Reading into Racism

Bias in Children's Literature and Learning Materials

Gillian Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134930821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published in the year 1985, Reading into Racism is a valuable contribution to the field of Education.

Chapter 1

What is a biased book? Recognition and responses

Mary Kingsley did more than study cannibals…she tried to change British ideas about the way Africans should be governed. She did a great deal towards securing justice for these backward races. (from Reading On, Red Book One. Oliver & Boyd. First published 1958, eleventh impression 1975.)

There is no such thing as an unbiased book. Every communication expresses the views of the individual or group of individuals making them. In the case of books (a word I shall from now on use to subsume other published materials such as cassettes, films, slides, videos, wallets of photographs, posters etc), those views are fixed in aspic for all who dip at any time in the future into that particular confection.

Much writing is candidly subjective: the author and the audience have both accepted subjectivity as being part—often a valued part—of the package. Writers like Buchi Emecheta or James Baldwin are actually exposing their subjective experiences and views, offering their vulnerability as a gift, a gift that at its best converts to insights on the part of their readers: ‘yes, it's been like that for me, too’ or ‘now I can begin to understand how it must have been for them’. Great authors let us look out of their eyes as well as our own; how they see the world is a product of their own personalities, experiences and environments. Which is why Othello and Shylock are skilfully drawn stereotypes of other races as regarded by a sixteenth-century Englishman.

Works of literature

It is also why one position taken on the debate on literary bias is that great literature is above or beyond such criticism. This is a position with which I would agree, though partly for a mundane reason: no one is likely to read Shakespeare at a stage when they have not developed their own views and also the ability to set what they are reading in the context of when and where it was written. Nevertheless, it is precisely when authors are writing with ‘creative’ subjectivity about groups other than their own that the anomalies creep in. ‘Nice’ black husbands for daughters of affluent American WASPs are handsome doctors, epitomized by Sidney Poitier in the film of the 1960s Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. When white authors set out to create black characters for whom they and their audience are intended to feel sympathy, they may judge them by white standards. Also, they often present them as victims, but victims of a system which is never questioned because, in the author's subjective view, the prevailing system is unquestionably acceptable.

Well-intentioned novels

For the well-meaning novels of the 1960s such as Sounder by William Armstrong, The Cay by Theodore Taylor, The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox, and Harper Lee's now-classic To kill a Mockingbird, the problem in all those works was identical. All the authors were white, and all were committed to creating in their novels black characters who would elicit their readers' sympathy and approval. The trap that all fell into was that they perceived their readers also as all white, and the ways in which they justified the worth of their characters were ways that would be wholly acceptable to white values and standards. But once articulate monitors of literature were being drawn partly from the black community too, it is little wonder that these finely-wrought novels drew fire.

In response, some white authors have been moved to seek a greater ‘objectivity.’

Subjectivity v. objectivity

In itself, however, objectivity is not the solution any more than subjectivity is necessarily the problem. It depends on whose subjectivity and objectivity it is. And such a simple categorization leaves no space for the skills of empathy: Louise Fitzhugh, for example, immerses herself totally (and so her readers) in her central character in Nobody's family is going to change. That Fitzhugh was white and adult did not stop her creating in Emma a convincing, fat, middle-class Black American girl of twelve who is determined to become a lawyer. Emma is as real as Edith Jackson created by another fine American writer, Rosa Guy, who is black, and who acknowledges Edith as being closely modelled on her own life.

Works of creative imagination are necessarily complex, so simplisitic evaluations or conclusions will only impede debate. In their search for greater ‘objectivity’ authors may try writing collaboratively—which often means that they work with people who think and feel as they do: David Hicks and Simon Fisher, for example, when developing their World Studies 8–13, 1985 or the anonymous teachers who produced Doing Things About the House, published by Serawood House in 1983. Both works are honest attempts to communicate a particular view of the world: that it happens to be a benign, constructive view is what makes its bias so acceptable.

Another path pursued by would-be objective authors is a commitment to researching and then trying to impart a view less their own, but currently prevailing in society. This is where so many historians come unstuck. In ‘boning up’ the writings of earlier historians, they internalize and perpetuate the views and values of their source material—unless they make a deliberate effort to overturn them. Even working from contemporary documents—done so successfully by Tony Bayfield, for example, in documenting the rise of anti-semitism in Germany (Churban—the murder of the Jews in Europe)—is no foolproof guarantee: much of the material in Churban was actually used against the Jews and certainly there are authors like John Buchan and J.B.Priestley who read and accepted those or similar documents in precisely the way that they were intended, and then passed on their prejudice in their novels.

So objectivity is not only unobtainable; it is not necessarily even desirable. What needs to be identified when we look at the bias of the author is: whose bias is being reflected? One can find examples of black authors who have themselves so imbibed the prejudices of their own environment and education that they perpetuate it unquestioningly. In Sri Lanka in 1982, I was asked to look at a PhD thesis by a Singalese which argued that poor nutrition was the cause of low achievement and intelligence among Sri Lankans (both Singalese and Tamil). He was aghast when I said that the worthy tomes by British anthropologists of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s to which he had gained grateful access at a characteristically colonial library in Colombo and on which all his argument was based, were almost bound to have been racist. This epitomizes the cause for concern. It is when the bias confirms in the reader a view of a group of people which is that of the dominant for the dominated, that bias becomes unacceptable.

Racist bias

We now move to a consideration of one form bias takes in books: racist. Many adults and children believe that books can be racist, and a consensus of opinion might offer this definition: ‘a book that imprints a racist image on the reader's mind’. It thus becomes necessary to define what we mean in this context by racist. The racist view is that presented by the dominant (here, white) group of all other groups as being in some way inferior. The standards by which the dominant group measures all others are also themselves determined by the dominant group, so are inevitably distorted.

Racism in books can have many causes—from the unthinking and insensitive passing on of prevailing attitudes, to the conscious strategy of rendering the ‘other’ as ‘lesser’, in order to attack or exploit them. The most obvious illustration of the latter is the German propaganda that preceded genocide, rendering the Jews as ‘untermenschen’—less-than-humans—such as the film made under the direction of Goebbels which cut quickly from rats eating corn in a barn to Jews at business (recorded in Bayfield).

Because we are here concerned mainly with English children's literature, it may be useful to examine at greater length the very similar process that sought to justify the exploitative patterns of colonialism. No one explains it better than Sivanandan and I recommend readers to study for themselves his exposition in A Different hunger (1982).

Where the dominated group are just simple, happy people in need of our paternalistic protection, we have justified the dominant group's behaviour. Beryl Banfield (in Preiswerk) illustrates how white Americans so justified slavery—from Edgar Allen Poe's faithful, contented—and stupid—slave in The Gold Bug:

‘Oh my golly, Massa Will! Ain't dis here my lef’ eye for sartin?’ roared the terrified Jupiter, placing his hand upon his right organ of vision

through to Walter de la Mare's Sambo in his tale ‘Sambo and the Snow Mountains’. Though this story first appeared nearly fifty years ago, it was published in Penguin's 1977 edition of Collected stories for children (1977).

This Sambo, third generation British despite the speech patterns given him by de la Mare, is just bright enough to know that if hewere white, things would be better—and he not so slow and stupid. Which is why it took him ‘exactly eight hours and a half in making up and learning this piteous rhyme’:

A pill, a pill, is all he ask,
Dat take away his ink-black mask
And make him quicker at his task

Even a creature of Sambo's limitations can perceive that with a whitening-up would come a speeding up—and who of de la Mare's readers would have challenged this portrayal?

For there is an even more sinister effect of this kind of racism, one that has been identified by black philosophers and activists such as Frière, Fanon and du Bois. Luis Neves Falcon devotes a chapter to it in The slant of the pen (Prieswerk 1980). ‘Through assertion, omission, concealment and mystification, the colonised people are forced to internalise as good the forces which are perpetually exploiting them.’ He continues to stress the interrelationship of children's books and colonialism: ‘every dominating class has to develop, from among its very young, the cadres it will need to guarantee the preservation of its privileges…and to instil in them the ideological beliefs which give legitimation to its position of power’. And, conversely, there is a need to prepare the children of the dominated group for their position; children's books then become social tools by reflecting the values of the dominating classes. ‘The printed word’, Falcon observes, ‘considered quasisacred in most dependent societies, in fact becomes a tool for transmitting to the children of dominated parentage the notion of their insufficiency and their natural inferiority.’

I expect that this is what happened to the Sri Lankan thesis writer.

Other forms of pejorative bias

The issues explored in this book are, as I have intimated, complex and interwoven, and one cannot let Falcon's observations pass without a recognition that the process he has so clearly described and related to racism is identical with the process which informs class prejudice. And because English writers for children are drawn almost exclusively from the middle class—and generally write for it, too—there is the parallel situation of working-class children and adults being portrayed by middle-class authors with a middle-class confidence in their own superiority. It takes an Alan Garner or Farrukh Dhondy to break the mould; a mould epitomized by Charles Kingsley or Rudyard Kipling who, writing in the nineteenth century, unquestioningly fixed their views for their readers. As did Charles Dickens, on both a conscious and an unconscious level; Steven Rose points out that, while the Artful Dodger talks in the language of the streets, Oliver Twist himself speaks impeccable standard English. Yet Oliver is no less a product of a workhouse upbringing; the difference is that his parents, and therefore his class, determined his upper-class speech patterns.

When we examine another area of bias: sexism, we are as likely to be reading a story written by a woman as a man. Women authors like Enid Blyton, Angela Brazil, Brett-Dyer put girls firmly in their place: it is interesting that Blyton, for one successful series, created a girl called George—a tomboy—for her young female readers who have not yet succumbed to the social pressures to identify with. Other women writers like Montgomery, Coolidge, Alcott, put on their pages even livelier—because better realized—‘heroines’. Anne of Green Gables, Katy of What Katy Did and Jo, the rebel among the Little Women leap gates and fly in the face of convention. They are all of an age to attract a readership in early adolescence—who may well, even if unconsciously, be looking for another way of growing into womanhood. These readers will be sorely betrayed by the authors: all these characters have their wings brutally clipped. To quote Marion Glastonbury, whose article ‘What books tell girls’ (see recommended reading) is definitive on this subject and a joy to read, ‘If they don't end up in a wheelchair, they'll end up pushing one.’

Most of the examples in this book examine racial bias, but issues of sex and class bias cannot be ignored. They stem from precisely the same mismatch between the portrayer and the portrayed. I wondered why my daughter, an omnivorous reader, shunned John Christopher's excellently wrought science fiction novels that my less-enthusiastic-reader son fairly gobbled up: it took me some time to realize that my ten-year-old was already aware that she would grow up into a woman—and Christopher offers no women nor strong girls, only female ciphers (usually of extraordinary beauty). Maybe she missed an imaginative experience: luckily Jane Langton, (The Diamond in the Window) Antonia Barber (The Ghosts) and ultimately Ursula Le Guin were there to lead her into the realms of fantasy and help her to explore the unknown through the eyes of lively female characters.

Reading schemes

For negative examples of sex bias, one need look no further than the reading schemes, considered in detail in Chapter 6. And there are many other forms of bias that have not yet been mentioned—the aged as infirm, of unsound mind, or extraordinarily eccentric; the portrayal of the disabled—whether blind, lame or non-hearing; what they all need is the help of a (‘normal’) friend. Having considered some of the causes and forms of bias, the next chapter but one looks in detail at the most prevalent—and pernicious form—the pejorative stereotype.

Illustrations

No...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Education Books
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 What is a biased book? Recognition and responses
• 2 Negative bias—does it matter?
• 3 Oh, but you're different
• 4 Issues in fiction
• 5 Issues in World Studies
• 6 Bias in materials in other areas of the curriculum
• 7 The cumulative and the concealed: curriculum implications
• 8 Strategies for Combat I: Sanitize or sensitize?
• 9 Strategies for Combat II: Censorship or selection?
• 10 Conclusions: The watershed
• Bibliography
• Further reading
• List of organizations
• Author and citation index
• Subject index