Black Feminism in Early Childhood and Care

The stories of Black women provide important lessons for early childhood and care (ECEC). Through Black mothering approaches, Black feminisms help pinpoint the ways in which Black women’s stories, resistances and community actions offer new imaginaries in challenging all forms of intersecting oppressions. In this chapter I describe the ways in which the field of early childhood education and care disenfranchises oppressed groups through the expert models, tropes of childhood innocence and purity. I call for a centring of Black women’s ways of knowing and being through Black feminism and sexuality. To achieve this, I employ a storytelling approach to describe my social-location, pinpoint key pillars of Black feminisms related to gender and sexuality, and highlight Black women’s community mobilizations in ECEC, which move beyond solely curriculum and formal documents.