TORONTO -- Plenty of families this December will be flipping through “T’was the Night Before Christmas," or “A Christmas Carol.” They’re often considered required seasonal entertainment, like “Home Alone” or “Die Hard.”
But two authors of colour are urging parents and children to remember to snuggle up and also read books where the main characters aren’t just white, but also Black, such as in “Grace at Christmas;” Latinx, such as in “Too Many Tamales” and “N is for Navidad;” Asian, such as in “Yoon and the Christmas Mitten;” or South Asian, such as in “The Night the Reindeer Saved Christmas” written by British South Asian author Raj Kaur Khaira.
“If we live in a world that cannot imagine a person of colour on the cover of a children’s book … we have a lot of thinking to do and a lot of questions to ask ourselves,” Khaira told CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.
“For me, images are really important,” Nadia L. Hohn, a Black-Canadian educator and author of “Malaika’s Winter Carnival,” said. “Especially in 2020, given the events that have taken place [the Black Lives Matter protests], I feel like we need to provide hope and inspiration for young children.”
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which collects in-depth statistics on literature trends of U.S. publishers, found that out of 4,035 children’s books the organization received last year, only:
- 11.6 per cent had Black characters
- 1.6 per cent featured Indigenous characters
- 8.8. per cent had Asian ones
- 5.8 per cent put Latinx centre-stage
- Just under 1 per cent had Arab characters
- Only 0.16 per cent centred on Pacific Islanders
But for those demanding publishers do something about that, they should know that any demand to fix that now, wouldn’t translate into new books until 2022 at the earliest, Hohn said. So she and Khaira suggest families do their part to put published, diverse holiday stories into the hands of children now -- to help start moving the ball in the right direction.
BOOKS ARE A WAY TO UNTANGLE BIASES
(Photo courtesy of Telling Tales Festiva, Nadia L. Hohn)
Hohn says young children, especially, don’t yet register race as fully as adults. But what a good book will do, is help expose them to other children who may look and celebrate the holidays differently, but they have commonalities, such as a shared love of the festive season, a childhood problem, or aspect of growing up.
“The stories that I have published feature Black girl protagonists,” Hohn, whose parents are from Jamaica, said. “And I think it’s really important to see that and to recognize the humanity of those characters and see themselves in those characters.”
And by normalizing Black and brown faces being front and centre, Khaira said children of colour will also internalize that their stories aren’t secondary to white children’s. And this will go further to help undo the trend that, “if you do have a main character of colour, it is expected that that children’s book will be about race.”
“We are able to share our stories and bring all that diversity and range into the centre and say that’s the norm -- the norm is that diversity that we have,” she said.
Earlier this month, Khaira wrote an article entitled “Why Diversity matters at Christmas,” in BookTrust, a U.K.-based reading charity. It partially touched upon how she herself internalized a white-centric view of the season growing up.
“Festive imagery when I was growing up was dominated by white (predominantly blonde) families enjoying the festive period. Santa was white, so was his wife and all his elves,” she wrote.
But that depiction of adults didn’t make sense to a young Khaira since all the bearded, big-bellied men in her life were South Asian. So as a nod to her childhood, in her own book, Santa is South Asian because “For me, it’s not that much of a leap.”
EVERYONE HAS BIASES
Khaira urges parents of all backgrounds to remember that neglecting to expose children to characters of other races is a form of unconscious bias that perpetuates white supremacy.
“More often than not, the propaganda of racism is propagated very subtly over time and it becomes so insidious that it infiltrates your life so casually that you believe those things about other minorities,” she said, adding that every culture has their biases, which that’s why she made her Mrs. Claus, a Black woman, in order to help combat issues in her own community.
“Because you know the South Asian community needs to reckon with its own anti-Blackness,” she said, also noting what she described as prejudices towards “Bla-sian” or Black-South Asian relationships.
MOST CHRISTIANS AREN’T WHITE
It also should be noted that it’s not that drastic for Christmas books to feature a protagonist of colour, since most Christians around the world aren’t white.
In 2010, Pew Research Center, a non-partisan fact tank, found a quarter of all Christians in the world were in Latin America and the Caribbean, 24 per cent were in sub-Saharan Africa, with 13 per cent living in Asia and the Pacific. So Khaira points out that it’s long overdue to have them more represented in everyone’s holiday reading lists.
But she notes that a “white-washing” has even occurred to the Messiah at the centre of Christianity. Although the Gospels describe a Middle-Eastern Jewish man, who was born and lived in what is modern-day Palestine and Israel, Jesus has mostly been depicted over the centuries as a white European man.
CHILDREN CAN DEAL WITH RACE EARLY
But what if children do point out the race of characters? Or if there’s concern that children are too young to learn about race?
At the height of protests against anti-Black racism this summer, there was a surge in interest of literature touching on Blackness, race and diverse perspectives. And, at the time, Carl James, a professor at York University’s faculty of education, told CTVNews.ca, it was vital for parents of all races to openly discuss these issues with younger generations and to start while they were constructing ideas about race.
“All of us have different histories and those histories are rooted in the stories that we tell and our relationship to the state so, therefore, it’s not one blank all-racialized group,” he said. “We have to pay attention to some of these differences because those differences inform how we see the different groups.”
Hohn echoed that saying, “we want them (our children) to be contributors of society. We want them to be sympathetic.”
She said to remember when their colleagues and public figures became more vocal about calling out anti-Black, anti-Indigenous or anti-Asian racism this summer, and ask themselves “what can I do? How can I prepare my child to not be a part of this?”
Because books, in her mind, in an easy way to start.
