Multiracial Identity in Children's Literature

Reading Diversity In the Classroom

Amina Chaudhri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317507840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica multiculturale

Racially mixed children make up the fastest growing youth demographic in the U.S., and teachers of diverse populations need to be mindful in selecting literature that their students can identify with. This volume explores how books for elementary school students depict and reflect multiracial experiences through text and images. Chaudhri examines contemporary children's literature to demonstrate the role these books play in perpetuating and resisting stereotypes and the ways in which they might influence their readers. Through critical analysis of contemporary children's fiction, Chaudhri highlights the connections between context, literature, and personal experience to deepen our understanding of how children's books treat multiracial identity.

1
Introduction

During my time as an elementary school teacher in a Chicago public school, I relied on children’s literature in all areas of the curriculum to reach my students on deeper levels than textbook learning allowed. Stories inspired and motivated as well as provided insight into life experiences that were similar to or different from their own. I shared with my fourth graders the metaphor that we can think of literature as a mirror that enables us to see our own lives reflected, and as a window through which we can view different experiences (Bishop 1990). The metaphor resonated deeply with my students and inevitably became an integral part of our discussions. Books such as Because of Winn Dixie (DiCamillo 2000) encouraged us to talk about different types of friendships and ways in which we tend to be judgmental; Kira Kira (Kadohata 2006) brought up the topics of sibling relationships, racism, and loss. The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 (Curtis 1995) was a window into the Jim Crow south. For many of my students, that kind of racism was something that happened to other people in another time, but became a less distant concept when we connected Watsons to current events. Immigration stories such as Lupita Mañana (Beatty 1981) hit home in very immediate ways as almost everyone had their own immigration story to tell. One year a student noted that she had never read any stories that mirrored who she was—“Chinese and American.” Others agreed, and I looked around and realized that at least six of my students were biracial (as far as I could tell). And they were right. Not one of us could think of a story that depicted a multiracial protagonist. Moreover, I recalled that I had once had a similar realization decades earlier, when I read a book that mirrored my own Pakistani and English heritage. I remembered the awe and disbelief that smatterings of that author’s life matched mine. It was in that moment that this project was born and I set out to find fiction for young readers that depicted multiracial experiences. Where were these stories? Who was telling them? What kinds of mirrors and windows would they provide?¹

Literature for children that includes multiracial characters is not easy to identify. In her study of literature for young adults, Nancy Reynolds (2009) comments on the variety of responses to her query in search of books with multiracial content. Respondents suggested titles that were about nonwhite characters, or written by writers of color, but not necessarily about multiracial experiences. My own experience was similar. I received suggestions of books about white and nonwhite characters overcoming racial differences, such as Jacqueline Woodson and E. B. Lewis’s (2001) The Other Side, or of books with diverse casts of characters such as some of Uma Krishnaswami’s novels (Naming Maya 2004, Many Windows 2008), or simply books by nonwhite authors. Like Reynolds, I found that purveyors of children’s books who I approached understood the terms “mixed race,” “biracial” and “multiracial” vaguely, the way that the term “diverse” is used as a catch-all label that includes everyone and avoids naming race. Fortunately, the Library of Congress (LoC) uses the subject heading “racially-mixed people” and offers a searchable online catalog that identifies relevant titles. In my search, I found that library databases and lists created by individual readers and bloggers on sites such as Goodreads.com and Amazon.com overlapped with the LoC lists for the most part. Additionally, I was able to find other books if, by chance, reviewers for publications such as The Horn Book, The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, and Booklist, made mention of multiracial characters. Sometimes, however, the label is used arbitrarily so that a search through a database for books using the terms “mixed race” or “multiracial” might refer to books with multiple characters of different racial backgrounds such as The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher (Levy 2014), which features four adopted brothers of gay fathers, two of whom might be white, and two might be black (one has to infer based on fleeting descriptions). Conversely, some books are not labeled and do not come up in many searches for mixed race children’s books. Pam Muñoz Ryan’s (2004) middle grade novel, Becoming Naomi León does not bear the LoC subject keyword, though it is most certainly about a character whose parents are white and Mexican, and her search for identity, as the title declares, involves her learning about her Mexican heritage. Neither does My Basmati Bat Mitzvah (Freedman 2013) which features a protagonist who is very much connected to her Indian and Jewish cultures. Blue Balliett’s (2013) novel, Hold Fast comes up in online searches for mixed race books although there is nothing in the novel to lead readers to believe the family is interracial or the protagonists biracial. The determination appears to have been made from this description: “The father is pale, the mother dark, the kids cocoa and cinnamon. Eyes in this family are green, amber, and smoky topaz” (5). The identification of books as having multiracial content appears to dependent on the keyword choices decided upon by authors and publishers, and by book reviewers who may or may not notice or choose to comment on racial identity. The absence or presence of these keyword tags plays a role in the accessibility of the books for readers who might be intentionally seeking stories featuring multiracial experiences. This project unites contemporary and historical fiction (and some narrative non-fiction picturebooks) intended for beginning and middle grade readers and contextualizes depictions of multiracial identity within a historical framework. Essentially, Multiracial Identity in Children’s Literature responds to the question: what recent publications feature multiracial lives, and what are they saying about the experiences of being multiracial?

Arnold Adoff and Emily McCully’s (1973) Black Is Brown Is Tan is considered the first children’s book featuring multiracial people. It is a picturebook, published shortly after the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967) overturned antimiscegenation laws in the United States. Adoff and his wife, Virginia Hamilton were themselves an interracial couple for whom the law and society’s judgmental views about interracial marriage must have had implications, so they understood the impact of laws on public perception and personal experience. Indeed, their son, Jaime Adoff is the author of three of the books with biracial primary characters. Black Is Brown Is Tan was significant for drawing attention to racial diversity in children’s books at a time when there was little, if any affirmation of children of color in literature. Twenty years later, in 1993, Marguerite Davol and Irene Trivas’s Black, White, Just Right doubled the number of books depicting multiracial children to two. The 1990s saw an average of two publications per year, with a sharp increase in 1999, the year before the U.S. Census change allowed people to “mark all that apply” among racial categories. To date, the Library of Congress lists 214 titles for children with the subject keyword “racially mixed people.” It is possible that more books exist that have not been labeled, and finding these becomes a task of serendipity. Given that about 5,000 children’s books are published annually, 214 books with multiracial content over the course of nearly four decades is a small number indeed. In a quantitative study, Chaudhri and Teale (2013) found that over the course of ten years, fiction for intermediate and middle grade readers with multiracial content comprised a mere 0.2 % of all publications. Another salient finding of the Chaudhri and Teale study is that 87% of the titles identified were about white and nonwhite biracial stories, with nonwhite mixes comprising only 13%. Representation is not only scarce overall, but limited in the ways multiracial identity is perceived and disseminated in the literary world. Critical multicultural analysis includes the consideration of the production aspect of children’s books. With regard to multiracial books we should ask questions about how and why certain books are identified as multiracial, and when and why they are promoted. Over the years, other scholars have also commented on the dearth of mixed race literature (Sands-O’Connor 2001; Smith 2001; Yokota and Frost 2003). All this is to say that taken as a whole, the “slipperiness of language” (Reynolds 2009, xi), the shortage of books, and the absence of critical attention, suggest a national blind spot in the view of the current racial terrain. Clearly, there are not enough multiracial mirrors for today’s rapidly growing multiracial population.

Multiracial Identity and Children’s Literature: The Need for Mirrors and Windows

A key tenet of the multicultural education movement is to ensure that historically marginalized groups are represented in literature and curriculum. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Madison reports annually on the racial breakdown of books by and about people of color. CCBC librarians review approximately 3,500 books per year and the data shows that only around 10% are by and about people of color. Multiracial content is not reported separately and is probably folded into the general ‘multicultural’ realm. This is a woefully inadequate number that makes it hard for teachers and parents to find a variety of books for young readers beyond the heavily marketed award-winners. The need for an awareness of the contributions and struggles of people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ, and differently-abled Americans has given rise to a slow but significant presence of quality literature by writers such as Christopher Paul Curtis, Sherman Alexie, R. J. Pallacio, Alex Sanchez, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Ami Polonsky, to name a few. As issues of civil and human rights have become more prominent on our cultural landscape, the influence of identity-based movements has been felt in many realms, including literature. Visibility is a critical starting point. Maria P. P. Root (1992) reminds us, “in essence, to name oneself is to validate one’s existence and declare visibility.” (7) As a key factor in identity construction, literature is examined for how it contributes to positive, negative, or complex perceptions of marginalized people. Authors make intentional choices in the characters they create and their fictional representations may resonate with readers in profound ways. When children see themselves represented in the books in their classrooms, libraries and bookstores in positive ways, they understand that who they are matters enough to be in a book. The educational benefits to this are tremendous and have been documented by many research studies that attest to an increase in self-concept, motivation, comprehension and literacy development (Brophy 2008; McNair 2013; Flemming et al. 2015) Children experience literature in deeply aesthetic and personal ways that contribute to the development of personal values that necessarily influence how they interact with other people (Galda and Cullinan 2000). Thus, literature for children who are not biracial can serve as windows and provide insight into what those experiences might be like. In the increasingly racially-mixed world of today, it is significant that multiracial identity is being represented in a small body of literature, being received by readers, and playing a role in shaping a perception of what it means to be multiracial. Critical readings of these texts can contribute new ways of thinking about racial identity, breaking away from the “binary caste system” (Reynolds 2009, xiv) consisting of white and nonwhite people.

Multiracial people are not a recent phenomenon, but the claiming of a multiracial identity is relatively new practice. The “mark one or more” option in the 2000 U.S. Census was a turning point in American history that permitted individuals to choose multiple racial categories for the first time. As a result, 2.4% of the population, 6.8 million people, identified themselves as multiracial. The 2010 Census results showed that 3%, or 9 million people identified as belonging to two or more races. The symbolism of this emergent shift in self-identification is significant and is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2. That millions of people reject the white/nonwhite categorization that is the legacy of the “one-drop rule” in recognition of the racial and ethnic multitudes in their heritage speaks volumes about the changing attitudes about racial identity in North America. How this racial identity manifests itself is at once a matter of individual self-perception and national social construction. Multiracial Identity in Children’s Literature explores the ways multiracial experiences are portrayed in children’s contemporary realistic and historical fiction against the backdrop of discursive and social practices that have defined mixed race identity for centuries.

Theoretical Framework

Western interest in children’s literature is as old as the idea of childhood itself. Seth Lerer’s (2008) book Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter, and Leonard Marcus’ (2008) Minders of Make Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature, are two recent publications that document the scholarly and public examination of what children read. More so than adult or even young adult literature, children’s literature has come under the scrutiny of all manner of “minders” who regulate, prescribe, censor and advocate the content and quality of literature that ends up in the hands of young readers. No matter which end of the ideological spectrum, adults in charge of children agree that stories can have an impact on emerging identities. The literate child, as Lerer (2008) points out, is “made through texts and tales.” (1)

This national awareness of the shaping powers of literature and the political, financial and ideological interests of the publishing world are intricately related (Marcus 2008), so it is not surprising that as in the realms of art, film and music, literature, too, tends to reflect dominant cultural sentiments. Efforts to have literature become more representative of diverse experiences in the United States led to the emergence of multicultural literature in the 1960s with the growing awareness of the deleterious effects on children of school and social segregation. A significant moment occurred in 1965 with the appearance of Nancy Larrick’s review of more than 5,000 children’s trade books in the Saturday Review. Published in the wake of critical events in the civil rights movement, Larrick’s article revealed “an all-white world of children’s literature” and sparked rigorous scholarship in the field of multicultural children’s literature by researchers who were invested in highlighting themes and topics in quality books, as well as critiquing persistent problematic depictions of marginalized groups. Another foundational study, and one on which this book draws was Rudine Sims Bishop’s (1982) analysis of representations of African American experiences in children’s fiction in Shadow and Substance followed by a second study in 2007. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African Am...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Multiracial Identity in the United States: Historical and Current Discourse
• 3 Multiracial Stories in Picturebooks
• 4 Multiracial In/Visibility: The Legacy of Pathology in Contemporary Fiction
• 5 Multiracial Blending: The Post-Racial Myth in Contemporary Fiction
• 6 Multiracial Awareness: Power and Visibility in Contemporary Fiction
• 7 Voices of the Past: Multiracial Identity in Historical Fiction
• 8 Hidden Identities: Whiteness and Passing
• 9 Teaching and Learning with Multiracial Fiction
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Index