Drawing Race

The day after the election, I spent the afternoon at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, as a guest in the drawing workshop taught by Stephen Bissette. Steve had invited me to teach a class on drawing ethnicity and race.

At the time I scheduled the gig, I hadn't actually processed the fact that November 5 was the day after that November 4. I was a bit tired the morning after. But the timing was perfect.

Much commentary during Obama's candidacy and since his election has considered the question of whether our nation is entering a post-racial era, with a number of commentators stating outright that we've arrived at such a milestone. I think they're skipping over a few stages. My view is that we are becoming a society with a conscious awareness of our multiracial identity. Examining how to do that in comics was an ideal way to spend the day after the election.

I talked about moving towards a big vision: authentic, respectful, recognizable depictions of the glorious diversity of humankind. (Of course one of the hallmarks of comics is making fun, but the skewering shouldn't be based on racial and ethnic characteristics or stereotypes.)

This means that Caucasian can no longer be the sole reference point. All too often in comics and graphic novels, the normative characters are all white. Non-white characters are defined by their difference from the norm, such as darker skin or differently-shaped eyes. In this model, some characters are depicted simply by race: the balding man with the paunch, the Goth chick with pointy glasses, the black guy. But race alone does not give you a full person. Every character of every race should be developed as an individual.

Students shared the results of an exercise I'd assigned: Find a comic artist who draws characters of more than one race. Make sketches of the characters, examining what the artist is doing. It was fascinating to see the wide range of techniques for effectively describing racial and ethnic variety.

I also got to make some of my own recommendations, such as graphic novelists Gene Yang (American Born Chinese), Derek Kim, Jillian Tamaki (Skim by Mariko Tamaki, which just made the New York Times Best Illustrated list) and Shaun Tan. Tan's exquisite and moving wordless picture book about immigration, The Arrival, is my current favorite book. The endpapers alone provide an entire course in depicting race and ethnicity.

In younger picture books, I love the multicolored children drawn by Le Uyen Pham, Jon Muth (Come On, Rain by Karen Hesse), and Sheila Hamanaka (All the Colors of the Earth), among many others. Aren't we humans gorgeous?!

Africa Is Not a Country

I illustrated Africa is Not a Country in 2000. These days, it’s suddenly current again. The election postmortem accusation by a McCain staffer that Governor Sarah Palin thought that the continent was one country made the national news, and denials and counter attacks kept the media feeding on the story.

Some professed shock – nobody could be that misinformed! – but in my experience, it’s not that surprising. I’ve met a number of perfectly intelligent adults, including a teacher or two, who’ve reacted to the book's title with a puzzled, “It’s not?!”

It’s not that people are completely unaware of the countries of Africa. Most Americans could probably name six or seven of the fifty-three. The problem is that we’re just not paying attention.

Our habit of lumping all the countries together as one place, Africa, blinds us to the extraordinary richness and diversity of the continent. In a September interview on "Meet the Press," former president Bill Clinton suggested that we should “have a cessation in the use of the word 'Africa' for just eighteen months while America learns that Africa is a continent.”

The twin historical scourges of slavery and colonialism have a lingering legacy, often unconscious, in our failure to recognize the peoples of Africa in their full humanity, dignity and value. This plays out in contemporary news, where we hear much of warfare in Darfur and the eastern Congo, and the devastation of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, but little about, for instance, the extraordinary success of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, or the South African convening of The Elders by Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel and Desmond Tutu.

When I visited South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe in 1998, I was deeply stirred not by war and devastation but by the museum tour of Robben Island where Mandela spent sixteen years, the World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe National Monument, and the warm friendliness of people I met while traveling who gave me directions and shared their snacks with me.

As we could see in internet photos last week, the citizens of Kenya and of countries all over the African continent watched our election with tremendous excitement. They’re very aware of us. Students I met in Zimbabwe knew all the names of U.S. presidents. We can help our own students join the world community by offering them better information about the countries and peoples of the African continent.

For more information:
"What We Want Children to Learn About Africa" by Margy Burns Knight in Teaching for Change

"I Didn't Know There Were Cities in Africa!" by Brenda Randolph and Elizabeth DeMulder for Teaching Tolerance