Racism in Contemporary African American Children’s and Young Adult Literature

216 Pages·2016·2.23 MB·English

by  Suriyan Panlay (auth.)

Suriyan Panlay
RACISM IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN
AMERICAN CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG
ADULT LITERATURE
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
Series Editors
Kerry   Mallan
Faculty of Education
Children and Youth Research Ctr
Kelvin Grove ,   Queensland ,   Australia
Clare   Bradford
School of Communication and Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood ,   Victoria ,   Australia
Aim of the series
This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on chil-
dren’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contem-
porary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range
of children’s texts – literature, fi lm and multimedia. Critical Approaches
to Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally
recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new
combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and
cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14930
Suriyan   P anlay
Racism in
Contemporary
African American
Children’s and Young
Adult Literature
Suriyan   Panlay
Thammasat University
Bangkok , Thailand
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
ISBN 978-3-319-42892-5 ISBN 978-3-319-42893-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956116
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
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For Mum and Dad
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There is a well-known, almost culturally untranslatable word in Thai called
‘namjai’, literally referring to ‘the pouring of the heart’, typically used to
describe an act of kindness one generously extends to another.
Upon the completion of this book, I am forever grateful for the namjai
of the following kind individuals: Dr Christine Wilkie-Stibbs from Centre
for Education Studies, University of Warwick, for her words of encourage-
ment and insightful criticisms; Professor John McRae of the University
of Nottingham and Professor Jonothan Neelands of the University of
Warwick for their comments on the fi nal draft; Brigitte Shull and Paloma
Yannakakis from Palgrave Macmillan New York for their interest in the
project and their kind assistance throughout the publication process; my
best friend Gary Rutthaporn Malayaphun and the two girls—Culi and
Kaopote—for being there every step of the way.
My Anthony—I am glad I have found you.
For Dad—thank you for instilling in all of us the importance of learning.
For Mum (3 June 1929—4 September 2014)—thank you for the sto-
ries, all those years ago, under the night skies of southern Thailand. I will
carry them with me. Always.
vii
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Internalised Racism and Critical Race Theory 19
3 Wounded 57
4 Tongue-Tied 93
5 Displaced 1 25
6 Triumphed 157
7 Conclusion 1 87
Index 203
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 “ I CRYING FOR ME WHO NO ONE NEVER HOLD
BEFORE”
Claireece Precious Jones or “Precious”, as she is better known in the
novel, is an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned protagonist of Sapphire’s P ush
(1 996 ). Precious loathes herself for being “so stupid, so ugly, worth nuf-
fi n” (p. 34) and, having been made part of a racialised landscape where
an image of the self is crooked, misrepresented, she is led to believe that
her existence is nothing but a “vampire sucking the system’s blood. Ugly
black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt, changed, fi nded a job for”
(p. 31). In her mind’s eye, however, she is a “beautiful chile like white
chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers ... a blue-eye skinny chile
whose hair is long braids, long long braids” (p. 64). Upon encountering
a stranger’s kindness, Precious cries—“I crying for me who no one never
hold before” (p. 18).
In Sharon G. Flake’s The Skin I’m In ( 1998 ), another young adult
text explored in this book, 13-year-old Maleeka Madison is perpetually
haunted by her own dark skin and African features: “Somebody said I had
hair so nappy I needed a rake to comb it” (p. 13). This feeling of inferior-
ity, unfortunately, has landed her at an inner-city school instead of a better
school across town as she is threatened by “them girls [who] looked like
they come out of a magazine. Long, straight hair. Skin the color of potato
© The Author(s) 2016 1
S. Panlay, Racism in Contemporary African American Children’s
and Young Adult Literature, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2_1
2 S. PANLAY
chips and cashews and Mary Jane candies. No Almond Joy-colored girls
like me” (p. 39). Young Maleeka is also envious of her friend Malcolm
at her school for having “a white dad and a black momma” (p. 17), with
“long, straight hair [and] skin the color of a butterscotch milkshake”
(p. 17). In her very own words, Malcolm is “lucky” simply because he
“looks more like his dad than his mom” (p. 17).
When their self-perceptions are constantly doubted and ultimately
reduced to nothingness—u gly black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt,
changed, fi nded a job for , and when physically morphing themselves into
‘blue-eyed’ skinny children with ‘long, straight hair’ is apparently their
only alternative available, Precious and Maleeka open up an old, hidden
wound that, for centuries, has haunted American blacks, a wound that has
often been treated, unfortunately, as their own individual psychological
fl aws, leaving them, as a result, in a perpetual state of self-c ondemnation.
It is the representation of this kind of experience of inferiority and its
subsequent psychological devastation portrayed in both fi ctional and
nonfi ctional works that has become the provenance and premise of this
book. Whether it is taken directly from lived reality as the one undergone
by young Claudette Colvin in Phillip Hoose’s C laudette Colvin: Twice
Toward Justice ( 2009 ), a National Book Award winner for young peo-
ple’s literature—“Though being smart was an asset, Claudette soon found
that having light skin and straight hair was the surest key to popularity at
Booker T. Washington” (p. 22)—or channelled through fi ctional char-
acters as portrayed by Precious and Maleeka, the paralleled experience is
equally distressing. This book is thus set up to explore, through its focus
children’s and young adult (C&YA) texts, such racially silent/silenced
experiences and to u n-silence them.
Both fi ctional and nonfi ctional representations cited above have com-
pellingly captured the life of young African American girls caught in a
racial tide and harmed by self-infl icted psychological mutilations. From a
theoretical perspective, this type of racially and psychologically devastating
experience is an example of what has been formally identifi ed as inter-
nalised racism or internalised racial oppression or psychological slavery or
a much-criticised term—racial self-hatred. As a theme, internalised rac-
ism has always been explored or treated, though ‘peripherally’, by African
American authors of both C&YA and adult literature. Toni Morrison’s
fi rst novel, T he Bluest Eye (1 999 ), an adult book focalised through a
child narrator, is arguably the fi rst full-length novel that puts this racial
issue at the centre, depicting how internalised white beauty standards or