White Privilege & Children's Books

In the 1980s, Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley professor, was working with a group of colleagues, both male and female. She kept noticing the privileges these male friends of hers took for granted and how they couldn't seem to see it even when their female colleagues drew their attention to it.

One day, she had an aha moment: If my male colleagues have unearned privileges and benefits that I as a woman don't have (and they can't see), perhaps I as a white person have similar privileges that my colleagues of color don't have (and I can't see). As an experiment, she began keeping a list, recording social benefits that she could count on, but that she was pretty sure the people of color she worked with couldn't count on.

Her 1989 essay, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" has become essential reading for understanding how race works in American society.

Making your own white privilege list can cause a permanent shift in awareness.

Here's my attempt at one related to the field of children's books:

As a children's book reader -

1. In any mainstream bookstore across the country, I can be certain to find children's books with protagonists from my race.

2. On the jacket flaps of children's picture books and novels, if there is an author/illustrator photo, I can expect that the majority of the creators will be of my race.

3. Purchasing a gift for a white child of my acquaintance, I never have to wonder if I can find an appropriate book with characters who look like her.

4. If that child imagines herself as a princess/magician/pirate/astronaut, I can find a book to feed her dreams with characters of her race.

5. If a child I love struggles with an issue of any kind - fear of monsters, grief or loss, tantrums - I can be pretty sure there's a book out there to help him starring a boy he could imagine to be himself.

6. Reading books that are wildly popular - Harry Potter, Twilight - I never have to wonder why there's no one in them who looks like me.

7. If race is not mentioned in a children's novel, I can usually assume that the characters in it are the same race as I am.

8. I've never had the experience of reading a book about people of my race by an author of a different race and discovering it to be full of stereotypes, misunderstandings, and ignorance about white people.

As a children's book creator -

9. Attending children's book conferences, book fairs and conventions across the country (except for those specifically multicultural in design), I know that the majority (here in New England, usually about 99%) of the authors, illustrators, editors, agents and other professionals attending will be of my race.

10. Submitting a book I've written or illustrated to a publisher, I can be pretty sure that an editor will judge my work based on its literary merits and/or marketability. I never have to wonder if an editor will reject it simply because they have no experience or understanding of the cultural and racial framework I'm working from and/or don't value it.

11. If I write a book with a protagonist of my own race, I can be certain that the publisher will not change the character's race on the jacket to improve sales.

12. When a book of mine is reviewed, I can expect that most reviewers will be people whose own race and life experience won't make it impossible for them to understand what I've created.

I welcome additions to this list, as well as questions and challenges.

Writing Whiteness

Get a pen and paper. Sit down in a comfortable place and get quiet.

Imagine yourself as a child.

Remembering your young life, ask: What is my earliest memory of noticing that my skin was a different color from someone else's, or that theirs was a different color from mine?

In other words, if you're white, in what circumstances did you first notice that you were "white?" (This is an enlightening exercise for anyone of any race, but particularly so for white people because so often the subject of race simply isn't raised in the white community.)

Other racial differences - hair, shape of eyes, etc. - may be more relevant than skin color, depending on the memory.

Doing this exercise the first time, some people find a memory from when they were six or seven. Others can't remember any awareness of race until they went away to college. Your story can be from when you were three or when you were nineteen; any memory will do to start.

Let the details come. Picture yourself at that age. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? What happened? How did the awareness come? What did others say or do? What did you feel?

Begin to write. Get down the vivid details, as if you were writing a scene in a novel. Rather than carefully composing, try free writing, throwing the story down onto the page without stopping to think.

When you've finished capturing the scene, read back over what you've written. Reflect on the experience and what it meant for the child/young adult that you were. Ask yourself some questions, such as:

- What did I pick up, perhaps unconsciously, from this experience?

- If adults were present, what did their behavior tell me - what they said or did not say, did or did not do, with all the nuances of gesture, body language and tone of voice?

- What did I internalize about race, about myself, about people like me, about people different from me?

Some answers might be:

- Race is a taboo subject and it's not polite to notice it.

- I love and am loved by this person whose race is different from mine.

- Those people are ___________ (scary? exciting? needy? forbidden?).

- I'm better than/less than others in these ways: _______________.

***

This process, repeated over and over, with the same memory and many others, can give us back ourselves. There's a way that recalling our young selves reminds us of our innocence. It makes it possible to see the patterns we began to internalize when we were young, without blaming ourselves for them.

"Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised."
Shoshana Zuboff

On the Path

Years and years ago, I asked a dear friend what I should read to get a true picture of the history of his people, the Lakota. He recommended Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

It's more than twenty years later and I still haven't read that book. Why not? Fear. Fear of knowing something unbearable.

I've tried to live up to a standard I've given myself: If they can bear to live through it, the least I can do is dare to listen to the story. But sometimes I fail to meet my own standards.

That's the place to start on this path, the place where I duck, flinch, shrink or cower. Where I feel defensive. Where I resist. Where I have a thousand explanations, justifications, arguments and rationalizations.

The process of liberation from conditioned responses to race (or any other aspect of living and relating) is a path, not a destination. The first step can be paying attention. Discovering where I am, where the patterns I've learned are limiting my life (lots of tools for this coming up in the next few weeks). Looking at what I don't want to see, what I can't bear to feel.

The next step is to make one move, into the discomfort.

Pick up a copy of the book and read it.

Be the Change

I write this phrase every time I autograph a copy of After Gandhi. But Gandhi's statement, "Be the change you want to see in the world," is so often quoted that it's hard to hear it.

What does it actually mean to be the change?

My early image of what it meant to fight racism was to work with people of color, being "helpful." Realizing - with some reluctance - that the real work was in the white community, I tried to be a righteous warrior, raising awareness of how whites are implicated in institutional and personal racism. With people of color, I worked hard to prove that I wasn't one of those white people.

None of this was very effective.

Finally, I was guided to turn the spotlight inward, on myself. What was my experience of being white? How has racism impacted and shaped me? I began a lifelong exploration of the veiled realm of my own unspoken thoughts, attitudes and associations.

The more I investigate, the more I discover, and the more I feel small knots loosening, little gummed-up places unsticking, muddied thoughts clarifying. The process creates a little more room to breathe, to see, and to be. As the unconscious becomes visible, I'm empowered to act based on my conscious choices, in line with my intention. Bit by bit, I am transforming myself. In subtle but significant ways, it has transformed my relationships, both same- and cross-race.

There's another Gandhi quote that addresses this:

"The only devils in our world are those running around in our own hearts, and that’s where all our battles ought to be fought.”

I think both quotes are simple statements of reality: For things to change, we must change.

Being White in a World of Color: Guilt and Goodness

You can't very far into a discussion of being white without plowing into the question of guilt.

Many might read the statement in my previous post about the places I've gotten it wrong as being spoken out of guilt. But I don't feel guilty when I say it.

I've posted before about the National Coalition Building Institute, and much of what I'll be writing about white patterns was learned from twenty years as a local associate in the Maine chapter of NCBI. One of the pillars of NCBI theory is, in the words of founder Cherie Brown, "Guilt is the glue that holds prejudice in place."

In a workshop years ago, I heard a woman of color - I'll call her Miriam - share a story about how she'd been mistreated because of her race. Moved to tears by her account, I also felt uncomfortably implicated. Afterwards I approached her and urgently expressed how sorry I was, saying, "if there's anything I can do..." Miriam's response: "Annie, just be yourself."

It was guilt that made me feel that I was somehow personally responsible for Miriam's pain. It was guilt that made me turn her story into something about me. It was guilt that made me seek reassurance and absolution from Miriam so that I wouldn't feel bad anymore.

Over the years, I've gradually worked on letting go of guilt and tried instead to remember my own goodness. I've noticed that I didn't ask to be raised in a system that would separate me from other people, that would divide us by our differences. I didn't ask to be taught patterns that would make it difficult to have authentic, loving connections to all kinds of people; in that way, it's not my fault.

The patterns are there, though, and it's goodness - the knowledge that we are one human family - that makes them my responsibility. I don't want any obstacles in the way of seeing the value, significance and wonder of any person I meet.

So instead of a guilty cataloging of sins, I consider this journey more of a detective investigation. I'm fascinated by the evidence I gather, and glad for every new clue that adds one more piece to the puzzle.

The more of the puzzle I see, the more I'm freed to just be myself.

Being White in a World of Color: Groundwork

Thirty-nine years ago this fall, I was a first-year studio art major at Mount Holyoke College. I'd come to South Hadley, Massachusetts from my family's home on a rural island off the coast of South Korea, so I was experiencing deep culture shock, though I had no language for it at the time.

Somehow I found my way to a campus workshop on racism, presented by Judith Katz, a UMass-Amherst professor who was developing the material that became her 1978 book, White Awareness: A Handbook for Anti-Racism Training.

Katz led the workshop participants through a series of exercises designed to help us see how we as members of the dominant group were socialized in often unconscious patterns of behavior, and participated and benefited from a system that gave preference to whites. I was introduced to the definition, "racism = prejudice + power." The goal, according to Katz, was to become "anti-racist racists" (one can see why the term didn't catch on).

It all made sense to me. The crowds of curious onlookers who gathered around me on childhood forays to the open-air market had made me highly conscious of my race. The shocking gap between our family's prosperity and the poverty of postwar, early 1960's Korea had been a troubling experience of the color line and the class line. And the chosen segregation by American missionaries from the people they had come to "save" had been a clear demonstration of white supremacy.

Everything Katz taught us that day was a revelation, an answer to questions I hadn't even formed yet. It was the conscious beginning of a lifelong pursuit to unlock the puzzle of race, culture and human difference.

Over the years, I've observed that white responses to such descriptions of white racism tend to fall into three predictable categories:

1. Adherence. A small but growing number of whites consider definitions like Katz's to be anti-racism orthodoxy.

2. Resistance: "Don't try to make me feel guilty for the sins of my fathers," "Don't try to pin this on white people. What about all the things that African-Americans do that are racist?" or "How can you paint all white people with the same brush? That's racism, too."

3. Defensiveness and guilt. Many white people are committed to racial equality but want reassurance that they're not personally part of the problem.

In my experience, none of these responses (all of which I've recognized in myself) really move us forward. I've heard innumerable testimonials that the hardest people to deal with are liberals who believe that they are in solidarity with people of color, but may be blind to the ways they're still operating within racist patterns.

The assurance of being right can appear as, and so quickly become, self-righteousness.

The only consistently useful approach I've found in nearly forty years of exploring the topic is to keep my focus on what I don't know. The other day I had a conversation about this with writer Catherine Anderson, in which I found myself stating my intention "to start from all the places where I have got it wrong."

That's what I'll be trying to do here.

"The literature of America should reflect the children of America"

I heard poet Lucille Clifton say this at a children's book conference in the 1980's. There was a growing interest in multicultural literature at the time, and a growing body of books by and about people of color.

Recently, it seems as if we've lost some ground. Though the makeup of our national community is more diverse than ever, the books being published for our children aren't. Conversations are raging in the blogosphere about recent examples of "whitewashing" jackets of books with protagonists of color; about popular series like Harry Potter and Twilight having all-white casts of main characters; about children of color too often appearing only in books about race or painful periods of history; about authors being urged to drop a character's ethnic or other difference in order to "appeal to a wider audience."

As I wrote in December 2008 in launching this column, it's high time we became a consciously multiracial nation. Conversations like this are part of it. One essential topic to examine is white socialization, how it creates unconscious bias, and what we can do about it. It's one thing that writers, illustrators, editors, publishers, marketing staff, parents, teachers and readers can explore, toward the goal of having our outcome match our intention: that the body of literature for children should include all of our children.

Last May I presented a workshop at the New England regional conference of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, entitled, "Being White in a World of Color." That's the topic I'll be exploring on this blog this winter and spring.

(The images accompanying these posts will be taken from my sketches, roughs and published illustrations.)