Caraboo struggles to hold on to hers because of their race. On the other hand, characters in Sita Brahmachari’s series about the Levenson children, Artichoke Hearts, Jasmine Skies and Tender Earth, who have a ‘dual history’ (Artichoke Hearts 7) of Jewish and Indian parents, celebrate and recognize how both sides of this duality make up their identity. Finally, Patrice Lawrence writes stories about mixed-race characters who have both happy and unhappy family situations; in Indigo Donut (2017), Bailey has a ‘six-foot ginger afro’ (60), a social worker white father and a black teacher mum; he helps Indigo, in foster care after her mother, who Indigo tells Bailey was mixed-race (77) dies violently. Lawrence’s books show family heritage as an important but not an overdetermined aspect of identity.


Such everyday portrayals of mixedness are present in Through My Window (1986) by Tony Bradman and Eileen Browne, which endures as a picture book that adopts the point of view of a mixed race girl in a contemporary multicultural, urban setting. Depicting a happy two parent family, the book but presents Jo’s mixedness as unextraordinary, and no specific reference to it is made in the text.


More recent picture books foreground mixed race children whilst exploring how their racialised mixedness informs their relationships. In That’s My Mum - Henriette Barkow & Derek Brazell (2001), Mia and Kai are friends with a common experience; people don’t think that their mothers are really their mothers. They notice that they don’t have the same problem when they are out with their dads. They resolve this issue, based in an experience familiar to many mixed race people, by making photo badges with the book’s title as a statement of pride. In My Two Grannies written by Floella Benjamin, and illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain, Alvina’s parents go on holiday, leaving her with Granny Vero from Trinidad and Granny Rose from Yorkshire. At first the two grannies compete for Alvina’s attention and by sharing the food, stories, and music of their own childhoods. It is Alvina who proposes they take turns. The attitudes of adults, as in Kamm’s 1962 novel, remains a potential source of tension, yet here it is the child of a mixed-marriage who has the wherewithal to resolve this tension, managing her relationships with both her grandmothers and the relationship between the two grandmothers. In Snowflakes (2013) by Cerrie Burnell and Laura Ellen, Mia, a brown skinned (and presumably mixed) girl moves from the city to live with her white Grandma Mitzi in the countryside. Mia’s initial sense of feeling somewhat out of place is core to the narrative but dealt with subtly. She stares into the playground of her new schools and sees ‘children, as pale as snow, so different from the children in the city’. Difference is acknowledged in the story but not portrayed as an insurmountable barrier to warm, loving relationships.


The use of mixed-race characters in British children’s literature highlight both the fears about a multiracial society and the struggle to find where you belong in society. All of these books underscore the fundamental need for all children, no matter what their ethnic background, class or age, to be loved and accepted for whom they are and for their potential to contribute to society.


As people of dual (treble, quadruple) heritage


become an ever-increasing percentage of the population, we hope that children’s books reflect this reality for all child readers.


Click here for a list of books with mixed race characters.


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


Books for Keeps No.231 July 2018 13


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32