Inspiration in Rome

I spent last week in Italy, with two days as a visiting author-illustrator at the American Overseas School of Rome, focusing on Africa is Not a Country (K-2), The Legend of Hong Kil Dong (8th grade art classes), and After Gandhi (7th grade English). I felt a real connection with this K-12 school community, its wonderfully welcoming staff and multinational, multilingual student body.

The school borders the busy Via Cassia on one side and a green zone of rolling hills on the other - amazing to find in the midst of a huge city. The cafeteria serves Italian food - risotto cooked with radicchio one day, pasta with pesto the next. Best of all, there is a coffee bar in the school, and kind staff members kept bringing me freshly brewed cappuccino between sessions! (Sets a new standard for author visits.)

On either side of the days of presenting, I got to explore Rome, with sights like the Pantheon, the majesty of which no photograph can convey.

And I got to experience - and get stuck in while traveling back from Florence - the biggest snowfall Rome has seen in decades, some say in 55 years!



My host, upper school principal Ken Kunin, shared some of the books he's used as references for faculty training on cultural competency, including Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, in which I found this gem of a passage in a Patricia J. Williams essay on intentional color blindness, "The Emperor's New Clothes" (here's an excerpt):

"... I do think that to a very great extent we dream our worlds into being. For better or worse, our customs and laws, our culture and society are sustained by the myths we embrace, the stories we recirculate to explain what we behold. I believe that racism's hardy persistence and immense adaptability are sustained by a habit of human imagination, deflective rhetoric, and hidden license. I believe no less that an optimistic course might be charted if only we could imagine it.

What a world it would be if we could all wake up and see all of ourselves reflected in the world, not merely in a territorial sense but with a kind of nonexclusive entitlement that grants not so much possession as investment. A peculiarly anachronistic notion of investment, I suppose, at once both ancient and futuristic. An investment that envisions each of us in each other."

Heroes

To my surprise, one of my new activities for 2012 is to open a Twitter account! The purpose of AfterGandhiBk isn't chatting (who's got time?), but to share quotes and information on nonviolent resistance.

I'm tweeting references to heroes whose provocative ideas, creative strategies, and courageous activism can inspire young readers, including those portrayed in the book my son and I wrote, After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance.


In 2011, we said goodbye to two of them:

Wangari Matthai of the Green Belt Movement, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, "a towering figure in Kenya, ... renowned as a fearless social activist and an environmental crusader." (The Guardian obituary), 

and Vaclav Havel, playwright, leader of the Velvet Revolution and first president of the Czech Republic, "whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power." (NYTimes obituary)


The history, experiences, and ideas of those who've actively practiced alternatives to violence could not be more apropos at this time, with news accounts full of images and stories of people participating in - and reacting to - the Occupy Movement. It's an incredible opportunity to help young people connect the dots between what's gone before and what's happening now and to engage hearts and minds in the quest for justice.

Cheers at Year's End

Earlier this month, Kristi Bernard of Kristi's Book Nook gave me the Versatile Blogger Award. (I was in a musical at the time and then it was the holidays... but I've finally gotten back to posting.) Thanks, Kristi!

According to Kristi, my mission, should I choose to accept it, is to:

a.  Thank the person who gave it to me and link back to them. ✓

b. Share seven things about myself: 

1. I live on an island in Maine - a real island, the kind you have to take a ferry to get to.
2. Intense color makes me happy.
3. I once spent a weekend as a go-go dancer for an American rock band performing at the National Theatre in Seoul, Korea, dressed in a white mini-dress with fringe, in front of hundreds of screaming Korean high school students.
4. I've been studying jazz vocals for a number of years. Some of my favorite singers are Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald,  Carmen McRae and Canadian Susie Arioli.
5. As a young girl, I wanted my name to be Ruby.
6. I love bread. A recent favorite book is Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, which taught me to always have a wet dough in my refrigerator with the possibility of a fresh-baked boule or baguette only an hour and fifteen minutes away.
7. I'm a perennial optimist. I love the book The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

c. Pass this award on to 5 (some posts say 15!) other recently discovered blogs and inform them of the honor. 

I'm not much of a blog reader, as in I don't have many favorites that I go to every few days. (My exceptions: Love Isn't Enough: "on raising a family in a colorstruck world" and my friend Catherine's Mama C and the Boys.) My favorite blogs are ones that are building a body of information and resource that is timeless and worth exploring again and again. Here are 4 nominations:

1.  Sojo's Trumpet: A Culture Blog for Teens. I discovered Sojourner Ahebee several years ago when she reviewed my book After Gandhi. She writes exuberant and important posts about music, books, global activism and cultural events, and has recently added a Zazzle account with beautifully designed Afrocentric greeting cards.
2. Korean American Story.  Essays by Korean Americans cover personal and political topics, creating a collective portrait of this diverse community.
3. Real Kids. Good Books. "Our children are gorgeously diverse and they love a good read." Kate has been blogging for only 9 months during which she's built an impressive archive (beautifully organized as a graphic) of book recommendations. (She had me at the heading illustration from Umbrella.)
4. Diversity in YA Fiction - a celebration!  "DIYA is a positive, friendly gathering of readers and writers who want to see diversity in their fiction." Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo, both YA writers of color, have responded to the problem of whitewashing in YA literature by giving attention to the positive side - good books featuring characters of color. I've just begun to mine this resource - lots to look forward to.

I'll notify the winners in the new year.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Racists = Bad People?

Recently I've been collecting nonfiction children's books (mostly from the 1990's, mostly library discards) addressing racism, including these titles: What Do We Think About Racism?; Talking About Racism; Let's Talk About Racism; What Do You Know About Racism; and How Do I Feel About Dealing with Racism. 

As a group, the books have some useful information, but most define racism as a confusing umbrella term that includes prejudice based on ethnicity, culture, religion and nationality as well as race.

But the biggest drawback shared by all the books is limiting the discussion of racism to overt, personal acts. The take-away message: Racism is something that bad people do.

Focusing only on individual racial bias overlooks the reality that racism is a system of advantage based on race. It fails to grapple with the ways in which all of us are socialized to play roles based on the racial group(s) we belong to. It doesn't address institutional racism, white privilege, unconscious bias, or the influence of the dominant racial culture, all of which are far more pervasive than individual acts of personal racism.

And it implies that well-meaning, well-intentioned people aren't likely to say or do something racist. This constricts our conversations because any suggestion that an action, attitude, or statement might show racial bias causes people, especially white people, to get extremely defensive, completely resistant, or deeply ashamed, because it's heard as an accusation that the perpetrator must be a bad person.

Recently, social commentator Jay Smooth gave an engaging and illuminating TED talk at Hampshire College - "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love Talking About Race" - addressing the problem of people's resistance to the idea that they might be showing racial bias.

Smooth advocates, with delightful humor, that we move from the "good person/bad person binary" to "the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse." He suggests that we equate a correction about race to the observation, "You have something stuck in your teeth."

Over the years, I've found the direction of remembering my own goodness to be quite useful in processing any feedback that my bias might be showing. If I know that my intention is good, then I can appreciate the mirror showing me any dissonance, offering me the chance to clean it up so that the impact matches my intention. I can choose to see the intervention as a kindness and respond, "Thanks! I needed that."

But Then Again, They Can Get It from Us

Just read a powerful post on Love Isn't Enough entitled "They Learned It From Watching You," originally posted at CocoaMamas.com. Author LaToya describes exclusionary play at the preschool where her daughter is the only African-American child. She shares her frustration at the school's handling of the incidents which involved responding to the children who were excluded but not addressing the larger problem of the children who were doing the excluding, and what it was they were acting out.

LaToya writes, "(L)et’s please recognize that these children learned this behavior at home... Their parents don’t have friends of other races – they don’t have to. Their kids witness their parents having mono-racial ideas of who is worth hanging out with and who is not... And they make an inference that if Mom and Dad don’t hang out with these people, then I shouldn’t either – for whatever reason."

According to psychologist Krista Aronson, community and dominant cultural norms are indeed stronger than family ones in influencing children's attitudes about race. But when these norms are not only not contradicted in the family but actually upheld through the absence of cross-racial relationships in our lives and our silence about race, children do learn from us.

Absence and silence are powerful teaching tools.

They Didn't Get That From Me!

 

In our joint school visits, as author Margy Burns Knight talks, I often sketch the face of an imagined child in each session, leaving the school with a group of portraits of diverse children. Several years ago, presenting our book Africa is Not a Country at a Maine school, I was sketching a series of children who could be from African countries. As the collection of portraits grew throughout the day, we asked students, "What do you notice about the pictures? What's the same about the children? What's different?" 

A second grade boy pointed to the image of a brown-skinned girl wearing a scarf around her head. "She's so poor," he remarked in a solemn tone. "And she's sad, so, so sad." 

In truth, the portrait was of a smiling girl, at least as happy-looking as any of the other drawings. (To add to the intrigue of the comment, the student making it was brown-skinned himself, an African-American child adopted by a white family.) A conversation ensued, in language appropriate to second graders, about "funny ideas" we sometimes have about Africa, and perhaps brown people - such as that everyone is poor and sad.

Has a child in your care ever burst out with a racial comment that puzzled, embarrassed, or distressed you? The more we explore race with children, the more it's likely to happen. One of the outcomes of getting children to share their observations is that if we're effective, we'll get to hear what children are actually thinking about race - and some of their ideas are not what we might wish. Our first response may be the horrified defense, "S/he couldn't have gotten it from me!" The good news is, you're probably right.

In our presentation, "Books As Bridges" (see previous post), Krista Aronson, psychologist and Bates college professor of psychology, shared research results that "children rely more on community norms than parental norms." As an example, she noted that parents new to a community may speak with an accent, but their children will soon sound like their classmates. 

So where do children's ideas about race come from?

1. Socialized Roles

Children are keen observers. If they see people segregated in distinctly different types of housing, jobs, classrooms, positions of authority, etc., they absorb this information.

2. The Soup

All day long, all of us, including children, are surrounded by and bombarded with images and information. Children notice, without the skills to deconstruct why, who's portrayed and how.

3. Silence

When adults respond to questions and comments about race with discomfort and shushing, or never raise the subject at all, children learn that race is something not to be discussed, like something bad or dangerous.

This is why talking about race is so crucial for children's development. If we don't engage kids in conversations that give them permission and language to say what's on their minds, to voice the associations they're making and the conclusions they're reaching, all of this conditioning goes unchallenged. When we provide a safe place for children to speak, we get the opportunity to engage with them and offer them the skills to break the silence, to interrogate the Soup, and to challenge socialized roles.

How to Talk About Race: A List of Books

Next week I'll be leading an educators workshop and co-leading a community event on talking about race with children. A book sale will accompany the presentations, with a small selection of children's books that are natural catalysts for starting a conversation on race. (Update: Here's a short TV interview about the programs.)

My co-presenter, Bates College psychology professor Krista Aronson, and I have identified three core categories of books that are useful in addressing race, in order of their developmental application:

1.  Celebration of differences (CD)
  Simply naming and appreciating difference is an essential foundation for conversations about race. Children are already making these observations; talking about them gives children permission and language to voice them. The goal of these interactions is not so much to teach as to create an open forum for children to say whatever they see. Supportive adults then have the opportunity to assist children in developing positive racial associations of both themselves and people different from them.

2. Cross-group (CG)
  In psychological research studies, books portraying positive interactions across racial difference have been shown to reduce prejudice (see the work of Rupert Brown). These books show cross-racial friendships which can strengthen children's developing appreciation of and sense of connection to people who look different from them.

3. Racism
  Stories of prejudice, mistreatment and discrimination are an essential part of any reality-based education about race, but not as the only or the first story. Too often, when well-intentioned adults want to introduce concepts of race to children, they start with books about the civil rights movement. This is problematic in several ways: Children learn to associate discussions of race with discomfort, conflict, and possibly guilt, and African-Americans may be seen only in the light of a difficult history. In other words, children may absorb the idea of race as a problem and people of color as victims.
  However, when presented by a relaxed and practiced facilitator in the context of a broader, ongoing conversation, these stories can be powerful catalysts for provocative conversations, memorable learning, and the development of empathy. Again, the focus of discussion should be on eliciting children's thoughts and feelings and on developing their critical thinking skills.

Here are some examples of books in each category (grade levels are suggestions only).

preschool - Gr. 2
All the Colors of the Earth by Sheila Hamanaka  - CD  (Multiracial)
Amazing Faces compiled by Lee Bennett Hopkins - CD, CG (Multiracial)
Bein’ With You This Way by W. Nikola-Lisa  - CD  (Multiracial) 
Come On, Rain by Karen Hesse - CG  (Black/Asian/White)
Jamaica & Brianna  by Juanita Havill  - CG  (Black/Asian)
Shades of People by Shelley Rotner  -  CD  (Multiracial)

Gr. 1 - 4
Baseball Saved Us - R (Japanese-American)
The Bracelet by Yoshiko Uchida - R, CG  (Japanese-American)
Chicken Sunday by Patricia Polacco - CG  (White/Black/Jewish) Jacqueline Woodson
Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles -  R, CG  (White/Black)
The Other Side  by Jacqueline Woodson - R, CG  (Black/White) 
Ruth and the Green Book by Calvin Alexander Ramsey - R  (Black) 

Gr. 3 - 7
The Basket Counts Matt Christopher -  R, CG  (Black/White)
Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson  - CG, R  (Black/White)
The Friendship by Mildred Taylor  -  R  (Black/White)
The Other Half of My Heart  by Sundee Frazier - CG, R (Black/White/Biracial twins)
Witness by Karen Hesse  -  R, CG  (White/Black/Jewish)

Gr. 7 - 12
The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie - R, CG (Native-American)
American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang - R, CG  (Chinese-American)
Face Relations: Eleven Stories About Seeing Beyond Color edited by Marilyn Singer - R, CG (Multiracial)
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow - R, CG (Biracial/Black/White) 
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This by Jacqueline Woodson -  CG, R (Black/White)