Racism in Contemporary African American Children's and Young Adult Literature

Suriyan Panlay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319428932
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Applying critical race theory to contemporary African American children's and young adult literature, this book explores one key racial issue that has been overlooked both in race studies and literary scholarship—internalised racism. By systematically examining the issue of internalised racism and its detrimental psychological effects, particularly towards the young and vulnerable, this book defamiliarises the very racial issue that otherwise has become normalised in American racial discourse, reaffirming the relevance of race, racism, and racialisation in contemporary America. Through readings of works by Jacqueline Woodson, Sharon G. Flake, Tanita S. Davis, Sapphire, Rosa Guy, and Nikki Grimes, Suriyan Panlay develops a new critical discourse on internalised racism by studying its effects on marginalised children, its manifestations, and the fictional narrative strategies that can be used to regain and reclaim a sense of self.

© The Author(s) 2016

Suriyan PanlayRacism in Contemporary African American Children’s and Young Adult LiteratureCritical Approaches to Children's Literature10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Suriyan Panlay¹

(1)

Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand

End Abstract

1.1 “I Crying for Me Who No One Never Hold Before”

Claireece Precious Jones or “Precious”, as she is better known in the novel, is an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned protagonist of Sapphire’s Push (1996). Precious loathes herself for being “so stupid, so ugly, worth nuffin” (p. 34) and, having been made part of a racialised landscape where an image of the self is crooked, misrepresented, she is led to believe that her existence is nothing but a “vampire sucking the system’s blood. Ugly black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for” (p. 31). In her mind’s eye, however, she is a “beautiful chile like white chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers ... a blue-eye skinny chile whose hair is long braids, long long braids” (p. 64). Upon encountering a stranger’s kindness, Precious cries—“I crying for me who no one never hold before” (p. 18).

In Sharon G. Flake’s The Skin I’m In (1998), another young adult text explored in this book, 13-year-old Maleeka Madison is perpetually haunted by her own dark skin and African features: “Somebody said I had hair so nappy I needed a rake to comb it” (p. 13). This feeling of inferiority, unfortunately, has landed her at an inner-city school instead of a better school across town as she is threatened by “them girls [who] looked like they come out of a magazine. Long, straight hair. Skin the color of potato chips and cashews and Mary Jane candies. No Almond Joy-colored girls like me” (p. 39). Young Maleeka is also envious of her friend Malcolm at her school for having “a white dad and a black momma” (p. 17), with “long, straight hair [and] skin the color of a butterscotch milkshake” (p. 17). In her very own words, Malcolm is “lucky” simply because he “looks more like his dad than his mom” (p. 17).

When their self-perceptions are constantly doubted and ultimately reduced to nothingness—ugly black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for, and when physically morphing themselves into ‘blue-eyed’ skinny children with ‘long, straight hair’ is apparently their only alternative available, Precious and Maleeka open up an old, hidden wound that, for centuries, has haunted American blacks, a wound that has often been treated, unfortunately, as their own individual psychological flaws, leaving them, as a result, in a perpetual state of self-condemnation. It is the representation of this kind of experience of inferiority and its subsequent psychological devastation portrayed in both fictional and nonfictional works that has become the provenance and premise of this book. Whether it is taken directly from lived reality as the one undergone by young Claudette Colvin in Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (2009), a National Book Award winner for young people’s literature—“Though being smart was an asset, Claudette soon found that having light skin and straight hair was the surest key to popularity at Booker T. Washington” (p. 22)—or channelled through fictional characters as portrayed by Precious and Maleeka, the paralleled experience is equally distressing. This book is thus set up to explore, through its focus children’s and young adult (C&YA) texts, such racially silent/silenced experiences and to un-silence them.

Both fictional and nonfictional representations cited above have compellingly captured the life of young African American girls caught in a racial tide and harmed by self-inflicted psychological mutilations. From a theoretical perspective, this type of racially and psychologically devastating experience is an example of what has been formally identified as internalised racism or internalised racial oppression or psychological slavery or a much-criticised term—racial self-hatred. As a theme, internalised racism has always been explored or treated, though ‘peripherally’, by African American authors of both C&YA and adult literature. Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1999), an adult book focalised through a child narrator, is arguably the first full-length novel that puts this racial issue at the centre, depicting how internalised white beauty standards or idealised whiteness can destroy the life of both black girls and women, or what George Yancy (2008) refers to as “the psychological price paid for bleaching the Negro soul in a flood of whiteness” (p. 184). Subsequent titles by other contemporary African American authors that have helped push this issue to the fore, particularly those representing the realm of C&YA literature, include, among others, Rosa Guy’s The Music of Summer (1992), Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994) and Feathers (2007), Sharon Flake’s The Skin I’m In (1998) and Who Am I without Him? (2005), Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade (2002) and The Road to Paris (2006), Julius Lester’s Day of Tears (2005). These titles, some of which are included as this book’s focus texts, have helped magnify the issue through the eye of a fictional child, consequently making internalised racism immediate and real, reaffirming, once again, that race/racism in America is never a thing of the past, and that postracial or ‘race-less’ America (Bernard, 2011), a catchphrase currently dominating American racial discourse, is perhaps far-fetched, elusive and futile. Also, as the emergence of African American C&YA literature is consistent with that of African American literature (Anatol, 2011; Smith, 2002; Johnson-Feelings, 1990) in that it attempts, as suggested by Rudine Sims Bishop (2012), to respond “to the social, political, and economic circumstances in which Black people in the United States have historically found themselves—a part of and yet apart from American society” (p. 10), these C&YA titles and their authors, therefore, have helped shape and form an integral part of the rich body of what is presently known as not only African American C&YA literature but also African American literature.

In essence, Precious, Maleeka and Claudette come to exemplify young adults who have been socially and psychologically programmed to perceive themselves as being ‘less’, and who often wish that they looked more like the dominant group—“a blue-eye skinny chile whose hair is long braids, long long braids” (Sapphire, 1996, p. 64). Unfortunately, these young female characters equate ‘black’ with inferiority and ‘white’ with beauty and superiority. By tracing their journeys from self-denigration to self-affirmation, from invisibility to liberation and empowerment—some of the recurring themes fundamentally permeating African American C&YA and adult literature (Anatol, 2011; Rountree, 2008; Smith, 2002), these C&YA texts are not only disclosing an interesting and integral part of the present state of race in contemporary racialised America, particularly its deleterious psychological effects towards the young and vulnerable but they are also defamiliarising the very racial issue that otherwise has become normalised in American racial discourse, or what bell hooks, in Writing Beyond Race (2013), refers to as “the normalized practices of racism and white supremacy” (p. 9). And this is one crucial aim that this book is attempting to uncover and achieve.

Also, what makes this particular racial issue worth examining or un-silencing, given its prevalence as a theme in contemporary African American literature, including C&YA literature, is the simple fact that the attention given to it in both race and literary scholarships has been few and far between. Perhaps it is due in part to the discomfort and embarrassment raised by the subject, especially how the blame is always put on victimised individuals as their own psychological flaws instead of structural defects or racial inequalities, which evidently reflects, as suggested by bell hooks (2013) and Ellen Herman (1995), America’s long obsession with psychology. And this very obsession has compounded the matter, resulting, unfortunately, in social problems being viewed or evaluated solely through the lens of psychology instead of politics. Another aim of this book, therefore, is to explore, through fictional representations of the focus C&YA texts, whether it is individuals’ flaws or structural defects that lie at the heart of this racial malady.

Although the issue of internalised racism has been portrayed in various channels over the years—autobiographies, essays, poetry, films, documentaries, novels—its place in critical literary research, including C&YA literature, has been limited, resulting, as shall be discussed further in the next chapter, in this racial issue being misunderstood, understudied and, therefore, theoretically void. It is my intention, therefore, to revisit this very issue through the eye of a fictional child, with Critical Race Theory (CRT) as my key theoretical underpinning, to seek new messages, viewpoints and positions on the issue of internalised racism, and also, and crucially, to seek to develop a new critical discourse regarding this silenced racial topic in relation to C&YA fiction. Principally, this book focuses on the interplay between CRT and internalised racism and asks the following: (1) what effects does internalised racism have on the marginalised characters, and what are its manifestations? (2) what narrative strategies have been used by the authors to help the main characters regain and reclaim their sense of self? and (3) what is the contribution of CRT to C&YA literature?

In his discussion of African American literature and legal history, Jon-Christian Suggs (2010) argues that African American fiction/nonfiction and the law are closely related, “The textual body of each, taken broadly, can be read as the basis for an alternative text of the other” (p. 325). The law, as Suggs suggests, is central and omnipresent in African American literature, dictating and determining “the creation of African American racial and personal identity” (p. 328). Its centrality in black literary texts is very much attributed to the fact that the black body has always been legally ‘marked’ historically as properties or objects, with no or limited legal rights, depending on the needs of the dominant group, “Africans in America were, by the founding of the republic, romantic constructs absent the quality of person ...; imbued only with the property of being property; never capable of owning property” (p. 329, see also the discussion of CRT’s Differential Racialisation in the next chapter). Whilst African American literature from 1825 to 1960, explicitly or subtextually, centres around the law, from 1970 to present, Suggs argues, it attempts to ‘decentre’ the law, yet the law “emerges as central to [its] content, form, and ideological concerns” (p. 328). As most of the texts included in this book, as will be explored in later chapters, are a testament to Suggs’s arguments, it is only fitting, therefore, that a ‘law’ theory is made an integral part of this literary endeavour.

As a recognised body of enquiry and as a movement, CRT is made up of scholars and activists, with a clear common goal—“Studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012, p. 3). Initiated in the mid-1970s as a critique of constitutional law, it has now spread to various academic disciplines, including the humanities. Researchers in Education, Political Science and Ethnic and Gender Studies, for example, have now considered themselves critical race theorists, utilising CRT and its theoretical frame—though without an activist dimension—to investigate pressing issues concerning their own disciplines, thus making CRT even more fast-growing. Yet, it has not been applied to this genre in a book-length project. As a theoretical and analytical tool, CRT is certainly a terrain unfamiliar to most literary scholars. By breaking this new ground, I hope this book will become a valuable addition to the field that clearly deserves more critical literary research (Rountree, 2008; Johnson-Feelings, 1990).

I am drawing on CRT, which is grounded on theoretical, practical as well as ‘activist’ dimensions, as my principal analytical tool to approach the focus C&YA texts charged with racial conflicts, for the following reasons. Firstly, given the pervasiveness of race, racism and racialisation in present-day America, the theory takes into consideration both overt and hidden racial injustice that has still permeated different spheres of contemporary racialised America after the civil rights era. Secondly, it offers multilayered and realistic modes of analysis to explore how various social hierarchies (gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.) intersect within power relations. Thirdly, and most importantly, CRT also takes into account essential tools needed for p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Internalised Racism and Critical Race Theory
• 3. Wounded
• 4. Tongue-Tied
• 5. Displaced
• 6. Triumphed
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter