It’s 2022, and children’s literature is looking more fun and diverse than ever. When I pass by the junior’s section at Barnes & Noble, I can’t help but smile fondly at covers sporting illustrated Latino kids (like I once was) and glittery books celebrating the beauty of Black girls’ natural hair. When this kind of material first started hitting the market in the late August 2010s–thankfully, as politics surrounding race and identity evolved in the cultural consciousness–it was enough to move me to tears. I was, of course, no longer a child by then, but something about my own reaction to those wonderful new releases struck something within me: all these books that uplift people of color were something my childhood sorely lacked. I read everything from the classics to YA novels during the course of my youth, and while I enjoyed a lot of those books, they were rife with stereotypical depictions of non-white races, if not outright hatred against them. While racism still hasn’t been completely eradicated from the world of children’s literature, I think it’s worth looking back at the books that made me–for better and for worse.
Racism as an institution is all-pervading; it has been ingrained in the fabric of our country since its founding. I remember reading a Little House on the Prairie book that was suggested to me by the school librarian and reading a sentence that briefly caught my attention: “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. My brain desperately flitted through a bare-bones catalog of all the history lessons I’d ever received, trying to find out why that was, but all I was met with were images of pilgrims, Thanksgiving, and petty skirmishes between White people and Natives–all concepts that I found far removed from my current reality. And then I simply moved on. My school was hugely responsible in erasing context from those particular lessons, so I shudder to think how that book would have influenced a kid with much less education. But it was normal. To me, at that time, that’s just how a lot of books were.
I had no idea just how much normalized literary racism affected my own self-image. At some point, I, a Peruvian-American girl, thought that I was Mexican. Or at least that I was supposed to be, because why else would I have black hair and know some Spanish? See, Mexican characters were the only vessel through which I could see myself in books in those days, and they were almost always accompanied by the sort of stereotypical descriptions you’d expect. But it was normal. At some point, I picked up a Warrior Cats book, a fiction series centered around anthropomorphic cats living in the forest, to read about a group of wise, feather-wearing cats that lived in communal “tribes”… only for the Western-coded protagonists to find an issue with their strange, scary ways. Sound familiar? These fictional animals–not even people–even bore titles that sounded like cheap imitations of Native American names. But that was normal. When I was older and found a salacious YA novel about vampires in my hands, I distinctly remember reading about one of the Black side characters, who always had something smart and sassy to say. I found it odd. When I saw her mentioned in forums, no one had a single thing to say about that. But that’s because it was normal. And as a child obsessed with reading, that was just life.
Of course, anti-racism education has pulled me a long way. I look back at all these book series, and classics with fondness and sadness mingled in my heart; it’s a strange feeling, to say the least. It also makes me exuberant for the children of this generation, who get to explore the classics in a much more critical light in schools, and who get to freely grab copies of fantasy and non-fiction books off the shelves and expect–not hope–that they’ll be accurately represented in them.
