Unsettling Scenes and the Geographies of Racialized, Dis/abled Childhoods

• In Event: Confronting Settler-Colonialism in Early Childhood Education: Building Anticolonial Pedagogies for Social Change

Abstract

A young Brown, non-Latinx, non-Spanish speaking child is asked to pose in photographs for a brochure as part of a preschool’s new bilingual Spanish program.

In February, the only Black History Month display in a school is a bulletin board that features Black athletes.

A three-year-old Black boy is frequently photographed by his teachers. These photos typically depict his physical strength, and the adults often comment on his muscles in his presence.

Without accompanying interpretations, a variation on the poem “The Language of Us/Them” by Mayer Shevin is displayed on a self-contained classroom door. The children must walk by it everyday.

Mass public schooling in the U.S. is an imperialist project that John Willinsky (1998) has identified as one strategy for dividing the world, into the colonized and the colonizer. While scholars, including Willinsky, have written about the grammars of settler colonialism within official school texts (Au et al., 2016; Author-1 & Redacted, 2020; Calderón, 2014; Panel-Author, 2019; Sabzalian, 2018), we focus here on the banalities of schooling: the displays, photographs, comments, seemingly innocuous requests, etc. These, we argue, are part of the “everyday workings of the settler colonial state that are simultaneously anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-poor, anti-trans, and also anti-disability (sic)” (Loutzenheiser & Erevelles, 2019, p 376). They are built into the fabric of schools as institutions of multiple structural oppressions.

In this paper, we draw out the unsettling scenes (sketched above) that we witnessed at two purportedly high-quality educational spaces for children in Texas. Through a dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) framework that emphasizes the entanglements of racism and ableism (Annamma, 2016), we present case studies (using archival research, ethnographic field notes, and audio/visual artifacts) of the insidious ways that race and ability are imbricated within the features of U.S. schools. These features operate in the interest of settler futurity, a “permanent virtuality” (Baldwin, 2012, p. 173) and an ongoing exhibition of Manifest Destiny in the white supremacist geography of schools. The scenes are situated within several other realities: 1) the invisibility of Indigenous children on land belonging to Wichita and Kiikaapoi tribes; 2) the schools’ milieus of anti-Black racism and ableism (Krueger-Henney, 2019); 3) the discourses of children’s impairments to further disable them; and 4) the fact that these spaces are placement sites for student teachers, who “are called upon to participate in these scenes” (Hartman, 1997, p. 3).

As a nonbinary White undergraduate research assistant and student teacher (Author-2) and a cisgender female Asian American childhood researcher (Author-1), we hesitate to propose a pedagogy that claims to decolonize. Instead, in anticipation of reopening one of these sites, we describe our plans for re-storying these school spaces by unsettling colonial relations with land and place (Discussant & Redacted, 2017). This includes ways that the young children might come to know the Indigenous place stories from Indigenous educators and the adults’ reckonings with their enmeshment with settler colonial ideologies.

Authors

• Tran Templeton, University of North Texas

• Margaret Frances Harvey, University of North Texas