“If you don’t care about your color,you don’t care about yourself.” Young children's racial literacy praxis in everyday contexts

Abstract

Research in young children's everyday settings, such as classrooms, indicates that they are curious about and actively try to make sense of race and racism. Drawing on racial literacy and socio-cultural, embodied theories of learning, this article shares findings from a video-cued ethnographic study that outlines the major categories of strategies that students across racialized groups used to build knowledge about race in a kindergarten and a first-grade classroom. Findings demonstrate that young children engaged in racial literacy praxis not only through discussions and formal lessons, but also through skills such as paying close attention, sharing and trying out ideas, asking questions, citing shared stories, engaging with one another, and being creative. It concludes with a discussion of how children's ways of learning about race are reflective of their cultural repertoires of learning and an embodied racial literacy praxis.