I Die Daily : Police Brutality, Black Bodies, and the Force of Children’s Literature

Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Samira Abdur-Rahman, Cara Byrne, Katharine Capshaw, Gabrielle Atwood Halko, Michelle S. Hite, Sarah E. Jackson, Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Renée Latchman, Michelle H. Martin, Ashley Hope Pérez, Connie Porter, Karen Sands-O’Connor, and Althea L. Tait

Positioned against the backdrop of state-sanctioned violence committed by law enforcement in twenty-first-century America, I Die Daily: Police Brutality, Black Bodies, and the Force of Children’s Literature is a difficult but necessary collection of essays that seeks to confront the treatment of Black bodies in children’s literature. Beginning with the tragic, brutal death of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, contributors in I Die Daily explore the biases at work in children’s stories dealing with race and power dynamics and the successes and shortcomings of scholars in the way of addressing these power dynamics.

I Die Daily names those killed by police brutality—Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Aiyana Stanley Jones, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd—to forever inscribe their histories into the social record. In connecting the fate of a young Black boy on a hot, Mississippi-summer afternoon to the long list of Black Americans killed by the police, I Die Daily asks readers to reckon with the relationship between America’s violent racial history and children’s literature and envisions new, hopeful paths forward.