Diversity 101: Blurring the Lines Between Familiar and Foreign

Part II—A Focus on Dialogue

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Uma Krishnaswami

My Personal Connection

The books you read as a child are as real as the places you live in or the people around you. They whisper to you of the possibilities the world can offer, like mental pathways into your own as-yet-unlived future.

In that category, Rumer Godden gave me permission to write. Kipling both enchanted and troubled me; only many years later did I understand my own need to write about the country he depicted with his strange colonial mixture of tenderness and disdain. But as a child of the late 1950s growing up in India, I cut my reading teeth on Enid Blyton.

I learned a lot from Enid about humor, family, friendships, and the pleasure of racing along a swiftly unfolding plot. Now, thinking back, I am pretty sure that I also learned how not to write dialogue.

Diversity 101: Blurring the Lines Between Familiar and Foreign

Part I—A Focus on Narrative

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Uma Krishnaswami

My Personal Connection

Back in the last century, when I dreamed of writing for young readers, the conventional wisdom about weaving foreign languages into fiction written in English went like this:

Don’t.

The stories I longed to write spanned continents. My characters often spoke in two languages, sometimes with varying degrees of fluidity. My narratives demanded a mixing of languages, reflecting the hybridity I was trying to show.

I plunged in, wanting to find my own answers. I wrote a lot of bad stories that earned the rejections they deserved. I kept asking myself, how can I represent this linguistic and cultural material while being truthful to the stories I’m trying to tell?

Diversity 101: Who's That Fat Kid?

Fat Politics and Children's Literature

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Rebecca Rabinowitz

My Personal Connection

I’m a fat person living in a virulently fatphobic culture. We’re soaking in it. The ubiquitous fear and hate of fatness is both glaring and invisible. It’s job discrimination; it’s insults from strangers on the street; it’s doctors who refuse to treat fat patients until we lose weight. I’m dedicated to fat politics, which is a social justice movement, and Fat Studies, which is a critical/academic lens.

Stereotypes/Cliches/Tropes/Errors

In children’s books, fatness often symbolizes negativity. One common trope is the fat bully. Think of Dudley Dursley. Think of Dana, the fat bully in Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot. Think of Nazir Mohammad, the fat bully in Suzanne Fisher Staples’ Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. Also common are fat victims. Think of Miranda in Cynthia Voigt’s When She Hollers – a fat girl who was terribly abused for years and has just committed suicide as the book opens. Miranda exists specifically to show Tish, the similarly-abused protagonist, what path not to take. Think of Dell in K.M. Walton’s Empty – a fat protagonist who’s raped, bullied, abandoned, and (like Voigt’s Miranda) driven to suicide. And think of Jake in Rebecca Fjelland Davis’s Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged – Jake’s a fat bully and a fat victim. The tropes of fat bully and fat victim occur far too often to be random. Lest we think that any particular example might be random, textual evidence often specifically links the actual fatness with the negative trait, cementing the conflation. About Hoot’s fat bully: “This time Dana hit him with the other hand, equally fat and damp” [96]. About When She Hollers’ fat victim: "Tish had watched the fat girl lumbering out the doors and down the sidewalk to where the car waited. Waddle, waddle – her buns rolling up against one another – like a girl going down the hallway to the electric chair every day" [42]. Fatness is mapped onto negative characteristics as if it were some sort of profound literary symbol, and as if such mapping were harmless to people in the real world.

Diversity 101: The Sidekick Syndrome

Contributed to CBC Diversity by our very own Andrea Davis Pinkney 

My Personal Connection
My teenagers are some opinionated people! I love this about them. It means they have strong ideas and that they’re speaking up about what’s important to them. That’s why I was very eager to write this blog post about clichés and stereotypes. As the mom of two teens, my daughter and son waste no time telling me what needs to be fixed in the YA books they read. As an editor and author, my kids like to stick it to me, thinking I have some magical power to correct each and every societal stereotype that exists in books for young people. While I don’t have a magic wand, I do know there is one cliché that annoys the heck out of me and my teens. Hopefully this post will shine some light on it.

Stereotypes/Cliches/Tropes/Errors

I’ll pose it in the way my kids put it to me ― in a question: “Why, in contemporary YA novels that feature groups of kids as friends, the black girl or boy is always a sidekick, secondary character, or nonentity?”

The way my daughter and son see it, this is the kid with no character development, no backstory, no emotional growth, no family, and dialogue one-liners that don’t amount to much. 

Diversity 101: The Trappings of Difference

Writing About Emotional and Developmental Disabilities 

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Lyn Miller-Lachmann 

My Personal Connection
I am honored and grateful to be invited to contribute to the Diversity 101 blog, but as a person with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism) who can discuss at great length a topic of special interest, I find the blog’s word limit especially challenging. Hence, I will focus on what is one of my biggest issues among those who write about emotional and developmental disabilities such as Asperger’s—the exaggeration of difference at the expense of the feelings and desires we all have in common.

Stereotypes/Cliches/Tropes/Errors

In classic literature for young readers, physical and emotional disabilities often occurred side-by-side and were used to teach lessons on proper attitudes and behavior. For instance, in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox’s self-centeredness is made visible through her sickly appearance, and the angry, depressed Colin Craven cannot rise from his wheelchair until he develops a positive attitude. Persons with disabilities appear in classic stories as fundamentally different, less capable of living a full life and contributing to society. It is no wonder that Colin is hidden away in a back bedroom of the hundred-room house; in those days, persons with disabilities were isolated and marginalized, hidden in the back rooms of their own houses or locked away in institutions.

Diversity 101: The Transgender Perspective

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Cris Beam

I was honored when I was asked to write a Diversity 101 post about transgender identity. Honored and a little daunted. Because while I’ve written two books on the topic, I’m not transgender—and speaking about always ends up becoming speaking for. Which is part of the problem with gender representations in general: who gets to speak for whom? Especially in children’s literature where gender variance is, well, not so variant yet, I know I’m walking into hot water. The scarcity of GLBT (accent on the T) depictions yields strong opinions as to how we should talk—and write—about the few transgender characters we have. 

People used to say that transgender was an umbrella term to encompass all kinds of gender variance—from drag king to transsexual to the little boy who wears tutus to play with his trucks. While the umbrella concept’s fallen out of favor somewhat, the core idea is useful: there are a myriad of ways to express one’s sense of self.  Transgender is fundamentally an internal identity wherein one’s understanding of self is different from the body one was born with. The expression part is separate, and can range from wearing different clothing to undergoing medical procedures to doing nothing at all. The bottom line is, only transgender people can decide that they’re trans, and it’s up to the rest of us to support and celebrate that.

Diversity 101: Not Injun Joe

Native American Stereotyping in Literature

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Joseph Bruchac 

No group in American culture has been more stereotyped than Native Americans. While other ethnic stereotypes now meet with disapproval, harmful images of native people are still accepted or defended within majority culture, even when Native Americans complain. There are images and characters in books and other media, expressions in current usage, the naming of places and sports teams, and negative expectations about the behavior of Native Americans. It is so pervasive that non-natives often don’t realize they’re saying or doing things hurtful to Native Americans. (And when it is pointed out, the response is often disbelief or denial.)

Diversity 101: An Introduction

I grew up reading books by diverse authors and thinking about the characters who lived in them and the questions they raised. I went to a “good” college where we often discussed issues of race, culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Yet here are a few of the things I wasn’t aware of when I started working as an editorial assistant in 2000:

• The Clark Doll Experiment
• The Indian burial ground trope
• The term “white privilege”
• That skin tone is a major source of sensitivity in many non-white communities
• The strong dislike or discomfort many cultures feel toward anthropologists
• The white savior cliche, in which a white person discovers the wonders of a native group, eventually becomes part of the group, is acclaimed as the best of them all, then leads them into battle against the white culture, which is trying to dominate the natives (see especially Dances with Wolves and Avatar)
• That for all its charms, The Story of Babar ultimately reproduces a colonialist narrative about the superiority of European life to African life