In a Nutshell

From the blog "We Are Respectable Negroes," in a post by Chauncey DeVega declaring May 26 a "Be White for a Day" Holiday:

"The ultimate power of white privilege is the ability to determine when and how one will be uncomfortable."

And a useful distinction from a comment to the same post:

"... notice the difference between white and 'White.' It is a huge one... This isn't about white people it is about Whiteness. "

White Mind

The article below appears in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, in my regular column, "The Illustrator's Perspective." With SCBWI's permission, I am posting it here to open it to a wider audience.

Also, I've been receiving quite a few emails in response to the column, each with stories of experiencing and wrestling with white conditioning. These personal examples really help to illuminate the nature of White Mind and deserve a wider audience. If you would like to respond to this column, I encourage you to post your comments here as well as contacting me directly. Thanks!

***

We belong to a field full of well-meaning people who care about children. If asked, most would surely agree with poet Lucille Clifton (Some of the Days of Everett Anderson) that “the literature of America should reflect the children of America.” I have never met an aficionado of children’s books who I can imagine wanting those books to misrepresent, marginalize or render invisible whole groups of our nation’s children.

So how can it be that in 2010, this is where we find ourselves:

• The percentage of published children’s books featuring characters of color is far smaller than - perhaps less than half - the percentage of people of color in the U.S. population, and the majority of these books are still created by white writers and illustrators.
• Many of the most popular book series, particularly in fantasy, have no significant characters of color at all.
• Cases of “whitewashing” book jackets, of editors requesting that an author erase a character’s ethnicity so that a book “can reach a larger audience,” of booksellers or librarians passing on certain titles because “our community doesn’t respond to those kinds of books,” suggest an assumption that white readers won’t respond to characters of color.

And so on.

I want to suggest a cause for the gap between our intention and the reality we’ve created: the patterns formed by white American socialization, which I’ll call White Mind.

By White Mind, I do not mean conscious prejudice or racist attitudes. It is not what you believe, what you intend, the values you are committed to or how you choose to behave. I’m speaking instead of the unconscious patterns that result from social conditioning as the dominant and majority race in the U.S. for the last several hundred years. Being a dominant group member is like having a free pass that members of out-groups don’t have, but with no awareness of having it. Given such conditioning, developing White Mind is pretty much inescapable.

Brain researchers such as Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard University (implicit.harvard.edu) have documented the presence of implicit bias as a universal human experience. When we think about people like ourselves, they report, a certain part of our brains light up; when we think about people different from us, a different part lights up. This kind of bias is completely unconscious, Banaji states, present in people who are absolutely positive they don't have it and who are committed to treating everyone fairly (and think they do). According to Banaji’s studies, 80% of whites show bias for the white race; people of non-majority races do not show this bias for their race. These implicit biases can drive our behaviors without our awareness.

White Mind shows up in the stuff we have no idea we’re doing (as in those studies in which a majority of teachers of both genders were shown to call more frequently on male students than female, even though they were committed to and convinced they were being fair). It’s usually invisible to white people, though often quite visible to people of color.

It’s part of the explanation for how scores of thoughtful white writers could create so many books with no significant characters of color, or how so few manuscripts by and about people of color get accepted. It’s one of the reasons why our children’s book conferences and conventions are overwhelmingly white, and why I might walk out of a bookstore or library with a stack of picture books, not even noticing that not a single one of them starred children of color.

From writing and illustrating to hiring publishing staff, editing and marketing to selling, buying and reviewing, White Mind affects children’s books today. Unless we become aware of and develop strategies to directly challenge these patterns, white norms will continue to prevail.

***

Sometimes, when facing puzzling and seemingly intractable problems, we can find clues in myth. Picture in your mind the lovely Snow White, asleep in her glass coffin, with the piece of poisoned apple stuck in her throat.

White Mind is a kind of sleepwalking. It can be as obscuring as fog, as ineffable as mist, as taken-for-granted as breath or gravity. So how do I break the spell? I wake myself up, cough out the poison, and step out of the coffin.

More about that in the next column.

The Center of the Universe

Growing up in 1960s South Korea, I was a spectacle. Tall for a white American, I was a giant compared to the average Korean child, whose nutritional intake might still have been limited by post-war hardships. My round eyes, high-bridged nose, honey-colored hair, and pale skin were all amazingly exotic to the children - and adults - who often exclaimed over me in the market. Every day of my young life, I felt the spotlight on me, just because of how I looked.

In addition, Korea's ancient tradition of gracious hospitality to the guest, combined with the South's gratitude for the U.S. role in the Korean War, meant that Americans were welcomed nearly universally as VIPs. Everywhere we went, we received special attention and special service, intensified when we spoke Korean and expressed appreciation for Korean life and culture.

As I often tell students during my school visits, it was a lot like being a princess. One of the results of this conditioning was that I developed an exaggerated sense of my own visibility and significance. Returning to the States on furloughs, I felt the strangeness of walking through airports and attracting no attention at all.

This early experience of being on a pedestal, so accentuated that I couldn't help becoming conscious of it, has helped me notice some ways in which I am accorded status as a white person in the U.S. The constant affirmation white Americans receive is neither as overt nor as exuberant as what I experienced in Korea, but it is pervasive. What the two experiences have in common is the assumption of being the center.

Absorbing a sense of centrality is a subtle process because it's usually unspoken and unconscious. It's a combination of being the norm - the reference point from which all other racial groups are viewed - and of constant validation through the prevalence of images of whiteness. But because those images don't provoke the thought "white people," but simply "people," we often don't notice them. (One example: from news articles to novels, people are usually identified by race only if they're not white.)

When there is constant reinforcement of the idea that one is the center of the universe, it develops into entitlement and expectation. It feels familiar and natural, so much so that the withdrawal of it causes anxiety. When Welcoming Babies came out, one of author Margy Burns Knight's relatives looked at the dozen babies pictured on the endpapers, five of whom are white, and asked, "Aren't there going to be any white people in this book?"

I've heard repeatedly from people of color that often the most difficult people in anti-racism work are liberal whites who proclaim their commitment to the cause, but want the process to be on their own terms, in ways that keep them comfortable.

As I work on releasing myself from the biases I've internalized, I've found the assumption of centrality to be one of the trickiest things to see and to reframe. I may be working on it for the rest of my life. Catching myself again and again expecting it to be all about me is disheartening. But I can take heart from the knowledge that if I'm seeing it more, it must mean my awareness is growing.

Transracial Adoption & Discussions About Race

A few of our daughter Yunhee's thoughts (comment #11) in response to the same clip (see previous post) on not discussing race with transracially adopted children:

I struggled with identity, and the idea of why I was put up for adoption. I went through phases of sadness, anger, and every other emotion along the way. The idea of my parents telling me not to worry about it, because no one cares about race anymore is unfathomable! That would have destroyed me.

My parents were understanding, supportive and ALWAYS willing to talk about what I was feeling. That is how I moved through each phase into something healthier and happier. Not by them ignoring my questions, emotions, and pain. They nurtured both cultures in my life, and let me explore both. I have since found a happy balance between my two cultures, and I claim both.

...Children are very observant. It is why we watch our language and behaviors around them, because they will pick it up. Children are curious, observant and very, very, blunt. A child will notice if they are not the same race as their family, and even if they don’t notice, some other person will, and then that becomes the mirror for the child. And the people in the world are not always the kindest.

At one point I was at a holiday party with my parents and a woman saw me, and then stated to her friend loudly, “Yes, you have to be white to be American.” Those mirrors are there, they are real, and they are painful.

Rant

At the website, Love Isn't Enough, there's a post entitled "Race Is Not an Issue for the Young?", in response to a CNN news story discussing transracial adoption and the public reaction to Sandra Bullock's adoption of an African-American baby. The commentator at one point observes that transracial adoptees may experience confusion as children but grow up to say, "Thank goodness someone saved me!", and the white psychologist being interviewed made statements that "adoption is colorblind," "I think race should really only be examined if you’re over 40," and that "I happen to have biracial children; they don't self-identify as black or white."

Here's the comment I posted:

Although I could only get my laptop to stream part of this clip, I found the first half of it infuriating, on so many levels. I feel anger as I struggle to find the clarity to express what feels so wrong about several statements in the clip.

My husband and I are white. Our daughter, now 24, is Korean. (We also have a white son by birth.) If our daughter, as the commentator suggested an adult adoptee would, ever uttered the phrase "Oh, thank goodness, someone *saved* me!" I would be appalled, and convinced that I had done something wrong as a parent.

Our daughter's adoption was not a "rescue" of some poor thing in need of being "saved." It was a complicated negotiation to make the best of a tragic human situation by placing an infant whose young mother could not care for her and whose father didn't know she'd been conceived with parents who dreamed of adopting her. The result is a family in which all of us are deeply blessed and enriched by having each other.

But all of us also recognize that our daughter's adoption represents tremendous losses: of the family, culture, language, and country that should have been her birthright. We have all done well at holding onto all we can of her ethnic and cultural heritage (I grew up in South Korea and speak fluent Korean). We have supported her through stages of grieving and exploration. But none of this is the same as being raised Korean by her Korean family.

We have understood connection to Korea and education about racism - our own and our daughter's as well as her white brother's - to be as essential to her health and wellbeing as a vaccination or teaching her to brush her teeth. She is simply our *daughter* - not our "Korean daughter" - but we celebrate her Koreanness as we do all of the particular aspects of her singular personhood; to overlook it would be to deny one of the gifts of who she is, a disrespectful diminishment of the complexity of her whole self. It would also represent abdication of one of our chief responsibilities as parents: to equip our children to live and thrive in the larger world - as it is, not as we wish it would be.

The white psychologist's characterization that adoption is "colorblind" and that "race should only examined if you're over 40" is chilling. Imagine what happened every time her biracial children noticed race: their mother, who didn't think it was a necessary topic for children, must have deflected, denied, and suppressed their curiosity, their questions and their confusion. (Given young children's intuitive ability to pick up unspoken cues, the curiosity, questions and confusions may have never even been voiced.) Of course her children don't identify as either white or black - racial identity is formed by the mirrors that people hold up for you when you are young. If their mother's statements are indicative of how she raised them, the mirror in which her children saw themselves reflected rendered their race invisible.

The ignorance represented by this approach is an expression of unconscious white supremacy. (It's also a handy dodge: avoiding the examination of race spares us the discomfort and sometimes real pain of acknowledging white racism and white privilege.) Race invisibility is an aspect of white conditioning; because we are the majority and the dominant group, we see ourselves as the norm, essentially as raceless. One way white supremacy operates is when we assume that what is true for us - the racial "pass" - applies to everyone else as well.

Because this psychologist, as a white woman, has the privilege of ignoring race without cost to herself, she presumes the same for her children, as if her willful obtuseness could give them a cloak of invisibility.

But whiteness with all its power can't erase the race of transracially adopted children. Just because their mother refuses to acknowledge the reality of her children's skin color and racially-defined features doesn't mean society will be so blind. And her children have been given no tools to stand strong in their knowledge of who they truly are, no connection to the black people from whom they were birthed, no claim to that part of their cultural and racial legacy. With no affirmation of the beauty and significance of their blackness and their whiteness, as well as every other aspect of their identities, they will face uninformed and undefended a world that is all too quick to label and diminish them based on race alone.

The Colors of My World

Today I talked about race with 350 children. Approximately 330 of them were white.

The occasion was the statewide conference of Maine's Civil Rights Team Project. Maine has the nation's most extensive network of school-based civil rights teams, from 3rd to 12th grade, involving more than 3000 students in helping to create safe, welcoming school communities for all kinds of difference. Bravo to them!

More than 1000 students and their adult advisors attended today's conference. In two sessions, I presented a workshop entitled "The Colors of My World" to all the 3rd-5th graders and their advisors.

Beginning with my own photo (the one from Seoul 1960 on the home page of this blog), I shared my own experience of race in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade. I talked about how my consciousness of being white and American developed from having Koreans notice my difference every day of my young life. Every time I went to the market I drew a crowd of onlookers who exclaimed over my light hair ("it looks like gold!"), my light skin, my large, round eyes and prominent nose, my height - everything that made me look astonishingly different to them.

This led to a discussion of Racial Identity Development (see the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?) - a mirror that other people hold up for you which forms your ideas of who you are racially - and Majority/Minority identity in relation to race (crucial to understand for those of us in Maine, currently the nation's whitest state), including:

Majority group members (one of many)

- experience self as the norm; minority members as different, sometimes Other

- strength: get to be seen as an individual; challenge: lack of awareness of race

Minority group members (one of a few)

- experience self as different

- strength: awareness of race, see things majority group members don't see

challenge: often seen as representative of racial group rather than individual

(I briefly noted that my experience of minority identity was unusual - both positive and privileged - but that's a big topic for another workshop.)

Then I led them in the following exercise:

Each student was given a blank card and packets of dot stickers. (This exercise is often done with jelly beans, but 350 students would have used more than 6000!) Using the color code here, I asked each of them to choose a dot to represent the race(s) of:

1. yourself

2. the family you live with (parents, siblings, etc)

3. the rest of your extended family

4. your closest friends (inner circle)

5. your friends (the wider circle)

6. most of your teachers

7. most of the students in your school

8. most of the people in your neighborhood

9. most of the people in your town

I instructed them to turn over the card for the final categories:

The race(s) of the characters in

1. your favorite TV shows, movies and video games

2. your favorite books

3. your imaginary worlds - the stories you write or pictures you draw

The culture(s)/race(s) of

4. your favorite music/musicians

5. your favorite foods

6. the holidays you celebrate

Students paired up to share what they noticed about the "colors of their worlds." Finally, we brainstormed lists of strengths, challenges, how they could share their colors with others, and things they could do to make their worlds more colorful. Some of their suggestions: get to know people of other races (in person or as pen pals); try foods of different cultures; visit churches, synagogues, mosques and temples; and watch movies and read books about people who don't look like you.