The SAGE Handbook of Child Development, Multiculturalism, and Media

Joy K. Asamen, Mesha L. Ellis, Gordon L. Berry

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781483342719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The SAGE Handbook of Child Development explores the multicultural development of children through the varied and complex interplay of traditional agents of socialization as well as contemporary media influences, examining how socialization practices and media content construct and teach us about diverse cultures. Editors Joy K. Asamen, Mesha L. Ellis, and Gordon L. Berry, along with chapter authors from a wide variety of disciplines, highlight how to analyze, compare, and contrast alternative perspectives of children of different cultures, domestically and globally, with the major principles and theories of child development in cognitive, socioemotional, and/or social/contextual domains.

Part I

Foundations for Multicultural Concepts, Child Development Principles, and an Emerging Worldview

Part I of this Handbook begins at the most appropriate point by providing a historical foundation for understanding the key concepts of multiculturalism, ethnic identity, and cognitive processes involved in child development, and the principles associated with the early acquisition of an individual’s worldview. This part of the volume also addresses some of the research and methodological challenges relevant to the study of multicultural issues. Thus, the principles and concepts of the first part of the Handbook form a type of historical and theoretical framework for the remainder of this volume.

Part I begins with a chapter by Ronald Takaki that provides historical insight into the “Master Narrative of American History” in which America has been defined as “White.” His treatise challenges this notion by providing an account of the diverse cultures that compose and have contributed to what we know as America.

The chapters by Mesha Ellis and John Lochman, Khiela Holmes, and Mary Wojnaroski focus on the cognitive processes in regards to the developmental factors that facilitate knowledge acquisition and the relevance of social cognition and social information processing in the function and development of children’s social schema, respectively. These chapters provide the theoretical bases for understanding the cognitive processes relevant to the multicultural development of children.

Sha’kema Blackmon and Elizabeth Vera move the discussion to a more specific exploration of ethnic and racial identity development among children of color. In this chapter, a recommendation for more ethnic-racial socialization research on groups of contemporary interest is suggested.

Finally, Part I ends with a chapter by Frederick Leong, Desirée Baolian Qin, and Jason Huang that offers an overview of the conceptual issues underlying multicultural research methods, such as approaches to differences; defining race, ethnicity, and culture; studies across cultures; and planning research. Furthermore, measurement equivalence issues, data collection challenges, cultural moderators, and the use of mixed methods are considered in conducting culturally appropriate and relevant research.

CHAPTER 1

Multiculturalism as a Cornerstone of Being in the 21st Century

A Historical Perspective

RONALD TAKAKI

THE MASTER NARRATIVE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

When I was a child, I lived in Palolo Valley on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. My neighbors were Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and Hawaiian. Across the stream that flowed down the middle of the valley lived Puerto Rican and Filipino families. As children, we played with each other, speaking in pidgin English. “Da kind tako [octopus in Japanese] ono [delicious in Hawaiian].” In the homes of our families, we heard an immense variety of languages. We thought of ourselves as Americans, and said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag each morning. Our teachers did not teach us why peoples from around the world had come to be living together in our valley. But it was not their fault: they themselves had never had the opportunity to learn about the history of Hawaii’s sugar industry and its insatiable need for laborers. Missing in their education and ours was the study of our multicultural roots—a cornerstone of our identity and being.

As a teenager, I became a surfer. Today, when my Berkeley students find out about my past, they become very curious: How did a surfer become a scholar?

A high school teacher changed my life. I attended Iolani High School, an Episcopalian institution, and during my senior year in 1956, I was in a class taught by Dr. Shunji Nishi, PhD. As his students, we were impressed. There were other Asian American doctors in Hawaii, but they were all MDs. This one was a PhD. I remember going home and asking my mother, who had been born on a plantation and had only an eighth-grade education. “Mom,” I said, “my teacher’s name is Dr. Shunji Nishi, PhD. Mom, what’s a PhD?” She looked at me and said, “I don’t know, but he must be very smart.” A light went on in my head. Maybe someday I could become Ronald Takaki, PhD.

Dr. Nishi became a role model for me, and I began studying hard. He made his students write short papers every 2 weeks, essays about the problems of the world and the human condition. He taught us that to write is to think. My essays were returned with extensive marginal comments. Many of them were epistemological questions. A critical thinking skill, epistemology asks the question, “How do you know, you know, what you know?” In other words, the “how” of knowing is more important than the “what.” How you know something determines what you know about it. Dr. Nishi and I developed a relationship with one another, through my essays and his marginal comments.

One day in April, Dr. Nishi flagged me on campus. “Ronald, I think it would be good for you to go away to college—good for your personal growth and your intellectual development. There is this fine liberal arts college in Ohio, called the College of Wooster. Would you like to go to the College of Wooster?” I blurted out, “No.” I had already been accepted to the University of Hawaii, and Ohio seemed so far away, for I had never been off the islands. Dr. Nishi replied, “Would it be okay for me to write to the college and tell them about you?” I said fine, walked away, and forgot about this conversation. A month later, I received a letter from the dean of the College of Wooster, which read: “Dear Mr. Takaki, you have been accepted to the College of Wooster. But please fill out the application form.”

After arriving on campus in the fall, I experienced a culture shock. My fellow students asked me questions like “How long have you been in this country?” and “Where did you learn to speak English?” My grandfather had come here in 1886, before many European immigrants. To the Wooster students, however, I did not look like an American and did not have an American-sounding name.

Reflecting later on my Wooster experience, I realized that my fellow students had learned nothing about Asian Americans in courses called U.S. history. They had also learned nothing or very little about Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans.

The Wooster students perceived me through a filter—what I call the Master Narrative of American History. This narrative is the pervasive and popular but mistaken story that our country was settled by European immigrants and that Americans are White or European in ancestry. “Race,” Toni Morrison (1992, p. 47) explained, has functioned as a “metaphor” necessary to the “construction of Americanness”: in the creation of our national identity, “American” has been defined as “White.”

This widely shared assumption lies hidden beneath our conscious thinking. However, once we become aware of the Master Narrative, we can find it not only in everyday conversations and the curriculum but also in statements of policymakers as well as the entertainment media.

The Master Narrative has often been innocent. The Wooster students did not intend to isolate or insult me. President Ronald Reagan was not seeking to exclude anyone when he offered a metaphor in his appeal for funding the space program. “We landed on these eastern shores,” he declared in a televised speech, “and we advanced civilization westward against the frontier. And space exploration is our latest frontier.” However, many of us asked, “Who are ‘we’?” Some of us were already here on these eastern shores when the English strangers first landed. Others of us landed on these western shores. In his powerful and vivid depiction of heroic White soldiers fighting the Nazis during the D-Day invasion, Steven Spielberg did not intentionally leave out the presence of African American soldiers unloading the ships on the beaches of Normandy and feeding the White combat troops. But their presence was absent from Saving Private Ryan because the film was seeking to entertain rather than to present accurate history. Saving Private Ryan was Hollywood’s portrayal of World War II.

But the Master Narrative has frequently been injurious. It led to the enslavement of Africans in 17th-century Virginia; the 1790 law restricting naturalized citizenship to “Whites” only; the Indian removal of the 1830s; the U.S. war against Mexico in 1846 under the banner of manifest destiny; the Jim Crow laws denying dignity to African Americans; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; the 1924 National Origins Immigration Act, which restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and totally closed the gates to Asia; the World War II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens by birth; today’s racially tinged nativism aimed at “illegal immigrants” from Mexico; and the government’s detention and deportation of Muslims after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

Whether innocent or injurious, the Master Narrative’s narrow and exclusive definition of who is an American leaves many of us feeling left out.

After graduating from Wooster in 1961, I entered the PhD program in American history at the University of California, Berkeley. However, even the completion of the PhD was not fulfilling intellectually. I still found myself asking, How do I know, I know, what I know about the history of the diverse peoples of the United States of America? My pursuit for answers lasted for decades and led to the writing of an abundance of books—Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America (Takaki, 1979); Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii (Takaki, 1983); Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Takaki, 1989); A Larger Memory: A History of Our Diversity, With Voices (Takaki, 1998); Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Takaki, 2000); and most important, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Takaki, 1993).

ROOTS: THE “VARIED CAROLS” OF AMERICA

While researching and writing a more inclusive and hence more accurate history, I discovered the plantation origins of Palolo Valley’s diversity.

In the 19th century, as the planters took lands from the Hawaiian people in order to cultivate sugar cane, they declared, “Get labor first, and capital will follow.” To get laborers, they looked everywhere, especially in Asia. Requisitions sent to the mercantile houses in Honolulu reveal their frenzied scramble for laborers. In a letter to a plantation manager, July 2, 1890, the Davies Company of Honolulu (Laupahoehoe Plantation Records, 1890) acknowledged receipt of a list of orders:

bonemeal

canvas

Japanese laborers

macaroni

Chinaman

A letter, May 5, 1908, from the vice president of H. Hackfield and Company to manager George Wilcox of the Grove Farm Plantation (Grove Farm Plantation Records, 1908) had itemized sections, listed alphabetically, for

fertilizer

Filipinos

Though they placed orders for workers along with supplies, planters were conscious of the nationalities of their laborers. An ethnically diverse labor force was designed to create divisions among the workers and reinforce control over them. Plantation managers devised a policy: “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Japs, Chinese, and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit” (Fairfield, 1895).

However, these immigrants from many different countries had their own ideas, feelings, and dreams for their lives in plantation Hawaii. They, too, were actors in history, making choices and taking action. In their own words, they told stories of working in the cane fields and creating new communities in the camps.

On the plantations, the laborers found themselves in a world of regimented labor. Early in the morning, they were jarred from their sleep by the loud scream of the plantation siren. A song captured the beginning of their workday:

Awake! Stir your bones! Rouse up!

Shrieks the Five o’Clock Whistle.

Don’t dream you can nestle

For one more sweet nap.

Or your ear-drums I’ll rap

With my steam-hammer tap

Till they burst.

Br-r-row-aw-i-e-ur-ur-rup!

Wake up! wake up! wake up! w-a-k-eu-u-u-up!

Filipino and Japanee;

Porto Rican and Portugee;

Korean, Kanaka and Chinese;

Everybody whoever you be

On the whole plantation—

Wake up! wake up! wake up! w-a-k-eu-u-u-up!

Br-r-row-aw-i-e-ur-ur-rup! (“The Five O’Clock Whistle,” 1910)

After waking up, the workers assembled in front of the mill where they were organized into gangs, each one supervised by a luna, or White overseer. The ethnicity of the gangs varied: some were composed of one nationality, whereas others reflected a mixture of Hawaiians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Koreans. For everyone, fieldwork was punishing and brutal. “We worked like machines,” a laborer complained. “For 200 of us workers, there were seven or eight lunas and above them was a field boss on a horse. We were watched constantly” (Ethnic Studies Oral History Project, 1981, p. 360). Harvesting the cane was dirty and exhausting work. The workers whispered to the wind, come, please come and cool our sweaty backs. But the breezes often could not reach them because they were surrounded by the green thicket. Twelve feet in height, the cane was like a formidable forest, and the workers were like miniature soldiers as they cut the stalks (Ethnic Studies Oral History Project, p. 360).

Fighting back against the cane, workers refused to be intimidated by the managers. Contrary to the stereotype of Asians as quiet and accommodating, they repeatedly engaged in strikes, inspired by fierce visions of what their labor and lives in Hawaii should be.

The first major strike was organized in 1909 by Japanese laborers, who constituted 70% of the workforce. In their strike demands, the laborers called for equal pay for equal work: they wanted the same pay as workers from Puerto Rico and Portugal. “It is not the color of his skin or hair, or the language he speaks, or manners and customs that grow cane in the field,” the strikers declared. “It is labor that grows cane.” Their strike demands reflected the transformation of these sojourning laborers into settlers. “We have decided to permanently settle here [and] to unite our destiny with that of Hawaii, sharing the prosperity and adversity of Hawaii with other citizens of Hawaii” (Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii, 1910, p. 76). Significantly, these Japanese immigrants were framing their demands in “American” terms. They argued that the deplorable conditions on the plantations perpetuated an “undemocratic and un-American” society of “plutocrats and coolies.” Fair wages would encourage laborers to work more industriously and productively and enable Hawaii to enjoy “perpetual peace and prosperity.” They were seeking to create “a thriving and contented middle class—the realization of the high ideal of Americanism” (Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii, p. 76).

However, the planters crushed the strike and then began importing Filipino laborers in a divide-and-rule strategy. By 1920, the Japanese workers represented only 44% of the labor force, and the Filipino workers constituted 30%. Pitted against one another, the laborers of both nationalities quickly realized that their struggle for better conditions and higher pay would have to be based on interethnic working-class solidarity.

In 1920, demanding higher wages, Japanese and Filipino laborers went out on strike together. The Filipino Laborers Associat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Multiculturalism, Media, and Money
• Introduction: The Interface of Child Development, Multiculturalism, and Media Within a Worldview Framework
• PART I. Foundations for Multicultural Concepts, Child Development Principles, and an Emerging Worldview
• PART II. Institutions of Socialization and the Development of a Child’s Multicultural Worldview
• PART III. Media and the Development of a Child’s Multicultural Worldview
• PART IV. Perspectives on Media Literacy and the Forces That Shape the Media Experiences of Children
• Epilogue: The Realities of Growing Up in a Multicultural and Multimedia World
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors