ABSTRACT
We are living in a new demographic era. White children are no longer the majority in today’s U.S. early childhood classrooms, where most young students are of Color (Krogstad, 2014; Maxwell, 2014). This is not a temporary situation as demographic projections predict that the percentage of children of Color in early educational settings is expected to continue rising through at least 2060 (Colby & Ortman, 2015). From 2014 to 2060, the white population under 18 is expected to diminish by 23.4 percent whereas the population of Latinos is expected to increase by 53.6 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014 National Projections). Paradoxically, most early childhood teachers are white (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). Whereas the percentage of young children of Color in U.S. schools has increased significantly over the past two decades, the percentage of early childhood teachers of Color has declined (Ingersol & May, 2011; Souto-Manning & Cheruvu, 2016; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). This mismatch often results in de facto minoritization; that is, the practices of children of Color-and their very identities-being positioned as “minoritized” (McCarty, 2002) because they are foreign to the dominant cultural and linguistic practices (Paris, 2009) of the overwhelming majority of early childhood teachers. Such minoritization represents capturing “the power relations and processes by which certain groups are socially, economically, and politically marginalized within the larger society” (McCarty, 2002, p. xv).
