Catching Up

A short break from the focus on white conditioning to share some recent happenings in my publishing life:

1. NEW BOOK!

What Will You Be, Sara Mee? by Kate Aver Avraham, was released in February from Charlesbridge. In it, six-year-old Korean-American Chong tells the story of his baby sister's tol, the traditional celebration of a child's first birthday.

I got a lot of help with visual details from my friends here in Portland, Won-Bae and Ip-bun Park of Sun Oriental Market, and their son Se-jong and his wife Ji-yun, whose daughter Chae-hee was the model for Sara Mee. Yesterday I took copies of the book to the Parks. Chae-Hee, now three years old, instantly recognized her baby self , and her six-year-old brother Tae-soo clasped the book to his chest, claiming the book as his own.

I'll be mailing out a copy this week to my friend Noah in Michigan, who was the model for Chong. In June of 2008 I spent a week with his family in Flushing, MI, while presenting at the Korean Culture Camp of Eastern Michigan.

Last month, the book was awarded the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal Book Award.

2. After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance (Charlesbridge 2009), which my son Perry and I wrote and I illustrated, has been getting a lot of wonderful recognition, including:

- Notable Books for a Global Society from the International Reading Association

- 2010 Teachers' Choices List from the International Reading Association

- NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People

- CCBC Choices 2010 - Historical People, Places,

and Events

- The Maine Literary Book Award, Children's/Young Adult Category, from Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

3. Earlier this month, Catherine Anderson,

wonderful writer, poet, mother, teacher, friend and co-explorer of the world of race, whiteness, and multiracial families, who posts at her blog, "Mama C and the Boys," gave me a fabulous gift - a Beautiful Blogger Award!

I am belatedly completing her challenge to post this. The next part of my challenge is to find other bloggers to award it to. I'm on the lookout.

For the children

The other day my massage therapist made a comment that got me thinking: "Every thought you have is lodging in the cells of your body."

That idea connected with something an artist, Joel Rivers, commented on my February 25 post on white privilege (it's worth reading his entire comment here): "You have to do a lot of soul-searching, and view your conditioning dispassionately in order to confront any prejudices that hide in there. As an artist, they WILL come out, and people WILL notice."

This all relates in my mind to why the exploration of what you've internalized about race is so important if you're working with children - as a parent, a children's book creator, a teacher, a librarian, a child care provider, in any other capacity. No matter how unaware we are or how we try to compensate, children pick up on what's in our minds, often without our even knowing it.

In February I had a conversation with Rupert Brown, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex, who has been conducting studies in prejudice, stereotypes and changing intergroup attitudes for thirty years. He reported that studies of families had shown that children express explicitly the implicit views of their mothers (interestingly, the fathers' views didn't have as much influence). In other words, no matter what the mother said, her children ended up absorbing the unconscious messages she was communicating, and holding these views consciously.

Yikes! What an argument for getting to know the inside of your own mind.

If we're uncomfortable about race, the children we live and work with will pick this up, no matter how we try to hide it. It will leak out of our cells, through our odd voice tones, our panicked eyes, our stiff and practiced smiles, our earnestness, our effortful and careful sentence structure, our trying too hard. They will take in our tension, our brittleness, our tiptoeing about the subject, our silences - in our bodies or our books.

And they will internalize the lessons: Race is difficult, dangerous, to be avoided. Or even: People of other races are difficult, dangerous, to be avoided. Instead of creating the world we all long for, we will have passed on the toxic patterns of the one we have.

Children need us to give them water, nourishing, life-affirming. Yet so often around the subject of race, we are like ice. We need to let go of our resistance, to melt. If we can't figure out a way to do this work for ourselves, let us do it for the children.