Insider/Outsider Belongings: Traversing the Borders of Whiteness in Early Childhood

Abstract

The power associated with identities is frequently negotiated within children's narratives and play scripts. When children engage in text production, they dispute and mediate their interpersonal and ideological relations. In this article, the author outlines an understanding of ‘whiteness' as a form of power or capital that is accumulated through certain social practices and a feature of children's social worlds. In this framework, the practices of whiteness that maintain hegemonic power rely on subtle expressions of an established sense of entitlement and governmental power. These expressions operate in collusion with the occasional use of racist epithets. Data collected in teacher research are read through this theoretical lens to reveal how the practice of ‘whiteness' may be seen to operate in children's shared narratives and in pedagogical interventions. Under scrutiny are a number of interactions including a jointly constructed ‘autobiography’ that contains all the typical elements of a young child's heroic fantasies: home alone, able to recognise danger, the child outwits, outmanoeuvres and overpowers the baddie. The narratives function as a technology of race and of whiteness in particular. The children are intensely engaged with each other's social imaginaries, and one of the remarkable features of these interactions is a propensity for resistance shown by the children as they dispute their identity positioning within the storylines.