Child Care Justice examines the historical, political, economic, educational, and cultural systems that continue to oppress early care educators and, by extension, racialized children and children in poverty. Why was this an important book to write?

The reason this was an important book to write is that during the COVID 19 pandemic, when the book project began, child care surfaced as an important factor for the country’s economic recovery in terms of parents being able to work with the comfort of knowing their children were being cared for. However, while child care was being touted as the engine for economic recovery, not many people were aware of the fact that the institution of slavery, and its low regard for humanity, through its economic and physical exploitation of the enslaved, continues to this day, and stigmatizes workers in the various care industries through racial injustice, gender injustice and economic injustice. Thus resulting in a class of low wage, low status individuals, primarily women of color, on whose shoulders the country intended to rebuild the economy.

With such a complex topic, how did you narrow the focus to the important ideas for you to share in this book?

As you can imagine, the outline for a book of such scope and complexity requires a lot of rethinking and multiple iterations in order to tell as story that has congruence and coherence. However, it was the skillful eyes and ears of my brilliant, co-editor Kyra Ostendorf who brought it all together. She took what started out as my topical outline, and converted it into chapters that made sense and hung together.

The authors cover a wide range of topics in this book and present facts from various sources. How much research did you undertake for this book, and how much time did it take to put it all together?

The selection of authors was a carefully, curated process that was a combination of matching authors that we already knew with the chapter topic and discovering new, fresh authors whose body of work was amazing, compelling and unknown. However, the beauty of this undertaking was our monthly author’s workshops that followed a protocol that created a sense of camaraderie and morphed into a problem solving lab. I believe that it created a sense of community that lent itself to the book’s cohesiveness. All total, it took about two years to bring the book to publication. However, it was a labor-intensive, multiple writes and rewrites process, with some serendipity along the way.

What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Child Care Justice?

I hope that the reader takes away a sense of hope that we can eradicate the vestiges of slavery, and past injustices by creating a national movement of low wage, low status workers across organizational lines.

Author Links: Website