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In this column, we expand the concept of Black Livingness as a lens to evaluate and select African American children's literature.
Decades of research have proven that children's literate lives are enhanced, expanded, and enlivened with exposure to and engagement with diverse literature. Specifically, picturebooks by and about African Americans, who remain one of the most marginalized racial groups in U.S. elementary schools, have been a source for cultivating freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002) through historical and contemporary forms of storytelling, quenching the thirst for authentic representations of Black people in print literature.
Today, as African American children continue to face racial violence, oppression, and harm within and outside schools, there is an urgent need for elementary school teachers to include more expansive stories that depict happiness, playfulness, and imagination in contemporary Black life. Despite the persistent Eurocentrism of children's literature publishing (Cooperative Children's Book Center, 2022), Black authors of African American children's literature in the United States are creating narratives that depict Black life in ways that resist anti-Blackness and demonstrate the many ways African American children are thriving in their everyday contexts.
In this Perspectives on Practice piece, we expand the concept of Black Livingness (Griffin & Turner, 2021; McKittrick, 2021) as an analytic lens for reading children's literature by outlining four questions and criteria for educators to utilize when choosing books that illustrate Black Livingness in contemporary contexts and detailing the ways that three recent African American children's literature fulfill those criteria.
Selecting and Analyzing Children's Literature through a "Black Livingness" Lens: A Look at Three Contemporary Picturebooks
In the face of continued book bans and suppression of marginalized histories and narratives in schools, it is imperative that elementary educators ensure that Black people are represented in full, nuanced, creative, and joyous ways through picturebooks. Although books that are biographical and often historical provide the necessary context for making sense of societal inequality and present struggles for racial justice, we need spaces for engaging joy. Children's lileralure, like those highlighted in this piece, can and should be an avenue to present "Black Livingness in its full totality, beyond the oppressive confines of anti-Blackness" (Griffin & Turner, 2021, p. 449) so that Black children have mirrors that nourish their emergent racial consciousness and...