Browne. Writing about his choice to draw so many gorillas in his books, Browne remarks that they are ‘fascinating creatures’, ‘they look so much like people’ and ‘they remind me of my father’. Earlier in the same book, he includes a picture he drew at the age of 14. Entitled ‘That Old Black Magic’, it is of his father playing an ‘unpredictable, dangerous tribesman’, blacked up and in a grass skirt for a performance of Robinson Crusoe. Whilst we should be careful not to draw too much from this, it is interesting to note that Browne does not offer any reflections on the racist connotations of Robinson Crusoe or of blacking up. Also interesting is that in the discussion of his decision to make a picturebook of King Kong, Browne does not have anything to say about the long-standing racist connotations of anthropomorphic apes and the criticism the original film received.
Things may be improving. In the US, New York Times bestselling author Mac Barnett and Geisel Award-winning illustrator Greg Pizzoli, recently gave an interview with Roger Sutton in which they explained that they changed Jack in Jack Blasts Off from a monkey to a rabbit because “We didn’t want anyone to associate the hero of our books with an offensive trope”. Yet in the UK, in as recently as 2016, Hodder and Stoughton published an updated version of Enid Blyton’s Noddy Goes to School where the golliwog from the 1949 original – now seemingly acknowledged by the publisher as a racist trope – was replaced by a monkey.
A number of children’s picture books have attempted to use animal characters to address stereotyping and racism in ways that young child readers can understand.
These books include Dr. Seuss’s
The Sneetches (1953), David McKee’s Tusk, Tusk (1990) and Rosemary Wells’s Yoko (1989). However, neither The Sneetches nor Tusk, Tusk actually confronts racism in any meaningful sense. Dr. Seuss’s book has characters who discriminate based on outward appearance, but this outward appearance can easily be changed. And while McKee’s elephants do have skin colour-based prejudice, it is apparently random and inherent – there is no depiction of power or any of the motivations witnessed in historical racism; no colonialism, no imperialism, no slavery no exploitation – just murderous, mutual hatred. The best fables reveal through animal narratives something true about human existence. Tusk Tusk, we suggest, conceals the history of racism by offering up an alternative creation myth for racism. In many reviews of Wells’s Yoko, a book about a kitten who is made fun of for bringing sushi to school, the words “tolerance” and “acceptance” come up; anti-racism is not, however, about tolerance but about inclusion and understanding of other people and their cultures, and it is about examining the privilege that allows some people to have “normal” food (or clothes, or toys, or holidays, or behaviors) and others to be marginalized. Even though Yoko has a “happy” ending, the book is aimed at teaching white child readers tolerance; the Asian child reader who might identify with Yoko learns that her culture’s food is “weird” and happy endings can only come with the acceptance of white society. More recently, Sarah McIntyre’s The New Neighbours can be read as a fable about new arrivals, perhaps immigrants and how it can be wrong to prejudge. The arrivals are rats – the animals that the Nazis likened Jewish people to in propaganda such as The Eternal Jew. And if these new arrivals are understood as being racialised differently from other groups, then it is unfortunate that the story rests on the old historic comparison between pseudo-scientific races and species. What is gained and lost by attempting to address xenophobia and racism, uniquely human ideas, through non-human animals?
Recently, studies have suggested that using animals to promote prosocial behavior doesn’t necessarily work; Larsen, Lee and Ganea, for example, found that “After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphized animals or a control story, children became more selfish” (“Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?” 6).
Notably, all the authors we discuss here are white. Writers from racially minoritized backgrounds tend to tell much different stories, and as a rule do not use animal characters as stand-ins for children from any background. Perhaps the best publishing can do is to open its door to more of such writers?
Campbell, Edith
https://crazyquiltedi.blog/2018/07/20/monkey-business/ Brown, Joe and Browne, Anthony 2011 Playing the Shape Game. Random House.
Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914 Ashgate, 2015.
Larsen, Nicole, Kang Lee and Patricia Ganea. “Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?” Developmental Science 21.3 (May-2018): 1-9.
Lofting, Hugh. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.
Ratelle, Amy. Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Sutton, Roger
http://mediasource.actonservice.com/acton/rif/10574/s- 2225-1909/-/l-0281:648a6/q-0c18/showPreparedMessage?sid=TV2:kIX3I VoLZ
Karen Sands-O’Connor is professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State in New York. She has, as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, worked with Seven Stories, the National Centre for the Children’s Book, and has recently published Children’s Publishing and Black Britain 1965-2015 (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).
Darren Chetty is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip hop culture. He is a contributor to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and published by Unbound, and tweets at @rapclassroom
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