written by Love Isn’t Enough guest contributor Anne Sibley O’Brien; originally published at Coloring Between the Lines
The article below appears in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, in my regular column, “The Illustrator’s Perspective.” With SCBWI’s permission, I am posting it here to open it to a wider audience.
Also, I’ve been receiving quite a few emails in response to the column, each with stories of experiencing and wrestling with white conditioning. These personal examples really help to illuminate the nature of White Mind and deserve a wider audience. If you would like to respond to this column, I encourage you to post your comments here. Thanks!
We belong to a field full of well-meaning people who care about children. If asked, most would surely agree with poet Lucille Clifton (Some of the Days of Everett Anderson) that “the literature of America should reflect the children of America.” I have never met an aficionado of children’s books who I can imagine wanting those books to misrepresent, marginalize or render invisible whole groups of our nation’s children.
So how can it be that in 2010, this is where we find ourselves:
- The percentage of published children’s books featuring characters of color is far smaller than – perhaps less than half – the percentage of people of color in the U.S. population, and the majority of these books are still created by white writers and illustrators.
- Many of the most popular book series, particularly in fantasy, have no significant characters of color at all.
- Cases of “whitewashing” book jackets, of editors requesting that an author erase a character’s ethnicity so that a book “can reach a larger audience,” of booksellers or librarians passing on certain titles because “our community doesn’t respond to those kinds of books,” suggest an assumption that white readers won’t respond to characters of color.
And so on.
I want to suggest a cause for the gap between our intention and the reality we’ve created: the patterns formed by white American socialization, which I’ll call White Mind.
By White Mind, I do not mean conscious prejudice or racist attitudes. It is not what you believe, what you intend, the values you are committed to or how you choose to behave. I’m speaking instead of the unconscious patterns that result from social conditioning as the dominant and majority race in the U.S. for the last several hundred years. Being a dominant group member is like having a free pass that members of out-groups don’t have, but with no awareness of having it. Given such conditioning, developing White Mind is pretty much inescapable.
Brain researchers such as Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard University (implicit.harvard.edu) have documented the presence of implicit bias as a universal human experience. When we think about people like ourselves, they report, a certain part of our brains light up; when we think about people different from us, a different part lights up. This kind of bias is completely unconscious, Banaji states, present in people who are absolutely positive they don’t have it and who are committed to treating everyone fairly (and think they do). According to Banaji’s studies, 80% of whites show bias for the white race; people of non-majority races do not show this bias for their race. These implicit biases can drive our behaviors without our awareness.
White Mind shows up in the stuff we have no idea we’re doing (as in those studies in which a majority of teachers of both genders were shown to call more frequently on male students than female, even though they were committed to and convinced they were being fair). It’s usually invisible to white people, though often quite visible to people of color.
It’s part of the explanation for how scores of thoughtful white writers could create so many books with no significant characters of color, or how so few manuscripts by and about people of color get accepted. It’s one of the reasons why our children’s book conferences and conventions are overwhelmingly white, and why I might walk out of a bookstore or library with a stack of picture books, not even noticing that not a single one of them starred children of color.
From writing and illustrating to hiring publishing staff, editing and marketing to selling, buying and reviewing, White Mind affects children’s books today. Unless we become aware of and develop strategies to directly challenge these patterns, white norms will continue to prevail.
***
Sometimes, when facing puzzling and seemingly intractable problems, we can find clues in myth. Picture in your mind the lovely Snow White, asleep in her glass coffin, with the piece of poisoned apple stuck in her throat.
White Mind is a kind of sleepwalking. It can be as obscuring as fog, as ineffable as mist, as taken-for-granted as breath or gravity. So how do I break the spell? I wake myself up, cough out the poison, and step out of the coffin.
More about that in the next column.
I want to thank you for this post, you really hit the nail on the head.
I am white and my husband is black. Our wonderful daughter, almost two, loves to read. We have a picture book, published by a publisher that prides itself on diversity and illustrated by a very talented illustrator. The book is not historically specific (like 12th century France), it’s about the seasons and depicts a contemporary setting. Every single person in the book is white. The illustrator was free to imagine a whole world, and the world they imagined had not one single person who was black, brown, or Asian.
I wrote a children’s book in 2006, which was illustrated by a very talented and very nice illustrator and published by the same publisher. Everyone in that book is also drawn white, I realized with a sinking feeling the other day as I read it to her. Her own mother’s book. That just sucks.
My daughter has many beautiful books about all kinds of people. She also really likes both of the afore-mentioned books. I expect that she will question the absence of people who look like herself, her dad, and others of our friends and family from their pages when she gets older, and rightly so.
I am very grateful for your thoughtful post because you have concretely expressed an issue that has been causing me increasing discomfort for a long time now. It will really help me to articulate answers for my daughter as she gets older and questions what she sees around her.
Thank you,
Jen
Thank you for including Ms. Sibley O’Brien’s article, I just “discovered” her blog and it is excellent and a welcomed voice to the discussion.
Thanks, Julia, for the invitation, and Jen and Jae Ran for the warm welcome. I’m honored to join in the community discussion here.
By way of introduction, I’m a writer and illustrator who’s published 30 books, all of which fit in the “multicultural” category one way or another.
I grew up bilingual and bicultural in South Korea as the daughter of medical missionaries. I live on an island in Maine where my husband and I raised two children, our son Perry (birth) and our daughter Yunhee (adopted from Korea at eight months).
So the issues we engage with here are significant – and personal – for me on many levels.
Jen, I love this thought: “The illustrator was free to imagine a whole world, and the world they imagined had not one single person who was black, brown, or Asian.” How restricting a world view that is!
My goal is to articulate White Mind in such a way that exploring it becomes both an imperative and an enticing journey, because I believe — I *know* from personal experience — that the more white people become aware of these unconscious patterns, the more we free ourselves to be our fully human selves.
On with the journey!
YES. Thank you.
I think about this a lot, with a daughter who is 21 months old and loves to “read.” It’s much too hard to find books with children of color in them and I try hard… Her world doesn’t look all white, why should her books?
I clearly remember as what would now be called a tween, when I first read a book that featured a diverse cast of characters- turns out the book was written in the 60s. I was overwhelmed and excited. And then I thought, what the hell? It’s 1988, why aren’t there more books like this now? And here we are, 2010! Probably it has gotten better- due to the efforts of people like you and parents like those here at LIE- but we still have a ways to go.
If Banaji has seen “implicit bias as a universal human experience”, how can it be that “80% of whites show bias for the white race”, but “people of non-majority races do not show this bias”? That would seem to make it a NON-universal experience.
@too-careful-reader, good question.
It’s implicit bias in general that is universal; according to the researchers, it’s what brains do, for all kinds of things, race being just one of the zillion possibilities. The particular biases are individual, with some patterns based on group experience.
In the talk I heard, Banaji explained that the mind is shaped by the associations it creates.
In a society that normalizes one race and stigmatizes others, everyone of all races is exposed to these positive and negative associations. In the U.S., this translates into bias for the white race in the brains of 80% of white people. I understood her to say that in the brains of nonwhite people, constant exposure to these associations (positive for white, negative for their own race) overrides the standard preference for one’s own race.
I want to reiterate: Banaji is talking about *unconscious* bias. She said, “When you think about people like you, you activate a different place than when you think about people different from you.” “Consciously,” she went on, you have “zero experience that this is happening to you.”
That’s why I think this research is so important and so potentially liberating. It’s an opportunity to stop the debate about our *intentions* as white people and whether or not we carry patterns of bias (they’re unconscious, so how would we know?).
Instead, we can look at impact. Examine any world we’ve created – starting with, say, our bookshelves, the people we have over for dinner, our interactions across race, our circle of intimates – and ask: Does this express what I consciously believe about race? Am I truly living out my ideals?
If not, my *unconscious* patterns are probably affecting the outcome, and what am I going to do about that?