Asking the Right Questions: Issues of Race in Children's Literature

In Mitali’s article, "Straight talk on race: Challenging the stereotypes in kids’ books," she comments on how books convey race and ethnicity, yet educators do not talk about how it is presented in the books they are reading. This is problematic because for some children, this is their first, or only personal experience with the race being presented, and the book may be inadvertently conveying racial stereotypes.

Mitali provides five questions to help in the analysis and discussion of race in children’s literature:

1. Are the nonwhite characters too good to be true?

2. How and why does the author define race?

3. Is the cover art true to the story?

4. Who are the change agents?

5. How is beauty defined?

First, I think this is a useful method of dissecting the sometimes hidden racial elements in a text. I look back on the early years of my education, and, growing up in a suburb of Detroit, my exposure with people of different races was fairly rare. I think the most contact I had with people of other races was Maria and Gordan on Sesame Street. Thus, being the avid reader that I was, books were significant in showing me other peoples and perspectives in the world.

Very few of the books I read as a child portrayed characters from a different race (which provides a significant point to analyze race in literature in itself), but one series that I read that featured various backgrounds was Ann M. Martin’s The Babysitter’s Club series. In this series, several girls (and an addition of a boy later on in the series) have a club and tell of the members' experiences in their personal and “professional” lives as babysitters. The book series celebrates the unique qualities of each character, which in my opinion, is the series’ best attribute.

When analyzed through the lens of Matali’s questions, Babysitter's Club excels in some areas, but still shows the same tendencies concerning race as most children’s literature. Of the various characters, all are white except Claudia, who is Japanese American, and Jesse, who is African American. Claudia is artistic and wears colorful, funky clothes. She is definitely viewed as “exotic,” and may be another case of “overexoticizing a nonwhite character to appeal to white readers” (Miltali, 2009, pg. 31). Jesse is tall and slender, a good student, knows American Sign Language, and is a talented ballet dancer. “Is the nonwhite character too good to be true?” Yes, I would say so. Jessie does face hardship, however. She was not part of the original babysitters club, having moved to the fictional neighborhood somewhere early in the series. Her family faced racist neighbors, but, luckily, this was mostly cleared up by the end of the first novel she was featured in.

If only racism took the length of one book to overcome.

Although the Babysitter's Club series does sugarcoat many experiences, Miatli’s questions are a useful exercise in examining how it and other books subversively describe race. This can be a great exercise for teachers and librarians. A librarian could use these questions in analyzing literature for a book review, as questions for a book club discussion, or just a way to increase awareness of race in children’s literature.

These questions are a practical guide to discussing race in children’s, but also could be used for adult literature. These stories can may be the basis of a child’s perception of race, and then reinforce that perception. This is why Mitali emphasizes that we must “pay attention to how and why the race of characters is conveyed in a story, because implicit messages matter” (pg. 31).

Mitali, P. (2009). Straight talk on race: Challenging the stereotypes in kids’ books. School Library Journal, 55 (4), 28-31.