Black Childhood Research Articles

Do early school- and family-related factors predict midlife psychological well-being? Findings from A prospective Black childhood cohort study

The relationship between early school- and family-related factors and later psychological well-being (PWB) has been insufficiently studied. To address this gap, a comprehensive model was employed to investigate the effects of school and family predictors (ages < 14) on PWB, and a related construct, life satisfaction (LS), at age 35 for a large urban childhood cohort. 30-year follow-up data were analyzed for 72 % (N = 1,112) of the original 1,539 participants (93 % Black) in the Chicago Longitudinal Study, a prospective investigation on the impact of an early childhood education program. Hierarchical linear regression analysis revealed both parent (β = 0.51p = 0.013) and student educational attainment expectations (β = 1.48; p = 0.032) as well as peer social skills (β = 0.25; p = 0.003) were the most significant predictors of midlife PWB. Peer social skills (β = 0.02; p = 0.032), school mobility (β = -0.09; p = 0.012), and student educational attainment expectations (β = 0.17; p = 0.022) were strongly associated with midlife LS. Sex differences were also examined. Implications for shaping key components of school-family programs, services, and policies that foster positive development across different social ecologies are discussed. Further research should explore the mediational pathways to better understand the mechanisms behind these observed relationships.

Artes visuales negras sobre la violencia policial contra niñez y jóvenes negros

(analítico)La violencia policial es una de las principales razones de sustentación de la racialidad en la sociedad brasileña, victimizando a niños y jóvenes negros, por lo que es urgente comprender las representaciones sociales y elaboraciones de tales experiencias. Así, se busca analizar producciones artísticas visuales, creadas por artistas negros, que expresan experiencias racializadas de niños y jóvenes negroscon la actuación policial en Brasil. Se analizaron seis trabajos de los autores No Martins, Sidney Amaral y Jota, producidos entre 2014 y 2021. Los resultados indican que estos trabajos problematizan cuestiones sobre las dimensiones raciales de la actuación policial y sus regímenes de vigilancia, control y violencia. Se trata de creaciones artísticas visuales que, al reunir aspectos estéticos, éticos y sociales, señalan las tensiones entre infancias y juventudes negras y la seguridad pública, articuladas por el sometimiento, la resistencia, la muerte y la vida. Palabras clave: Violencia; raza; jóvenes; niñez; policía; artes visuales; Brasil.

Trans-Ancestral Genetic Risk Factors for Treatment-Related Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Survivors of Childhood Cancer.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) is a prevalent long-term complication of treatment in survivors of childhood cancer, with marked racial/ethnic differences in burden. In this study, we investigated trans-ancestral genetic risks for treatment-related T2D. Leveraging whole-genome sequencing data from the St Jude Lifetime Cohort (N = 3,676, 304 clinically ascertained cases), we conducted ancestry-specific genome-wide association studies among survivors of African and European genetic ancestry (AFR and EUR, respectively) followed by trans-ancestry meta-analysis. Trans-/within-ancestry replication including data from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (N = 5,965) was required for prioritization. Three external general population T2D polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were assessed, including multiancestry PRSs. Treatment risk effect modification was evaluated for prioritized loci. Four novel T2D risk loci showing trans-/within-ancestry replication evidence were identified, with three loci achieving genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10-8). Among these, common variants at 5p15.2 (LINC02112), 2p25.3 (MYT1L), and 19p12 (ZNF492) showed evidence of modifying alkylating agent-related T2D risk in both ancestral groups, but showed disproportionately greater risk in AFR survivors (AFR odds ratios [ORs], 3.95-17.81; EUR ORs, 2.37-3.32). In survivor-specific RNA-sequencing data (N = 207), the 19p12 locus variant was associated with greater ZNF492 expression dysregulation after exposures to alkylators. Elevated T2D risks across ancestry groups were only observed with increasing values for multiancestry T2D PRSs and were especially increased among survivors treated with alkylators (top v bottom quintiles: ORAFR, 20.18; P = .023; OREUR, 13.44; P = 1.3 × 10-9). Our findings suggest therapy-related genetic risks contribute to the increased T2D burden among non-Hispanic Black childhood cancer survivors. Additional study of how therapy-related genetic susceptibility contributes to this disparity is needed.

Trans*-itional Longings of the “Dark Ghetto”: Rosa Guy and a Trans* Black Childhood Studies

Abstract: “Trans*-itional Longings” argues that the neglected Black Arts Movement writer Rosa Guy traces out a model of trans* Black childhood in her essays and fiction that is informed by the materiality and lived experience of antiblack necropolitics in “ghetto” ecologies. Guy offers a different entry point and genealogy for a “quared” Black childhood studies that is more than an extension of white queer childhood studies. In her essays and fiction, Guy witnesses that the trans* Black child of Harlem is a figure of improvisational Black aliveness “trans-itioning” into alternative Black futures.

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North by Crystal Lynn Webster

Reviewed by: Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North by Crystal Lynn Webster Vanessa M. Holden (bio) Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North. By Crystal Lynn Webster. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $24.95.) Lucinda Ricks, a newly freed single mother, moved with her three children into the Shelter for Coloured Orphans in the City of Brotherly Love in 1827. Stephen, Simon, and Henry Ricks would initially live with their mother as boarders in the shelter, but, because of her precarious financial future, Lucinda surrendered her sons to the shelter and moved out into the city. The family’s story, including that of Simon and Stephen’s deaths while in the care of shelter workers, haunts Crystal Lynn Webster’s book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood. In it the Ricks navigate the changing landscape of Black freedom in a city noted in its time as a hub of free Black life. Webster tells their story and the stories of other free Black parents and children to demonstrate the important role that Black children and the contested meanings of their childhood played in shaping free Black life. Webster’s work offers a significant contribution to African American history. Few books have investigated the lives of free and enslaved antebellum Black children. Broadening our understanding of emancipation and free Black life, Webster argues that free Black children and command of their labor were central concerns of activist movements in the antebellum North. But beyond how adults contested the boundaries of Black childhood, Webster demonstrates how Black children acted politically and advocated for themselves. The book begins with an exploration of how white reformers and ante-bellum popular culture racialized childhood as a white and middle-class prerogative. Webster then demonstrates that while play was an essential hallmark of white childhood, Black children at play transgressed society’s expectations. While Black children were institutionalized at benevolent homes and orphanages, reformers instilled the middle-class values of industry and labor. These values were classed, raced, and imposed on the poor and racially marginalized. Benevolent homes, asylums, orphanages, almshouses, and reformatories run by white reformers and activists were sites of abuse, neglect, and suffering for many free children of color. Webster presents the bleak reality of children growing sick and dying. She also reads the building plans and [End Page 554] layouts of these institutions to demonstrate how literal structures reflected authorities’ ideas about the differences between white and Black children. Unlike their approach to white children, authorities also sent Black children to institutions intended for adults, rendering these youths vulnerable to even more abuse. Reformers and officials racialized and criminalized African American children and childhood, denying Black children the innocence and play afforded to white children. The line between placement in a benevolent home and incarceration in developing antebellum prisons was thin, and reformers often pushed Black children across it. For Black children, danger came from within and without institutions. Webster notes how whites targeted institutions for Black children with extralegal violence and destruction. Beyond brick-and-mortar institutions, Webster investigates a significant legal institution: indenture. With roots in systems of apprenticeship, the legal system of indenture bound an apprentice to a master for a set term of service. Ministers of the poor throughout antebellum America bound children, white and Black, to property-owning white adults who were obligated to provide their new wards with basic shelter, clothing, and food. In return, children were expected to work for their masters. As Webster points out, institutions often had stipulations that their charges would be placed through indenture with white adults. Officials also indentured Black children deemed destitute. Once their children were relinquished to or taken to an institution, Black parents faced considerable obstacles to retrieving them. Through this legal system of unfree labor, whites continued to control free Black children and profit from their exploitation. The system did not die when northern states began the process of emancipation, and it did not die in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment. Webster’s work presents important consideration of the value of Black children’s labor and the...

A Community within a Community: Collectivism, Social Cohesion and Building a Healthy Black Childhood

This article features in‐depth interviews and ethnographic vignettes that explore collectivism, social cohesion, and Black educational leadership as a strategy to infuse liberatory practices in the educational process. The article examines how the social foundation of African‐centered ethos of collectivism can shift how marginalized students approach and experience learning and socialization inside mainstream K‐12 educational systems. Additionally, this article introduces a new theoretical concept entitled Ethno‐Cultural Responsiveness. This theory explains how sub‐culture groups socialize new members into their particular ideological and sub‐cultural communities. This research demonstrates how African‐centered leaders shape their schools through an ideological inquiry designed to challenge what they perceive as the cultural negation of African histories and understandings. Moreover, the leaders featured in this article use their public‐facing political project (an African‐centered institution) grounded in the politics of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism to design and shape their institutional cultures to be responsive to people racialized in western counties as Black.

The Girls Are Alright: Examining Protective Factors of US Black Culture and Its Impact on the Resilience of Black Girls and Women

AbstractAn overarching narrative exists that the self-concept of Black girls is adversely impacted by the negative portrayals of Black Americans in the mainstream media. We assert that this mainstream narrative presents a deficit model account in which Black girls are perpetual victims of white racism. A more complete narrative, one that we offer in this essay, is that while the white patriarchal society has tried, through various means, to undermine the self-esteem of Black Americans, Black girls are healthy, confident, and full of belief in themselves, their beauty, and their power. We argue that much of the power exhibited by Black girls can be attributed to three crucial supports. First, the Black childhood facilitated by the Black family, Black spirituality or “Black girl magic” as it has come to be known in the mainstream, and sisterhood with peers and elders. We offer this counter narrative in order to challenge the predominate account but also to enable critical thought about the resilience Black girls possess, a magic wherein they engage in self-definition and see their worth despite society’s attempts to crush their souls.

“Children of the Mantled-Birth”: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Photography in The Crisis, and the Politics of Black Childhood

This essay examines Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetic depictions of Black motherhood and childhood in the annual “Children’s Numbers” of The Crisis that appeared from 1912 to 1934. Visually and discursively, the run of “Children’s Numbers” stages the modern crucible of educating Black children on the realities of racism and contends with racialized notions of childhood innocence. This essay considers how Johnson’s poems respond to such ideas of education and innocence in W.E.B. Du Bois’ editorials on childhood and the photographs of Black children that appeared in these issues. Focusing primarily on Johnson’s motherhood poems that appeared in the “Children’s Numbers” and the striking photographs of children that accompanied these poems, this essay asserts that Johnson’s poems disrupt racialized notions of childhood innocence, intervene in discourses on Black education, and challenge the representational politics of the “Children’s Numbers” by centering the epistemological perspective of Black motherhood. Furthermore, this essay argues for the benefits of reading Johnson’s motherhood poems in relation to her erotic poetry, demonstrating that Johnson’s poetry of Black motherhood addresses the sexual politics of the Black bourgeoisie at the turn of the century and creates a space for the expression of Black female sexuality.

Reading Black Childhoods in Chains and Crongton Knights

This essay reads Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (2008) and Crongton Knights by Alex Wheatle (2016) as texts in the young adult (YA) genre that provocatively render black childhood legible. It contends that Anderson and Wheatle destabilise the presumed authority of first-person narratives through the formal choices that structure their novels. Through these choices, the essay argues, creative representations of black childhood in these two texts subvert and challenge perceptions of black children as so mature and resilient as to be outside or beyond notions of childhood or innocence — what is known as ‘adultification’.

Craig Of the Creek: Black childhood and environmental racism

ABSTRACT The animated show Craig of the Creek is an important source of animated environmental imagery for children as its main characters and plot provide the opportunity to discuss both race and environmental issues. However, these shows often only show one view of environmental degradation and ignore issues like environmental racism and urban housing issues. The history of racial environmental innocence and the exclusion of people of color need to be considered to fully understand the benefits and shortcomings of the show’s narrative. I argue that while Craig of the Creek resists some notions of racial innocence, the show still promotes a mainly romanticized, commodified view of nature. To do this, I provide a close ecocritical analysis utilizing discourse analysis and environmental racism theory to explain how well the show includes social inequality. I conclude that while the cartoon acknowledges pollution and the dangers of nature, it largely ignores the complicated relationship between race and the environment and reproduces the idea of the environment being nothing more than a commodity. It glosses over the complicated history that both people of color and indigenous people have with nature ownership and is passing on an unfortunate lesson to children viewing the program.

Remapping Black Childhood in The Brownies’ Book

This essay examines the recurring preoccupation with geography in W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s African American children’s magazine, The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921). Drawing in part on conventions established by early Black periodicals, including an emphasis on the rich global presence of non-Western peoples and places, many of the magazine’s features, from its stories and poems to its images and games, offered Black children a much wider view of their place in the world—both literally and imaginatively—than that provided by typical U.S. schoolroom atlases and geographies, which tended to have little to say (or show) about countries and continents outside North America and Europe. By aiming to develop in its readers alternative forms of geographic and political consciousness, The Brownies’ Book provocatively recast geography as a radical mode of knowledge available to Black children through cultural as well as cartographic forms, in the process remapping Black childhood itself.

At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. by Tamika Y. Nunley

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. by Tamika Y. Nunley Elizabeth Wood At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 254. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6222-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6221-3.) Scholars studying African American women before the Civil War have long documented their resistance to slavery and racism but have found it more difficult to elucidate their intimate and interior worlds. In this first study of African American women living in Washington, D.C., from the city's founding through the Civil War, Tamika Y. Nunley draws on a rich body of evidence to reveal clues about how they envisioned their lives beyond slavery and circumscribed freedom. Nunley uses the concept of self-making to examine ways these individuals sought to "define and preserve a sense of self in a society that supported a narrow definition of what it meant to be a black woman" (p. 2). [End Page 378] She argues that navigation was critical to processes of self-making, as women made calculated as well as improvised choices to traverse the sometimes vast physical and ideological distances between their circumstances and their imagined selves. African American women did not achieve equality, even after emancipation, but Nunley demonstrates how their ceaseless claims to liberty in the nation's capital challenge what we know about enslaved women's resistance and laid the foundations for continued self-fashioning and activism after the Civil War. Nunley uncovers an impressive array of women's experiences as she carefully examines federal and municipal records, financial transactions, newspaper articles and advertisements, diaries and private correspondence, and even the words of Black schoolgirls. Though the city was founded to govern a nation shaped by the highest ideals of liberty, African American women's labor was crucial to Washington's early growth; and the nature of urban slavery there, along with a burgeoning slave market, created immense unpredictability through kidnapping, sale, and hiring practices. Nevertheless, enslaved women made the District of Columbia contested terrain as they "carved out pathways of escape" and asserted their identities through practices such as self-naming (p. 42). Other women turned to the courts to pursue their visions of freedom, demonstrating their understandings of kin and community, even as navigating the courts became increasingly complicated. Free African American communities emphasized educating girls to understand moral virtue as a weapon against stereotypes assigned to Black women and as an "expression of racial progress" (p. 106). Outside the middling classes, women turned to economic self-making in the street by more openly engaging in prostitution and leisure culture during the chaos of the Civil War—a practice both lucrative and perilous. Throughout, Nunley reminds readers that claiming liberty was no easy feat, even as emancipation laws were passed, but that Black women articulated their understanding of rights as they transitioned from enslavement to citizenship. Nunley provides nuance and correction to existing scholarship on antebellum Black women and girls. She carefully outlines the parameters of enslavement in the district and cautions us not to overstate the flexibility of urban slavery, since Black women's work as domestics placed them in the intimate spaces of white control. Nunley challenges the understanding that kin obligations prevented enslaved women from taking flight by showing how networks of relatives and friends inspired and facilitated running away. Her chapter on education for African American girls in a slaveholding city adds to a growing body of work on antebellum Black childhood and demonstrates an early community commitment to racial uplift that both shaped girls' self-understandings and prepared them for white hostility to their achievement. Finally, Nunley emphasizes that just as restrictive laws could have limited scope, so could beneficial ones. In the face of enormous obstacles, African American women claimed citizenship and challenged "the notion that liberty stopped at legal emancipation" by growing their institutions and building new ones dedicated to the expansion of freedom (p. 187). At the Threshold...

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: African Science Fiction and the Reimagined Black Girl

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti unsettles harmful depictions of Black childhood and reconceptualizes the role of young Black females in racialized communities with an acute awareness of the challenges they encounter in the realworld. Using the speculative form of Binti as an allegory for the present, this article turns to the character of Binti to highlight ways to overcome obstacles of exclusion and otherness. Inspiration is found in how Okorafor utilizes Africanfuturism as a framework that artfully integrates and retains African Indigenous cultures in a technologically advanced world. Additionally, childhood studies informs how this article examines the impact of Africanfuturism as a defamiliarizing strategy to address normalized (Western, white) childhood and notions of futurity for Black children and youth.

Disrupting Anti-Blackness in Early Childhood Qualitative Inquiry: Thinking With Black Refusal and Black Futurity

Working with Black feminist concepts of Black futurity and Black refusal, this article seeks to illustrate what is possible when early childhood research does not begin with the anti-Blackness that is pervasiveness in early childhood education. My focus is on the liberatory potential of attending to quotidian relational world-making practices in the places and spaces of Black childhood. Thinking with a photo essay on Black boys and with images of a young Black girl from a place-based research project, I gesture toward the otherwise worlds that are made possible by experimenting with wayward methods as a practice of listening for Black childhood futurity.

à prova de balas? necroinfâncias cariocas, violência de estado e filosofias da rua

This essay aims to reflect on the impacts of state violence upon black lives and childhoods. In the wanderings through the city of Rio de Janeiro and in the theoretical trails proposed by antiracist and decolonial thinkers, we discuss the impacts and challenges of racism in the formative and existential itineraries of racialized bodies, crossed by the public necropolitics that provides the premises of the pedagogical government of peripheral childhoods and adolescences in large Brazilian cities. From the bumping into M., 11 years old, who sells chewing gum in the surroundings of a train station in Rio de Janeiro, we problematize the vulnerabilities produced and the systematic violations of the black children’s human rights, which hinder racial justice in the country, in face of the permanent conversion of differences into inferiorized inequalities. The violence of this injustice, according to the argument developed in the text, culminates in the reinforcement of the vilification and naturalization of racial inequalities against populations historically inferiorized by the colonial wrath. It also points to the need to think about black childhoods from the territory, in order to problematize inequities and disparities that persist. We conclude, finally, that the capture and nullification of black childhoods is a State project, guided by criminalizing and stereotyping practices of subjectivation which brutalize bodies and dehumanize black lives.

Necropolítica, governo sobre as infâncias negras e educação do rosto

In this article, we seek to discuss the recurrence of racism and prejudice toward black lives and childhoods, in spite of repeated initiatives to overcome it by social and educational policy-makers. Following the investigations launched by Michel Foucault on the biopower hypothesis, we revisit some of his interpreters, with the objective of discussing the challenges posed by racism to pedagogical provisions for black children and—following on a concept offered by Emmanuel Levinas--an education of the Face (el Rostro), as a weapon in the political field of struggle against the thanatological dimension of biopolitics. To do so, we retrace some scenes from the history of inclusion devices – especially those policies aimed at black populations. We reflect on the racism embedded in our historical unconscious and discuss how it affects the education of the black Face in our country. We problematize the peculiarities of Brazilian racial prejudice and explore its necropolitical positioning when it comes to the governance of black childhoods. We conclude that the current form of governmentality and education needs a movement of de-rostification—deconstuction of the black Face--in order to identify a future for black children that makes it possible to rise up against the hegemonic order of the white-male-heterosexual-christian-European, and to create processes of subjectivation that can build solidarity with the multiplicity of others-becoming-minoritarian.

There Are Children Here: Examining Black Childhood in Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County Alabama (1940-1969)

There Are Children Here: Examining Black Childhood in Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County Alabama (1940-1969)

Neighbourhood characteristics associated with child pedestrian fatalities in Johannesburg, South Africa

The present study investigated the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and childhood pedestrian fatalities (2001–2010) in Johannesburg, South Africa. This cross-sectional study used negative binomial regression models. Results indicate that: areas with high concentrated disadvantage have elevated childhood pedestrian deaths, especially for those aged 5 to 9 years. Areas marked by residential mobility are associated with high pedestrian deaths among children 0 to 4 years. Black childhood pedestrian deaths are higher in areas marked by a high concentration of female-headed households. The analyses highlight the value of further exploring the effects of neighbourhood characteristics and suggest points of entry for interventions to reduce or prevent childhood pedestrian traffic mortality.

A LITERATURA AFRO-BRASILEIRA NA PRIMEIRA INFÂNCIA: POR UMA EDUCAÇÃO DAS RELAÇÕES ÉTNICO-RACIAIS

This article aims to analyze a book of Afro-Brazilian children's literature focusing on the ways of being and living a black childhood. For this, we will present a brief presentation of the policies that institute the education of ethnic-racial relations, especially Federal Law 10.639/2003. This Law is responsible for promoting editorial production of literature focused on ethnic-racial diversity. We will highlight Afro-Brazilian literature as a way of enabling the recognition and appreciation of black children's stories, contributing positively to the constitution of their identities. Finally, we will present the book “Azizi, the precious gift”, written by Lucimar Rosa Dias, as a potential for an anti-racist practice in childhood.

O ESTADO DA ARTE SOBRE CRIANÇAS NEGRAS EM PRODUÇÕES DA ANPED (2007-2019)

This article aims to analyze the theme of black children in the production of national meetings of the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPED) in the period from 2007 to 2019. Therefore, it is configured in quantitative and qualitative approaches, in which we carry out survey of articles in Working Groups 07, 13 and 21. The focus of the research is concentrated in the period from 2007 to 2019, which corresponds to the last 10 national meetings of that Association. The data analysis was based on Bakhtin's Discursive Dialogism (2011). Regarding the results, we found 17 (seventeen) scientific works that deal with black children, who present the history of black childhood, public policies, pedagogical practices, the elaboration of racial identities, quilombola education and ethnic-racial relations. We conclude that the number of works on black children is still small considering the universe of work of the WGs, requiring the expansion of productions that deal with the theme in the area of ​​education.