As a corollary to last week's What a Girl Wants entry on race and identity in YA lit, I've been thinking about the question of what it means to be white. When I was teaching (soldiers and dependents at Ft Wainwright, AK) we would discuss ethnicity as part of our survey of war in the 20th century. For a classroom exercise, everyone would identify their own ethnicity. It was always a United Nations in my classes: Native American, African American, Asian American (Cambodian, Filipino, Japanese, etc.), Hispanic (Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, etc.), Jamaican, Puerto Rican and on and on. Then we would get to the Caucasian students and always - without fail - the first response would be "I'm white". It always took a few minutes to explain to them that white was a color and really, means nothing at all.
My white students identified more with skin than ethnicity while all of my other students identified much more strongly in the opposite manner. It did not occur to any of them to say they were black or brown - they preferred to discuss how they were raised, where they were born or what their families taught them. There was a lot of head shaking as we discussed what it meant - and didn't mean - to be white. After the first few times I knew to expect it, and was ready to ask the questions about where their parents and grandparents were from and tease out the immigrant stories that everyone has (no matter how far back you have to go).
I've been thinking about my students a lot lately as I put together the post on minority characters in YA lit. While there is certainly a dearth of such characters in most teen novels (which is why I posed last week's question) there is also something very odd going on in novels with Caucasian protagonists. It has been ages since I've read a YA novel that is not pointedly about minorities where the characters are described as anything other than just white. There is no mention of a religion (even so much as a sentence about going to church, synagogue, etc.) or culture or any kind of ethnic clues at all. There is a blandness to these books - and these characters - that would seem to defy the way most of us live. It is not that I expect ethnicity to be part and parcel of every novel - plots do not need to revolve around it - but I can't possibly be the only person in the country who grew up with a parent that spoke endearments in his native language (my father first language was French) or enjoyed a cup of tea served the Irish way by my grandmother. Also, as someone half Irish and half French Canadian, I came from a very Roman Catholic background. While we may not have discussed God on a daily basis (please) we were in church every Sunday, every funeral is a Catholic Mass and every member of my family (except for my generation) carried rosaries on their person pretty much all the time. (I imagine my mother still carries some sort of religious medal or rosary in her purse somewhere, if for no other reason then to honor her parents.)(I do the same thing.) There is food that we ate, stories we told and sports we watched (the Montreal Canadians were my father's saints) that we all related to our ethnicity. And everyone I know lived this way to one degree or another. But that's not the world I've been reading about and I'd love to know why.
Author Alma Alexander raised something similar to this in one of her comments last week about white authors: "There is such a breadth of human experience out there. Just as I don't for a moment believe that there is a generic "black experience", I believe at the same time that a reverse error is often made when people speak of "white writers" - WHICH white writers? A Swedish writer? A British writer? A Greek writer? Someone from Sydney...? Rome...? Chicago...? Just what EXACTLY are all those wildly diverse "white" writers supposed to have in common to write about in terms of "white experience"?"
I see a similar catch-all of "white experience" for characters. There is a misconception that being white is a totality of experience by itself and yet, and yet, really that is not true. Again, in my classes I would divide the classes to break down what made us different and what made us the same. First we split by race (Caucasian and non Caucasian) as that was how the class saw themselves most different. But then I asked them to divide by who had given birth and who hadn't which led to a lot of comments from every mother in the class saying that unless you had done that you didn't know anything about pain. (This was usually a huge mood lightener which was the chief reason why I did it.) From there we split on region (westerners thought they were cooler, easterners smarter, northerners tougher, southerners claimed bbq - and no one could argue that.) We split on who had lost a parent, who had survived cancer, who loved Star Trek vs who hated it. Things always got a little goofy but the point, as everyone walked back and forth across the room, was that there were a lot of things we had in common that transcended race. Skin color was just skin color and in the grand scheme of things only part of who we are.
Which wasn't really news to anyone but something that became so obvious no one in the class could ignore it.
In reading most YA novels for girls these days the protagonist is some generic white girl whose parents do an indefinable job for a living, lives in a house or apartment that is easily paid for, and has nondescript features that are either beautiful, mousy, appealing, understated, or plain....depending on the book's message. She goes to school, she has friends, she has drama. She is sick or someone she loves is sick. She is in love or pines for love. She is bright and appreciated or shy and unnoticed. She is the obvious heroine or becomes one by the end. But regardless of all those plot points, she rarely has any aspect of her life that lets the reader know the slightest thing about who her people are or where they came from.
We might as well be reading glorified versions of Dick and Jane for all these books really tells us.
I bring this up not to suggest that white characters are in some sort of competition with minority ones, but rather to show that homogeneity is more the order of the day in our stories then we imagine. Part of why it might be more difficult for minority characters to break through is because white characters are so blank that any character with any ethnic sensibility (even when it is only descriptive and not the point of the story) stands way out. The point is to make the characters to identifiable to all readers (or who the publishers want them to appeal to) that they have become not everyone but no one. It's all about blonde and white and middle class. And beyond that, well beyond that you pretty much might as well be an illegal immigrant for all that these books tell us about ourselves.
I hated Dick and Jane, by the way. What bloody boring stories. That's not the world I grew up in and I don't understand why it still pervades our reading experience today.
[Post pic: my father and grandfather - proud French Canadians. Circa 1942. My father was the first one in his paternal family to be born in this country.]
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July 13
2009
04:53 AM
Not surprisingly, another wonderful, thought-provoking post. Stories can only get richer, more grounded, when infused with the sorts of particulars you are calling for. You open doors when you call for such a thing. Selfishly speaking, may I also say that such stories are also fun to write. In a recent YA book (HOUSE OF DANCE), I loved introducing characters from very different backgrounds—loved shaping them on the page. The vocabulary expands and so do the possibilities.