Van Ausdale and Feagin have written an honest ethnography of the playgroup activities of children ages three to six in a racially and ethnically diverse preschool. In addition to providing the reader with respectful and realistic representations of children, they critique a “double deficit” model that reflects professional and popular beliefs concerning children’s capacity to comprehend and employ abstract racial–ethnic concepts. The idea of the double deficit is drawn from Piagetian and other adultcentric theories, which depict children as either developmentally or experientally limited in their abilities to comprehend race. Van Ausdale and Feagin’s approach to children as social actors capable of participating in social systems of inequality places the authors within the tradition of the sociology and anthropology of childhood.

The book’s introduction sets the scene with an extraordinary anecdote, one that typifies how adults (teachers, preschool directors, parents) respond to children who are caught uttering racial epithets or using racialized language. Van Ausdale and Feagin illustrate how adults individuate racist behaviors and practices to absent adults while simultaneously constructing the child as “imitator, not as creator or master of language” (p. 2). They argue further that, by articulating a color-blind liberal ideology, white middle-class adults live in denial that institutionalized racism and its expression in everyday social practices happen at all.

The introduction also contains a literature review, written in accessible language for several audiences. The authors cover enough of the scholarship in cognitive and developmental psychology to establish their expertise. They also provide a gentle introduction to studies of everyday forms of institutionalized racism. Finally, the authors’ discussion and use of Vygotskian theory is appropriate for their analysis of children’s social practices.

The remainder of the monograph is organized along four themes. Two themes treat how children use racial–ethnic categories to define Self and Other. The third theme centers on playgroups and how children employ racial–ethnic concepts and foreign languages to include and exclude multiethnic children from participating in their activities. The final theme concerns how adults at the preschool viewed the children and how they responded to the researchers’ observations and preliminary findings.

Van Ausdale’s descriptions of children’s activities and perspectives reveal that she successfully employed the least-adult method to establish a status of non-sanctioning adult participant-observer. This afforded her a privileged lens into children’s daily practices—practices that children normally conceal from adults in positions of authority. The authors consistently link microinteractional exchanges among children in preschool and macrosociological beliefs about race currently circulating in the United States. Throughout the book, they provide compelling analyses of how children are active, albeit unequal, participants in reproducing racial–ethnic categories, some of which mirror adult, conventionalized racist social behaviors and practices. Many of their observations also reveal that children are equally adept at transcending some behaviors and inventing new ones. In the final chapter, Ausdale and Feagin fully articulate their critique of how white middle-class members of U.S. society (especially “liberal-minded” ones), employ Piagetian beliefs about egocentricity in order to deny that children are as active as their adult counterparts in reproducing social structures of inequality based on racial–ethnic categories. The authors conclude the monograph with a postscript designed to provide practical advice for teachers, parents, and researchers about “what can be done” to effect social change by “recognizing how central the tools of race and racism are in the social toolbox” in order to “begin rendering them obsolete” (p. 201).

I applaud Van Ausdale and Feagin for tackling this subject matter with these subjects. Their careful and faithful observations of playgroup practices are commendable. The central theme is of equal importance; however, I feel as though they have only scratched the surface of a complex subject matter that deserves more theoretical rigor. Although the authors acknowledge the work of some scholars working within the sociology and anthropology of childhood, they overlook others who have made key contributions in historicizing the concept of “the child” and problematizing children’s agency in an era of late capitalism. For example, absent from their analysis is a theoretical discussion of the interdependence of race and class relations and how they are changing in response to postindustrial society. The authors are clearly aware that race and class inform U.S. structural inequalities, but class falls through the cracks in their analysis except in cases where they critique liberals’ ideology of race. I would, nevertheless, recommend this book precisely because, unlike so much of the literature on child socialization, Van Ausdale and Feagin do not ignore the discursive power that cognitive and developmental psychological theories continue to have in professional and popular circles.