts (Boutte and Muller, 2018; Copenhaver-Johnson, 2006; Daly-Lesch, 2021; Lee et al., 2008; Payne and Journell, 2019; Pierce and Gilles, 2008). These studies emphasize that young children can be engaged in critical dialogue for the purposes of social change and transformation (Comber and Nixon, 1999; Souto-Manning, 2009).

Young children, immigration, and literacy

A number of scholars have explored issues of immigration and the complexities of immigrant identities with young children in the US (e.g. Brown, 2011). Some research has explored the multimodal literacy practices (e.g. photography and photo narrations) that immigrant children can utilize to inquire into and make sense of their lived realities, along with the stark disconnect between literate identities at home and those sanctioned in schools (Brownell, 2021; Campano, 2007; Ghiso, 2016; Strickland et al., 2010). Martínez-Álvarez et al. (2015) found that in engaging young Latinx children in critical inquiry, they surfaced and challenged the dominant discourses of schooling through the creation of multimodal writing and use of photography and unpacked social issues that were important and central to their experiences like poverty and police profiling. Other studies have highlighted immigrant children's intellectualism and how educators can nurture their literate identities as resources and assets in US classrooms and schools (Martínez-Álvarez et al., 2012; Medina, 2010; Nuñez, 2021).

Much of the research with young children concerning their experiences with, conceptions of, and ideas about immigration in the US has been conducted about and with Latinx children. African American children's perspectives are largely missing from the research that lies at the intersection of literacy and young children's discourses and inquiries about immigration. Although African American children may not directly experience the effects of the harsh discriminatory practices of present immigration policies, they are making sense of the treatment of non-Black immigrants of color in the US just as they do other societal inequities and racialized realities. Children observe and synthesize media, news, and political messaging that position immigrants of color as the Other (Gallo and Link, 2015; Said, 1978). This article demonstrates that if provided with a context in which to attend to systemic and institutional forms of racism, African American children can dialogue about justice and equity and, importantly, they can think across the racialized experiences of people of color and develop foundational conceptions for cross-racial solidarity.

Theoretical orientations

Three theories serve as interpretative lenses for the analysis of the data presented in this article: Black feminist epistemologies, critical literacy, and critical consciousness.

Black feminist epistemologies

Black feminist scholars have long recognized that combating and eradicating intersectional oppressions calls for working across difference (Combahee River Collective, 1983). For example, after visiting Germany and engaging with Afro-German women in 1984, Lorde declared:

We are the hyphenated people of the Diaspora whose self-defined identities are no longer shameful secrets in the countries of our origins, but rather declarations of strength and solidarity. We are an increasingly united front from which the world has not yet heard. (Lorde, 1991: 68)

Black feminist epistemologies illuminate the ways that solidarity is a life-sustaining practice for historically marginalized communities. In delineating a “solidarity of humanity,” Collins states:

Black feminists who see the simultaneity of oppression affecting Black women appear to be more sensitive to how these same oppressive systems affect Afro-American men, people of color, women, and the dominant group itself. Thus, while Black feminist activists may work on behalf of Black women, they rarely project separatist solutions to Black female oppression. (Collins, 1986: S21)

From a Black feminist perspective, Black people who seek to forge relationships across difference are more attuned to disrupting hierarchies and systems and generating solutions that are inclusive and liberatory for all. Deeper and more complex than a similar hollow extension of empathy, African American children can demonstrate this kind of kinship and solidarity with other marginalized groups when provided with a space to explore salient issues of identity, subjugation, and freedom. In this article, my analysis is informed by Black feminist epistemologies as a lens through which to understand the connective perspectives of social analysis and solidarity for the African American children in my study.

Critical literacy

Critical literacy, a means through which we make sense of the world in a way that attends to power relations and dynamics, highlights the primacy of inequities in how our political, economic, and schooling societies were formed and are maintained (Vasquez et al., 2019). Numerous scholars have translated critical literacy into pedagogical practices (e.g. Comber, 1999; Souto Manning, 2013). Moreover, several conceptual developments in the field have guided how educators engage young children in critical literacy work like problem-posing (Quintero, 2004), the four resources model (Luke and Freebody, 1999), and audit trails (Vasquez, 2014). Although these pedagogical interventions have sought to create classrooms that will engage politicized issues of fairness, justice, and equality, these studies have predominantly focused on axes of inequality like gender and social class with diverse groups of students in and out of classrooms, as opposed to an explicit interrogation of race and racism (e.g. Jones, 2013; Silver et al., 2010).

Black scholars, drawing on Black educational communities’ ingenuity and perceptiveness across time and place, have expanded the theorization of critical literacy by squarely focusing on how Black people have used literacy to critique the world (Coles, 2019; Kinloch et al., 2017; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2018). As Muhammad (2020: 35) writes: “Literacy for [Black people] was always connected to social justice and change for the rights of humanity.” Despite the many theorizations of critical literacy and the work that Black scholars have done to infuse criticality and racial analyses in how we operationalize critical literacy practice, research in early childhood has yet to examine and analyze young children's full capacity to make sense of how the world is organized and designed to stratify people by racial categories, and the realities of intersectional discrimination (in this case, being a non-white immigrant). Critical literacy, in my study, served as a theoretical and analytical framing that made space in the literature-circle sessions for the expression and representation of race, power, and the manifestations of racialized inequity that abound in the US. This article seeks to demonstrate that, through their critical literacy practices, young African American children's racial awareness of immigration is sociopolitical in nature and extends beyond themselves and challenges the dominant Black–white paradigm in the US.

Critical consciousness

Critical consciousness, which is grounded in the formative theorizing of Freire (1973), can be characterized by two dimensions: awareness and action (Jemal, 2017). The development of critical consciousness is a process of becoming aware of the ways society is inequitably structured alongside and in conversation with others (Freire, 1973; Mathews et al., 2020). Questioning, interrogating, and reconstructing constitute the fundamental aspects of engaging critical consciousness (Diemer et al., 2016). In this way, the humanity of the oppressed can be reclaimed (Freire, 1970). Freire (1970, 1973) centers critical consciousness on its potentiality for liberating oppressed communities—predominantly people of color. With an emphasis on the cognitive processes and dimensions of critical consciousness (Jemal, 2017), this article extends the theory, which has predominantly centered on how the construct materializes within adolescents and adults, through an examination of young African American children's meaning-making. Critical consciousness, for my participants, is an ongoing collective construction—one that explicates their ways of knowing about the world, privileges their awareness of a range of sociopolitical issues, and highlights their capacity for imagining social transformation.

The development of critical consciousness can be seen as an embodiment and articulation of their lived experiences and observations of the world. The participants’ demonstration of critical consciousness is an outgrowth of their identities as African Americans, as students enrolled in a school that privileges critical social praxis, and as children whose parents engage in race-conscious parenting practices. This is evident in the participants’ ability to understand and reflect on the plight of others, viewing the racial and political struggles of others as analogous to their own. Therefore, the construct of critical consciousness, in its early stage and form, serves as a platform for understanding how institutions and structures operate, along with creating the conditions for a future enactment of change through such means as cross-racial solidarity and multiracial coalition-building between and amongst people of color.

Research methods

Setting and participants

I collected the data for this article over the course of one school year at an independent neighborhood school (pre-kindergarten through sixth grade) in an urban city in the north-east of the US. The independent neighborhood school, in which about 80 students were enrolled at the time of the study, predominantly consists of African American children and teachers. The school's curriculum, which is fluid and responsive to the needs of the students, is composed collectively by the principal (who teaches history in the upper grades), the teachers, and the children. The school's pedagogy is centered on providing children with a space to learn to love reading, writing, and research, and develop activist orientations to issues of inequity in the world (Johnson, 2022b). Importantly, the school also centers the curriculum and pedagogy on the full range of Blackness, Black history, and Black contemporary realities, triumphs, and struggles. The principal has cultivated a space that is of and about the local community, but also strives to be a community in and of itself. She sees her school as a family of parents, teachers, and students, who are united by the school's vision of social and racial justice. My study's primary participants were five first-graders (six- and seven-year-olds; Table 1); all nine African American first-graders were invited to join the study and these five families agreed to have their children (all names are pseudonyms) participate.

Table 1.

Participant information.

Name	Gender	Age at start of study	Parents
Kelly	Girl	6	Biological African American mother and father
Miles	Boy	6	Biological African American father and white mother
Camille	Girl	6	Adoptive Jamaican American father and white father
Isaac	Boy	6	Adoptive white mothers
Renee	Girl	7	Biological African American mother and father

Data collection methods

As my primary data collection method of the larger research project, I facilitated 14 after-school literature circles with the participants (for more on the methodological approach, see Johnson, 2022a). These circles lasted from 30 to 45 minutes and were audio-recorded; each week was focused on one central topic, from which the inquiry and discussions began. I designed the series of literature circles as a “community of inquiry” (Campano et al., 2013), wherein the children could ask me questions, pose questions to one another, share stories, affirm and bolster the stories of the other participants, and express themselves in whatever way felt most comfortable for them (or not at all in some instances).

I opened the session with the reading of a children's book—most of which were by and about Black people—and followed up by posing a set of open-ended facilitative questions. I read at the start of each literature circle, and the focal topics were guided by what the children had discussed or introduced in previous sessions and what book felt most resonant with who I came to know the children to be. I chose books that were primarily written by authors of color, primarily featured Black people as the main characters, and were categorized as accessible for early elementary-aged students. During any session, the children could choose to just listen and sit in, without offering anything orally or through drawing.

Notably, the research I present in this article took place during Donald Trump's presidency (2017–2018). The political moment was fraught with bold white-supremacist demonstrations and harmful xenophobic messaging, as well as constant negative, pathologizing imagery about the US–Mexico border. This certainly influenced the children in the way of making immigration top of mind during the circle sessions. However, I see the clear influence of media and political discourses on the children as further evidence for documenting young children's sociopolitical awareness.

Data analysis

My data analysis process was cyclical and iterative. I took the audio-recordings from the literature-circle sessions and analyzed them in multiple rounds of coding. I began by developing a first set of initial descriptive codes to address the first research question and examine what issues emerged across the circles. The second cycle of coding employed pattern coding to organize my initial codes into broader and more cohesive analytical units (Miles et al., 2018); “immigration policies, practices, and discourses” is the broader theme from which the data for this article was drawn. The stages of category coding, category refinement, exploring the relationships across categories, and evaluating the integrated data (Morehouse and Maykut, 2002) helped identify the meanings the children made about immigration across the sessions and thereby led me to organize the data into three overarching codes—the rhetorical categories “connecting Black and Brown,” “utilizing a critical moral ideal,” and “invoking historical US knowledge”—that directly respond to my second research question.

Researcher positionality

As an African American woman and mother of young African American children, I entered this research from a place of acute racialized awareness and critical consciousness myself. As Campano et al. argue:

Rather than seeing ourselves as dispassionate outside critics and explicators, we recognize that we invariably bring our own identities into our research sites… we are constantly engaged in the hermeneutics of learning from and alongside differentially situated others whose own cultural and experiential horizons inform our interpretive processes…. (Campano et al., 2015: 34)

I, therefore, did not strive for objectivity, but used my “insider–outsider” status as a source of strength in the data collection process (Fine, 1994). I desire, in both my everyday and professional lives, to stand alongside other marginalized people in the fight for racial and ethnic justice. Solidarity is an integral piece of the way I see my work in the world unfolding and has shown up in sisterhoods that I have formed, the kind of educator I work to be in my classroom practice, and the way I choose to show up in the world more generally. In conducting the research, I, at times, saw myself in the children. Unlike the participants, my Blackness was not affirmed, centered, reflected, or intentionally developed throughout my K–12 (kindergarten to Grade 12) educational journey; instead, I intentionally chose that path when I matriculated to college. Therefore, while cultivating a space for these children to share in the way that they did, my own Black identity and sociopolitical awareness were nurtured. My orientations and experiences in the world did not dictate my findings, but my epistemologies did spur me to craft a study that facilitated a context for the data to emerge.

Findings

The larger study's purpose was to examine the nature, range, and depth of five African American children's racial and sociopolitical knowledge, and what literacy practices they used to convey their awareness and perspectives. Among the issues that emerged as salient during the literature-circle sessions, immigration, politics, and race were among the first. The children demonstrated their emergent capacity for cross-racial solidarity through three rhetorical moves concerning immigration: (1) interchanging Black and Brown people in name; (2) forwarding a critical moral ideal by juxtaposing current and former political leaders; and (3) invoking an understanding of US history and geography. These moves and their understandings demonstrate the ways the children articulate a diasporic critical consciousness and underscore the capacity of communities of color to band together in pursuit of liberation, as Black feminist theorists has urged us to do across time. An illustrative data excerpt for each move is included and analyzed below.

Connecting Black and Brown

After reading Skin Again by bell hooks (2007) during the first session, the children introduced Donald Trump into the discussion on being asked to define their own skin color and provide their understanding of racism. Renee declared during this initial discussion: “And I don’t like Donald Trump because he doesn’t like kids. And second, because he lied … and he's a racist.” All five of the children expressed their disdain for Trump, his attitudes toward Black people and others, his racial and socioeconomic privilege, and, most importantly, his xenophobic views about Mexico and immigration. Their “reading” of Trump's actions takes up a critical literacy practice, unpacking the status quo and problematizing what had been normalized in the public discourse across his presidency, as well as a Black feminist ethos in aligning themselves with the struggle for justice with which other marginalized groups are grappling. After listening to the other children discuss Trump's views on Brown and Black people during this first session, Miles declared: “Donald Trump doesn’t like anyone that are different than him.” As they continued to discuss Trump, his politics, and how his beliefs manifested into policies, talk about immigration became a salient dimension of the conversation.

Trump's presidency is defined for the children by his attempts to discriminate against certain people and limit their autonomy and right to migrate and/or seek asylum. Camille details her conceptualization of Executive Order 13769, widely known as the “travel ban,” during the same Skin Again session:

I think Martin Luther King might like help people, so Donald Trump don’t hurt people … Like make the servants chase the Black people and some of the people that are white was Donald Trump and they’re mean. Some white people think that Brown people are mean, but they don’t think of their self and they react to the Black people and they say, “You cannot come to this country. You cannot come this country”—that's what the government says sometimes, when you’re Brown, and you have to get a ticket to go to the other country, and some people saw movies about Donald Trump making the police and servants getting the Brown people and putting the people in jail, and they’re taking lessons to how to be mean.

Camille's comments illustrate one component of critical consciousness: critical reflection (Watts et al., 2011). Conceptualized as a precursor to critical action (and, in this case, acts of solidarity), critical reflection is evident when children and youth analyze social conditions and identify inequity as worthy of critique and sustained examination. In her discussion of how the travel ban was instituted and enforced, Camille ties Trump's actions to a broader conceptualization of white people who act in a prejudicial or racist manner. Trump does not act alone; there is a group identity—whether it be “[s]ome white people” or “the government”—that Camille associates with Trump's racism and his desire to prevent people from entering the US. She is critically aware that Trump and other white people who support and work alongside him (i.e. his “servants”) are part of a system—a sociopolitical network that serves to marginalize Black and Brown people. There is an important distinction being made, where white people are categorized as the actors of marginalization and discrimination and people of color are on the receiving end of subjugation.

Camille interchanges the descriptors “Black” and “Brown” when describing the “travel ban.” Although she may not be doing this consciously, in this specific recounting, the interchanging points to her analysis of the realities of Black and Brown people in the US as connected to one another. The racism that Black and Brown people experience is not identical, specifically when considering the intersections of race, class, citizenship, and religion. However, Camille demonstrates an understanding of Black and Brown people's plights in the US. What can be read as an unintentional connection between Black and Brown communities can also be seen as her capacity to align herself, an African American (in some conversations she called herself Black) girl, with those who have been targeted by the “travel ban” Executive Order. This implicit expression of solidarity is in the spirit of Black and Brown organizing (see the mission of organizations like Causa Justa Just Cause: https://cjjc.org/about-us/mission-history/) and represents an expression of the critical consciousness that Martín-Baró delineates:

learning to say the word of one's own existence, which is personal but, more significantly, collective. And to pronounce that personal and collective word, people must take hold of their fate … a move that demands overcoming false consciousness and achieving a critical understanding of themselves as well as of their world and where they stand in it. (Martín-Baró, 1994:40)

Utilizing a critical moral ideal

In the previous data excerpt, Camille began her statement by evaluating Trump's moral character and actions through juxtaposing him with Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Using this prominent Black historical figure as a counterexample, Camille underscores the far-reaching power and influence that Trump has over the nation, in a similar way as Martin Luther King Jr had when he was alive, and how influential he is still today. Isaac expressed a similar sentiment: “Donald Trump wants to build a wall and for Mexican people … Martin Luther King, if he was still alive, he would say Mexican people could go into the United States.” For Isaac, Martin Luther King Jr does not represent the moderate liberal that the contemporary imaginary and dominant public discourse have attempted to shape him into (Jackson, 2021). Rather, for both Isaac and Camille, he is believed to be someone who is diametrically opposed to Trump, someone with power and influence who would stand up to Trump and work to stop his efforts to discriminate against others. Martin Luther King Jr's words and legacy are sometimes selectively used in public and educational discourses to further narratives of cross-racial healing as opposed to an opportunity to interrogate the intentional harm, in some cases, caused by the government's actions and limitations. His image and messages are sanitized to simply imagine him as having only worked within the system, rather than against it, constructing him as moderate rather than revolutionary or radical. Isaac and Camille, however, invoke his historical legacy as complex—one that promotes racial harmony but also one that challenges racism upfront. For them, Martin Luther King Jr represents not only a formidable opponent to Trump, but also a moral ideal—someone who would not simply allow blatant injustices like the abuses at the border to proceed. The children extended this moral critique of Trump in explaining their views of Barack Obama: WFJ:

You guys say you don’t like Donald Trump, but did you all like when Barack Obama was president?

Miles:

Yes.

WFJ:

Why? Tell me a bit … why?

Miles:

He was better than Donald Trump because he let people come from Mexico, and he doesn’t hate anybody, and he treats everybody fairly; but Donald Trump doesn’t because he doesn’t like Black people, and he doesn’t like kids. And he doesn’t like people who are not rich like him.

Obama received positive praise from all the children; unlike Trump, the children felt that President Obama was nice to children, did not lie, and was not a racist. Some (Black) Americans, however, feel that Obama's election was mere hollow symbolism and did not signal a radical departure from the status quo or government or racial progress. Moreover, Obama has been heavily criticized for his high mass deportation rates (Martínez et al., 2018). This is significant in that we must acknowledge that the children's critical reflection has developmental limits; as they gain more historical knowledge and are further socialized by their families and school context, for instance, their critical consciousness will grow, and this juxtaposition has the potential to become nuanced (Mathews et al., 2020; Watts et al., 2011).

Despite their lack of nuance about Obama's immigration and deportation policies and their heroic conceptions of him, they juxtaposed Trump with who they imagined Martin Luther King Jr to be and who they believed Obama is. For them, Trump's policies are not only unjust; they are also amoral. All five children viewed Donald Trump as a racist white man who had the power to deny people their rights to move freely, be unharmed by the government and police, or receive help in times of need. There is an explicit connection between his race and his belief system; they underscore that we cannot understand Trump outside of his identity as a rich white man. Their critical awareness of Trump and the nature of his election and presidency stemmed from the fact that they viewed violence against Brown and Mexican people (along with children, Black people, and those who are not rich) and intentional acts of exclusion and separation as dishonorable. Illustrative of their developing critical consciousness (Freire, 1973), the juxtaposition of these political leaders not only enabled them to critique the system that executes Trump's ideology, but also allowed them to reject the notion that Mexicans should be prevented from entering the US. By positioning Obama and Martin Luther King Jr in direct opposition to Trump, they exhibit the capacity for solidarity by utilizing these two significant African American historical and contemporary political figures to analyze immigration in the US.

Invoking US history knowledge

The children’s awareness of history did not end at a knowledge of prominent historical figures or past presidents. Miles illustrates a deeper sense of history when he discusses relations between the US and Mexico:

And Donald Trump doesn’t like homeless people. I mean, he just doesn’t care about them and he doesn’t want them to do anything and he wants to take over Mexico and my aunt told me a long time ago, Mexican people used to live here.

Miles demonstrates historical knowledge about the relationship between the US and Mexico, and acknowledges that Trump's policies are rooted in a lineage of oppression against Mexican people and their land. As does his and Isaac's subscription to a perceived moral standard set by Martin Luther King Jr and former President Obama, Miles alludes to a historical continuity that is present in politics and the discrimination that people of color have faced in the US. The Mexican fight for land and borders stems back hundreds of years; Miles’ invocation of this history situates the present struggle by Mexicans to cross the border and enter the US as part of a longer narrative of exclusion and racism. Given that Mexican people used to live on land that is now considered the US, for Miles, it is even more awful for Trump to try to exclude them from migrating across the border or seek asylum.

Furthermore, Miles’ words demonstrate that he is on a trajectory to being capable of perspective-taking and empathic concern across racial difference. Miles' statement illustrates his empathy because he stipulates that one of the reasons why he does not like Trump is because “he just doesn’t care about them.” His awareness of this lack of care indicates care on his own part, and that he cares enough about this topic to remember the conversations he has had about it with family members. This could be seen as a form of advocacy, and historical reasoning an approach to such advocacy.

Conclusion

This article seeks to deepen our practical and theoretical understandings of the genesis of African American children's capability for solidarity. Moreover, by offering the understudied perspectives of African American children on issues of immigration and racism, this article attempts to address the dearth of early literacy research examining these issues. By rejecting the assumption that children are solely egocentric in their notions of justice and fairness, these data affirm that young African American children can look beyond themselves and engage in critical reflection, and identify the discrimination to which others are subjected, and that they possess an emergent capacity to be in solidarity with other people of color in opposition to whiteness. On the whole, educators are challenged to see young children of color's literate repertoires as expansive, not simply for the cognitive act of reading and writing, but also for the sociocultural act of making meaning between and across race and against racist practices and policies. If researchers and practitioners look to extend the goal of critical literacy to critical social action—specifically, action that is organized across social and racial boundaries—we need to first understand what children know, what it reveals about their habits of mind toward others, and the ways that awareness can be further developed. As Gill (2022: 393) declares: “Engaging in soul work toward building solidarity and community is our path toward true resistance.”

In particular, the rhetorical strategies that the participants used are insightful because they spotlight how literacy educators in early and elementary settings might enter into conversations about such issues. Privileging their ways of knowing and thinking, it is clear that history is of importance to how they make meaning about sociopolitical issues. The connectivity that these children demonstrated between the past and present highlights the importance that educators must place on teaching and discussing the past with children. Teaching young children about historical social issues and figures provides a grounding for them to understand present realities. Furthermore, affording them with the pedagogical space to link histories, see historical continuities and discontinuities, and draw parallels to contemporary conditions is a form of critical literacy pedagogical practice that all educators can and must engage in, regardless of the schooling context.

Furthermore, the implications from the findings presented above urge educators to reconsider how literacy classrooms are organized for African American children, so as to privilege the rich oral literacies they offer. There will be much that remains to be explored and revealed about African American children's knowledge of the world and what they can contribute to a classroom context if we look outside the limited measurements of testing scores and reading levels. Culturally responsive and critically engaged practice is characterized by honoring the relevant forms of literate expression of the children who inhabit the classroom. This article contributes to conversations at the intersection of young children of color's capacity to make sense of the racialized world in which they are living and growing, along with their ability to recognize marginalization and suffering in various forms, and the importance of dialogue and sociocultural literacy spaces for engaging racialized issues.

Finally, this data demonstrates why we as educators must make immigration and politics an urgent issue and provide African American children with the opportunity to grapple with these matters. Black immigrant communities do exist (e.g. Renee's grandmother had grown up in Jamaica), and that intersectional experience often becomes obscured in the larger discourse around US immigration. Young children of color need spaces to build community with other marginalized peoples, as African American communities have done across time and continue to do today (e.g. Black–Palestinian solidarity movements). As Aboriginal elder, activist and educator Lilla Watson shared: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” (Uniting Church of Australia, 2020). The children in my study illustrate that this liberation work is possible with young children of color and that, when asked, African American children can foster belonging that is rooted in a critique of inequity and larger social and political forces.

Future research

This article suggests the need for future related research. There is a growing body of studies that have examined issues at the intersection of early literacy and racial meaning-making, yet few have a specific focus on sociopolitical issues (e.g. Darolia, 2020; Fontanella-Nothom, 2019; Rogers and Mosley, 2006). None focus exclusively on African American children and the nature of their specific gestures, acknowledgments, and acts of empathy and solidarity.

Research examining whether and how nascent conceptions of solidarity and cross-racial awareness foster relationships between groups of non-white children is necessary. How do their mindsets of justice, solidarity, and allyship progress and develop over time? How do young children of color form cross-racial relationships that not only support inclusion, but also advance justice orientations among them? What are the outcomes of these relationships and dialogues? What are the characteristics of multiracial coalitions of young children of color and in what ways can critical literacy facilitate these kinds of communities? Furthermore, longitudinal studies examining how these friendships are maintained as children's capacity for solidarity and allyship grows would be particularly insightful. Shifting the focus away from bias and prejudice, which predominate in the literature, to the development of positive, generative relationships across race through dialogue, reading, and writing would likely illustrate the prerequisite behaviors and conditions to support adolescents’ and youths’ multiracial alliances and coalition-building.

A second avenue for future early childhood research would engage the ways that young children of color's awareness of others’ experiences of marginalization can be enhanced through discussions in schools with early educators. This article's research was implemented in an after-school context but has resonance for how early childhood educators do this work during the school day. Open-ended dialogic engagements sparked by the introduction of multicultural children's literature are important moments to include in curricular planning. Young children and the development of their literacy practices benefit from having space to take up, grapple with, and ponder events in their lives and those to which they have been exposed through various means. Early literacy researchers should ask: How can educators foster cross-racial solidarity through literacy pedagogy? What are the most effective approaches for, as well as the complexities of, teaching non-white children about the discrimination and marginalization that other groups of color face? Examining these lines of inquiry would enhance the field's role in advancing racial justice in the broader society, and transform the early childhood classroom into a “radical space of possibility” (hooks, 1994: 12) to imagine new, more interconnected ways forward.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Wintre Foxworth Johnson is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development.

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