Imagining an Antiracist Future for Early Childhood

• In Event: Early Childhood Education for a New Age: Centering Equity and Social Justice

Abstract

This presentation offers a framework for envisioning an anti-racist future for early childhood education, bringing together ideas at the intersection of BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016; ross, 2020), Afropessimism (Hartman, 2007; Patterson, 1982), Humanizing Practice (Freire, 1985), and Culturally Sustaining Education (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017) to elaborate the author's own conception of anti-racist practice (Doucet, 2021).
Popular conceptions of young children as innocent of racial awareness and of early childhood education as a “nice” field (Ladson-Billings, 1998) full of “nice” people ignore research (cf. Doucet & Adair, 2013) documenting that young children and early childhood educators live in the same world as the rest of us—a world that has been shaped by imperialism, colonialism, the white supremacist fantasy, and other hegemonic master scripts that rank human beings along hierarchies of relative value. Left unexamined, the beliefs undergirding these societal structures will continue to maintain power hierarchies and accept social inequality as a given (Doucet, 2019)— Wash. Rinse. Repeat—and early childhood education will remain complicit. This argument amplifies and elaborates the intellectual legacy of foremothers in early childhood education, most of them Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color, who, for decades, have named (and continue to name) the manifestations of hegemony in early childhood education and offered alternative visions—women like ReGena Booze, Cheryl Greer(-Jarman), Maria Gutierrez, Enid Lee, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Gloria Boutte, Louise Derman-Sparks, and Deborah Menkart (Derman-Sparks & the A.B.C. Task Force, 1989; Lee, Menkart, & Okazawa-Rey, 2008).

Author

• Fabienne Doucet, New York University