40 Ways to Raise a Nonracist Child by Barbara Mathias

Author:Barbara Mathias [Barbara Mathias and Mary Ann French ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062015310
Publisher: HarperCollins

21

Be Careful About What Your Children Read

Is the hero always white? If a black person plays a lead role in the story, does he succeed only because a white person comes riding to his rescue? Does a Latino triumph because he sees the errors of his culture’s ways and abandons them in order to follow in an Anglo’s footsteps? If these story lines sound familiar, then you have got the wrong books. You need to run—not walk—to the store or the library and get some new ones to read with your child.

For the first time ever, there’s a fairly wonderful selection of books available featuring America’s minorities. And many of them were written by minorities, in voices that are fresh and real. There also are many intriguing and enriching books on the market written by Third World authors about their countries of origin.

The scope of our children’s curiosity is too often narrowed as they are bombarded by the media, the movies and the marketplace. Those commercial forces—along with peer pressure—determine what kids consider to be cool and what they will exclude.

Books are a means of opening up the world for children—magically transporting them to foreign lands or demystifying the lives that others lead closer by. They are maps for the world today and guides by which to plan tomorrow.

Of course, everything you and your child read should be chosen well. Here are a few trouble spots to avoid when evaluating books, taken from guidelines suggested by the Council on Interracial Books for Children:

Flip through the book and check out the illustrations. Are hackneyed images used to portray minorities? Do the black people who are pictured always look happy-go-lucky? Does the Asian American seem inscrutable? Is the Chicano wearing a sombrero? Is the Native American naked, except for his loincloth? Are the Latinas either Madonna-like or loose? Do the pictures show people of many colors and ethnicities who all curiously have the same features—as if someone tinted them as an after-thought? Are the minorities always playing supporting, or passive, roles?

Examine the storyline. Are the minority characters always the ones in trouble or with problems? If the minorities are poor and/or oppressed, does the story explain how they came to be so? Or does it lead the reader to assume that poverty is the minority’s natural lot in life?

If the book depicts the lifestyle of a minority family, does it do so mainly by comparing its “oddities” to the “normal” aspects of white middle-class America? Also be on the lookout for this tendency in books featuring natives of foreign countries and in books that focus on the cultural traditions that various immigrant Americans brought with them from the “old country.”

Does it seem like the hero merely happens to be black? When white America wants to champion a minority, it has a history of choosing an individual it doesn’t feel culturally threatened by, that is, one who acts white.

Consider the plot carefully to determine who the minority hero is fighting for—his people or white people or whatever other people.

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