Exploring “Race-Identities” with Young Children: Making Politics Visible

Abstract

Politics is about power—the power to define the world and act in it and on it. Power is the capacity to exercise influence in the world about what is doable, permissible, desirable, and changeable in your lives. Inserting politics into the “racing” of children leads us to explore how power operates in young children’s lives as they construct their “racial” classifications, comparisons, preferences, and status assignments. It requires us to ask how children and others exercise power in defining and influencing what is doable, permissible, desirable, and changeable in relation to “race” in their lives. Three ideas about identity are central to putting politics into researching young children’s identities in order to acknowledge the complex dynamic of the social contexts in which they live, learn, and produce their racialized lives:

• Identity is chosen not fixed; it is therefore changeable.

• Identity is formed in and through discourse and therefore identity choices are limited or made possible through discourse.

• Identity is actively performed, not passively given.