As a bit of a corollary to my Friday post, I wanted to be specific about the issue of race in one particular book for kids: Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. My interest in this one was primarily for the Wrinkle in Time angle. Betsy really loved it and had a very thorough review posted last year. She talks about many aspects of the story, like the time travelish bits and the mystery bits and the bits about friendship and families and mostly how it serves as a very smart puzzle book. Here's some of her thoughts:
I’ve been calling it LOST the book, referencing the television show that leaves you with as many questions as this novel initially does. But unlike LOST, the answers are forthcoming. And the crazy thing is, it all fits together. Every little piece of the puzzle. You end up rereading the whole thing just to watch the puzzle pieces fall into place before your eyes.
What's interesting about Betsy's review (and others) is that they don't write about When You Reach Me as a book about ethnicity or race. Charlotte noted in her SFF round-up of Cybils noms that one secondary character in the book is "black or mixed race" but that was because she was actively looking for kids of color in the noms. My point is that When You Reach Me is a book about many things, but to the blogosphere race has not been one of them.
And yet in the Heavy Medal blog at SLJ the Newbery discussion about the book is headlined as "When You Reach Me: The Race Card". And Jonathan Hunt has some pretty specific things to say. To wit, here's his take on the character, Julia:
Julia's skin color is described, but she's never labeled racially or ethnically. She could be African American, but she could be Indian or Asian, too. Or biracial. As I mentioned earlier, it's a similar technique employed by Virginia Euwer Wolf in the MAKE LEMONADE trilogy. It allows the reader to impose an ethnicity or racial identity on the character. We would generally recognize this as a strength, but there's also a trade-off. Isn't there also a generic quality to the character? One writer told me that, for example, when you set a book in the South, everybody knows that it's hot and humid. What she looks for are the details in the setting that reveal a native understanding of the region. What are the details that would escape the notice of the casual visitor? Apply this to Julia's characterization. She's universal, but not very specific.
Hunt notes that this is not necessarily a weakness for the book but it is clearly something that stood out for him. What bothers me about this is the double standard at play here. A Caucasian character can be described as white with no one blinking an eye but Julia must be more than her skin color because it is not specific enough. As regular readers here know, I have a major beef with the uniformity of white characters (see my earlier post "White Girl") and how little skin color reveals about any character's ethnic background. In a book about race or ethnicity, you need to know where everyone is coming from but in a book not about those issues then why do you just have to know only where the dark skinned girl is coming from? Why is this double standard okay and why is it possibly any kind of an issue in this specific book?
Here's more on Julia from Hunt:
Julia's darker skin color is foreshadowed before the big reveal in the store as evidenced by her crayon complaint, but it also raises other questions. Did none of the other children of color complain about crayons? Or were there no other children of color? Or did Miranda simply not note them in her narrative? For whatever reason, Julia is set up to be the token black character, the one that is going give Miranda her big epiphany about racism. At least in the beginning. She does grow into much more than that in the latter part of the story.
We know from the text that Miranda is named after the Miranda Rights but then Julia is there to "give Miranda her big epiphany about racism? It seems like Miranda is doing just fine on that issue thanks to her mother. Simply because Julia reaches for a dark crayon or construction paper she is now responsible for her classmate's education on racism. This is not because the book is about racism, not because it is sold or advertised in any way about racism but simply because the children note their different skin colors in an unexpected way. So in a book about something else, the inclusion of a brief passage where the children note a physical difference immediately transforms the text into one about race. Is that fair? Isn't it putting a text under way too much of a microscope and one that a text with all Caucasian students or a historical text set comfortably during slavery would not have to undergo?
Why do this - and why make it the way way to discuss a book's award winning chances?
The post has a lot of comments (more than 50) and it quickly becomes specific to the point of page counts, direct quotes and intense analysis of just what certain words used by certain characters might mean. At one point Hunt chimes in with this:
Anyway, the color effectively depicts Julia's personality? It effectively depicts the fact that there is no way Julia is a flesh and blood second grader (when the incident is purported to have happened). She can have these words--"cafe au lait" and "sixty percent cacao chocolate" in her vocabulary, but what makes it depart the land of reality is that she is using these words figuratively to describe her skin color (simile and metaphor).
It should be noted that Julia's choice of words is further proof of her different social class from the others - she travels to Switzerland, has fancy clothes, etc. But honestly, as Hunt then goes on to mention the unbelievable smartness of several of the young characters I had to shake my head. If he's going there, then he has to drag along a lot of other books about wicked smart kids and although we all read them and shake our heads sometimes, they are popular books. Ironically, A Wrinkle in Time is pretty much the most well known of this subset with Charles Wallace Murray who most certainly would have described color the same way as Julia and he wasn't even in the 2nd grade when Madeleien Engle wrote about him!
The smart kid bit is really not the issue here however, it is that in the unwritten rules of how to write a multi ethnic cast, Stead has apparently messed up. Her character uses arts and crafts to explain her color, makes a comment about skin rooted in her personal experience, (which Stead does not think she needs to explain further) and then goes on NOT to specify why she ethnically is that color. No joy on Stead. Apparently, you just can't do any of this which beggars the question: what can a writer do when it comes to race and who gets to decide?
We have been discussing race in children and teen lit quite a bit in recent months because a lot of us are incredibly frustrated over how uncommon it is to find kids of color in books that are not implicitly about race. We don't need another book on slavery but we do need a book about kids from multiple races and/or ethnicities and/or sexual orientation who solve crimes, face down vampires, win the big game, run into some ghosts and generally, basically, do all the things that happen all the time with 100% Caucasian casts of characters in most of the books kids and teens read. Rebecca Stead put together a slightly multi ethnic cast. She didn't make a really big deal out of it because she has something else to do with her story; she just let her kids work their relationships out on their own. She wrote a good book and yet that small inclusion of race has become a far bigger point then she clearly wanted it to be. Why is that exactly - and what does it say about us that race could be a point of contention in her book?
[As a personal aside I should note that I have compared my father's and brother's skin color to various shades of wood my entire life. I said they were like walnut (most recently the African Walnut of my coffee table) most of the time so people could get an idea of just how different our skin colors are. The skin color is quite varied in my Caucasian family and it is a frequent point of conversation especially when people see my brother and I side by side for the first time. And yet if I wrote a story with a character who says her brother has skin like African Walnut I doubt some people would believe the sincerity of that statement. Which just goes to show that we don't know everything about a writer's inspiration and it is wrong to assume we do.]
January 10
2010
10:18 PM
Love the LOST connection.