Examining Narratives of Black Livingness Through a Critical Content Analysis of Contemporary African American Picturebooks

• In Event: “Be Real Black For Me”: Black Livingness in Children’s Literature - From Past to Present to Hopeful Futures

Abstract

The contemporary moment in education has been characterized by increasing book bans (American Library Association, 2025), rhetoric about the pervasiveness of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, conservative pushes to abolish the Department of Education (Walker, 2025), and the desire for white parents—especially mothers—to protect their children from “perceived existential harm” and “defend the US polity from internal dangers” (Kearl & Mayes, 2024). Educators—classroom teachers, librarians, curriculum and reading specialists—are being met with hostile resistance to the inclusion of diverse literature and representation in their instruction. In particular, Black stories are among the most banned in classrooms (Gardner et al., 2023; Opoku-Agyeman, 2023). Young Black children are learning that their lives are not worth reading and learning about in schools and that their existence is marginal or even unwelcomed in the literary imagination as well as the curriculum. To resist the overwhelming focus on struggle, racism, and other hardships within historical and contemporary Black stories, we are a group of Black women scholars who amplify the richness, the texture, and the nuance of everyday Black life through children’s literature (McMurtry, 2025). In this paper, we explore the following question: What is the nature of the narratives of Black life that are depicted in non-biographical, contemporary picturebooks written by and about African American from 2020-2024?
Informed by Black Childhood Studies (Dumas, 2016; Webster, 2021) and utilizing the lens of Black Livingness (Griffin & Turner, 2021), we conducted a critical content analysis of 30 African American children’s books that examines the ordinary, the mundane, and the commonplace depictions of Black children and their families, friends, and communities. The selected books met the following criteria: (1) written by Black authors; (2) contemporary realistic fiction picturebooks; (3) published from 2020-2024; (4) centered on young Black protagonists living their daily lives without explicitly fighting racism, sexism, or other societal oppressions; and (5) available at the local public library. We adapted Short’s (2017) critical content analytic process to closely examine how Black Livingness was manifested as African American “cultural and heritage related themes...translated through illustrations, characters, and language use in books” (Braden & Rodriguez, 2016, p. 61). Our critical content analysis revealed four interrelated themes: 1) Black Livingness as Loving Intergenerational Family Relationships; 2) Black Livingness as Joyful Learning and Skill-Building; 3) Black Livingness as Imaginative Freedom; and 4) Black Livingness as Contentment in Everyday Life.
This paper is aimed at expanding classroom teachers’ and educational researchers’ understandings of Black life and literary representation and (re)orienting them towards African American children’s literature that depicts a fuller range of Black humanity and lived experience. Furthermore, as the publishing industry still grapples with underrepresentation of stories from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities (Cooperative Children’s Book Center, 2025), we challenge children’s literature publishers to examine the kinds of stories that are being published for Black children and to advocate for more expansive narratives of Black livingness.

Authors

• Wintre Foxworth Johnson, University of Virginia

• Jennifer Danridge Turner, University of Maryland