Blog post by Neal A. Lester and Elizabeth McNeil

In the technicolorized version of the film Imitation of Life (1959) about racial passing and white supremacy, Annie Johnson, a Black housekeeper, asks a rhetorical and existential question of Miss Lora Meredith, Annie’s white employer and mother of a white daughter. Referring to her Black daughter Sarah Jane, who passes for white, Ms. Johnson says, ‘How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?’ While this film is melodrama at its best, Annie's sentiment captures Black parenting and Black guardianship and its inability to protect Black children and families from systemic racism. It further underscores the fact that adult racial politics deny Black children their humanity and the luxuries and privileges granted white children and white childhood.  

Whether through the adultification of Black children or the erasure of Black children’s experiences altogether, representational and physical violence against Black children in cartoons, commercial ads, games and picture books mirrors manifestations of racial violence against Black adults. Such racialized physical and representational violence denies humanity to Black people more broadly, adults and children alike. Within the contexts of US history, children's literature and popular culture, the invisibilization of Black children is yet another social injustice under the colonial white gaze. This invisibility includes the exploitation of Black children in poverty porn as well as Black children’s experiences with ‘curriculum violence’ in problematic classroom pedagogies across the USA. 

​Blog post by Rebecca Callahan, University of Vermont, USA; Julieta Rico, University of California at Los Angeles, USA; Kathryn M. Obenchain, Purdue University, USA; Claudia Ochoa, University of Texas-Austin, USA; and Angeles De Santos-Quezada, University of Texas-Austin, USA
 
Polarizing and hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric dominates political news in the US, a nation uniquely defined by both its immigrant origins and its racist, white settler colonial history. In the politically charged months leading up to the 2020 election, we interviewed dozens of Latiné young adult US citizens about their sense of belonging and responsibility to their community. As we explore in our Identities article, ‘Civic identity: media, belonging, and Latiné youth in the 2020 US presidential election’, these data revealed surprising findings; (1) our participants used social media to identify a community of belonging beyond their geographic locale; (2) as informed citizens, they curated, vetted and disseminated information to protect and improve the community; and (3) they perceived media misinformation as a serious threat to democracy. 
 
Not only did participants report using social media to identify a community of belonging defined by shared experiences, beliefs or ethnicity, but they did so at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic limited traditional ways that people gathered and engaged in civic life. Social media allowed participants to connect not only with family and friends, but also with a large coethnic community that expanded beyond their physical location to include people they already knew as well as those they admired (e.g., celebrities and political figures).