Crayons, Culture, and Child’s Play: How Preschool Teachers Contribute to Racial Socialization

Scholars have shown that young children understand race and interpret messages about race from families and schools. In the United States, many children spend their early years in preschool classrooms, where preschool teachers contribute to constructing racialized environments for children. How do preschool teachers communicate ideas about race and racism in the classroom? Using interview data from 27 preschool teachers, we found that teachers used various classroom practices that tended to avoid addressing racism. Teachers largely avoided explicit mentions of categories such as Black or Asian and discussions of racism. Instead, preschool teachers minimized race by portraying race as an individual, visual attribute, or as an optional source of cultural novelty. In cases where anti-Black racism occurred between students, teachers excused white students’ actions as innocent child’s play. We argue that these approaches divorc race from power and uphold color evasiveness within classrooms. We contribute to scholarship on racial socialization by showing how preschool teachers’ classroom practices may complement or contradict racial socialization in families.